Church Without Walls Quotes

“A common tendency among us today is to remain disengaged, uncommitted to other people. Life is already too busy, too hectic, so it is easier to rely on and support a pastoral staff and stay in the bleachers. To correct this is the leadership challenge of the day. If our leaders cater to this weakness, we will continue to turn inward, serving ourselves and increasing our isolation from the unbelievers around us. But if they lead, equip, and empower us, we can fulfill God’s purpose for our presence in the world.”
― Jim Petersen, Church Without Walls

“Christians who are primarily spectators, or whose service has not gotten beyond helping with the chores around the home church, have little demand for putting truth to the test. This leaves them especially vulnerable to the prevailing winds of philosophy that are blowing across the nation.”
― Jim Petersen, Church Without Walls

“But biblical truth, if it is truth, will stand the test of being helpful for building people up according to their needs. It will benefit people. It will change their lives. While I was starting out in my ministry in Brazil, I received numerous invitations to speak to churches and organizations about the things I was doing. But I hadn’t really done anything in that country yet. So I would decline. I feared that my ideas, untested as they were, were more likely to confuse than help. I have tested these things I have written here, but nonetheless I write with apprehension, as the danger of confusing and misleading is still high. My prayer is that we will have the wisdom to judge the things I have said against the Scriptures, and then put them to the test of experience in his or her own situation. The challenge to all of us is to learn from”
― Jim Petersen, Church Without Walls

“It does not insist that everyone and everything around it adopt the changes. It thus leaves what is already in existence intact.”
― Jim Petersen, Church Without Walls

“In essence, what we have just said is that those among us who feel their function in the body is best accomplished “off campus” should be encouraged and enabled to do just that. But to think in these terms will require a paradigm change for some of us. It will mean a reordering of our thinking—away from being centered around sanctuaries, pulpits, pews, and clergy and to focusing on offices, living rooms, laypeople, and our neighbors. These can be unsettling ideas. They”
― Jim Petersen, Church Without Walls

“They were designed for people who did not believe and included no songs, no prayers, no jargon, no quick answers, and no calls for decisions. As those young believers realized that these sessions were indeed safe—that we would not invade the space the unbeliever needs to work through his or her unbelief—they increasingly brought their friends and peers around. The studies were reinforced by steady social involvement—barbecues, soccer games, anything where people could get a closer look at their Christian friends in a natural Brazilian environment. It was the gospel incarnated. The result was a “synagogue” of from forty to sixty people in various stages of interest in Christ. We had our rapport. It became a simple matter then to invite those individuals who were responding to take a closer look at Christ through the Scriptures. It was very fruitful. I describe this effort, not to offer it as a model, but as an illustration of the kind of innovation required to effectively field contemporary apostolic teams. We found that every step we took, at every stage, required equivalent creative effort. Local Expansion of the Gospel An apostolic team can go where a congregation cannot and make things happen that would”
― Jim Petersen, Church Without Walls

“Since the traveling expressions of the church have largely fallen into disuse, we have little contemporary experience to go on. The recovery of this function will require creative experimentation, trial and error, and perseverance. It will not be easy.”
― Jim Petersen, Church Without Walls

“will be dead-ended; there will be no reproduction. In that case, the apostolic team would have to again put themselves through the laborious task of foundation laying.”
― Jim Petersen, Church Without Walls

“They did not preach and run. They lived with the fruit of their efforts until those they reached could not only care for themselves, but also assume the holy trust of keeping the gospel flowing. That is the function we need to recover! In fact, if we do not, we will fail this generation.”
― Jim Petersen, Church Without Walls

“Two primary functions need to be recovered at this time. We will call them the apostolic team and the local expansion of the gospel.”
― Jim Petersen, Church Without Walls

“We saw in chapter 4 how the church of the first century was multiform in its expressions and how the combined effects of the gathering and scattering of God’s people—together with the “traveling functions”—resulted in the expansion and penetration of the gospel. If we have any hope of accomplishing the task before us today, we must recover that kind of mobility.”
― Jim Petersen, Church Without Walls

“In confession the breakthrough to community takes place. Sin demands to have a man by himself. It withdraws him from the community. The more isolated a person is, the more destructive will be the power of sin over him. . . . In the darkness of the unexpressed it poisons the whole being of a person.”
― Jim Petersen, Church Without Walls: Moving Beyond Traditional Boundaries

“He who is alone with his sin is utterly alone. It may be that Christians, notwithstanding corporate worship, common prayer, and all their fellowship in service, may still be left to their loneliness. The final breakthrough to fellowship does not occur, because, though they have fellowship with one another as believers and as devout people, they do not have fellowship as the undevout, as sinners. The pious fellowship permits no one to be a sinner. So everybody must conceal his sin from himself and from the fellowship. We dare not be sinners . . . so we remain alone with our sin. . . . The fact is that we are sinners! .”
― Jim Petersen, Church Without Walls

“God’s response to people who humble themselves apparently knows no limits.”
― Jim Petersen, Church Without Walls

“have learned to sit down with an unbelieving friend, or small group, and over a period of time just read that first-century tract and talk about it.”
― Jim Petersen, Church Without Walls

“The messenger adapts to the hearer, not vice-versa.”
― Jim Petersen, Church Without Walls

“it is always time for something—planting, cultivating, watering, or harvesting.”
― Jim Petersen, Church Without Walls

“The journey to Christ is a process, not just an event. One of our most common mistakes is to try to do it all at once. We wait for an opportunity to share our faith with a friend or acquaintance, and when it comes we unload the whole message and end up calling for a decision. Few people are ready for that, and far more often than not the attempt results in polarization, rather than in faith. Non-believers vow to never let themselves get caught in such a situation again, and would-be messengers realize they have distanced a friend, and often give up for good on attempting to share their faith. It does not have to be that way.”
― Jim Petersen, Church Without Walls

“We are not called upon to demonstrate perfection, but truth. Indeed, there is power in being truthful about one’s imperfections.”
― Jim Petersen, Church Without Walls

“Communicating Christ involves incarnation, not just information.”
― Jim Petersen, Church Without Walls

“What are these weapons? Prayer, God’s Word, and a Christlike life.”
― Jim Petersen, Church Without Walls

“Then it dawned on him. To debate system against system, religion against religion, was a losing proposition. It was his word against theirs. But since “the Word became flesh,” everything Jesus taught was a fact within himself. He didn’t just bring the good news; he was the good news. The gospel lies in his person. Philosophies point to truths; Jesus said, “I am the truth.”
― Jim Petersen, Church Without Walls

“In the articles quoted above, Gallup also says that 40 percent of Americans attend church or synagogue weekly, but that only 10 percent of Americans would not be included in the above descriptions as biblically illiterate and ethically indistinguishable from the majority. That would mean that 75 percent of our church members are nominal indeed. There is no indication that these numbers have improved in recent years. Barna”
― Jim Petersen, Church Without Walls

“Paul Hiebert of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School calls this kind of thinking “bounded-set thinking.” That is, there is a boundary that sets the standard. One either qualifies or is rejected; it’s pass or fail. What I’m advocating in this chapter is that we move from bounded-set thinking to what Hiebert refers to as “centered-set thinking” in our understanding of the church.24 In a centered set, what counts is how each member is moving in relation to the center. The focus is on the center, and each individual is in dynamic relationship to it. Belonging, in this case, is not a matter of performing according to an agreed-upon profile; it is a matter of living and acting out of commitment to a common center. The focus is on the center and on pointing people to that center. Process is more important than definitions. Centered-set thinking affirms initiatives that would otherwise not find a place. It rewards creativity.”
― Jim Petersen, Church Without Walls

“As believers formed themselves into identifiable bodies in the first centuries, their times of gathering were just the tip of the iceberg of their life together.”
― Jim Petersen, Church Without Walls

“believe there is a single truth that must lie at the heart of any adequate definition of the church. In essence, the church is people who are indwelt by the Holy Spirit, who is transforming their character and giving them gifts they are to use for service. Every believer is to use whatever he or she has to serve one another—and his or her neighbors. Most of the big passages that have to do with God’s people in the New Testament revolve around this truth.12”
― Jim Petersen, Church Without Walls

“We made a major mistake when we first admitted the term parachurch into our vocabulary. How can one part of a body be “para” to the other parts? This awkward division of local and parachurch structures has resulted from our narrow understanding of the church. This narrowing costs us dearly, as it leaves the unbelieving world in no-man’s-land.”
― Jim Petersen, Church Without Walls

“Without the crosswinds of other spiritual leadership, it ends up talking to itself. It will lack the range of vision and the experience needed to break out into the world.”
― Jim Petersen, Church Without Walls

“This has a debilitating effect on the local church. A church that sees its own appointed leaders, staff, or majority vote as the sole source of spiritual leadership becomes an increasingly inward-looking church.”
― Jim Petersen, Church Without Walls

“Distinctives bring focus to action, and thus are very powerful. Their weakness lies in the flipside of focus: the tendency to ignore other truths of great importance that bring balance. So we can lose another part of our Bible because of a narrow focus on our distinctives. This is one more reason why one part of the body needs every other part just to be complete.”
― Jim Petersen, Church Without Walls