Vertical Church Quotes

“The biggest obstacle to making Christ magnificent is the refusal to make yourself small.”
― James MacDonald, Vertical Church: What Every Heart Longs for. What Every Church Can Be.

“Let God Himself be the main attraction at church again, and let us be tireless in our insistence that church is for God, about God, through God, and to the glory of His great Son.”
― James MacDonald, Vertical Church: What Every Heart Longs for. What Every Church Can Be.

“The reason God responds to persistence is because prayer is changing the one who prays. As we pray, God is making us spiritually fit to receive what He is already willing to do.”
― James MacDonald, Vertical Church: What Every Heart Longs for. What Every Church Can Be.

“The entity God created to traffic His transcendence has fallen far from its mission when it chooses instead to traffic what can be found on any street corner or at the local mall. You may ask, "But how has the church done that?"

* By offering secularists what they find mildly interesting and calling it church.
*By submitting to self-help sermons where encounter with God is not even on the agenda.
* By letting the horizontal excellence of the show stand in for Vertical impact.
*By substituting the surprise or shock of superficial entertainment for the supernatural.

Church was designed to deliver what we were created to long for. Church must again be about a Vertical encounter that interrupts and alters everything.”
― James MacDonald, Vertical Church: What Every Heart Longs for. What Every Church Can Be.

“Church leaders raised on rationalism lead ministries where the supernatural, the Vertical, is suppressed and where God Himself is at best an observer and certainly seldom, if ever, and obvious participant in church.”
― James MacDonald, Vertical Church: What Every Heart Longs for. What Every Church Can Be.

“The problem in the church today is that we treat God's glory as a by-product and the missional activities of the church as the primary thing when the opposite is what Scripture demands. We don't proclaim the gospel and feed the poor and shepherd the flock in hopes that God's glory will be the by-product of those activities. We seek the revealing of the glory of God through the methods He prescribes so that His glory is revealed in the church. When that happens, the lost are converted, the poor are fed, the saints live in unity, and much more, all as by-products of God's manifest presence in the church.”
― James MacDonald, Vertical Church: What Every Heart Longs for. What Every Church Can Be.

“The fundamental question in everything we do must be: Will this honor God? Does this display Jesus Christ? Does this make people see how awesome the LORD is? Failure to answer “Yes!” invites Ichabod. I have many, many wonderful”
― James MacDonald, Vertical Church: What Every Heart Longs for. What Every Church Can Be.

“In a society where rationality has ruled so long, the church frequently fails to see that in forsaking the weekly pursuit of the transcendent, we have given up the only ground that was uniquely ours in this world. In attempting to make the church something that can attract and add value to secular mind-sets, we have turned our backs on our one true proposition - transcendence.”
― James MacDonald, Vertical Church: What Every Heart Longs for. What Every Church Can Be.

“Most of the church landscape in my lifetime has been heavily invested in trying to do something for Jerry or Sherri or some other icon of unchurchness. The problem is that they have been only about themselves from the moment they could wail for their mothers, and the decision to give them at church what they can find in any self-help book appears now as a choice to abandon the One in whose honor the church gathers. What they need is to be set free from themselves with finality and to be lost in the awesome wonder of the manifest presence of God. It was never God’s desire that He would sit on the sideline and watch us frantically devise impressive ways to reach people or simply hold the line on orthodoxy as though faithfulness can exist in a vacuum apart from fruitfulness. God is the Matter of first importance! Can you say that about your current weekly encounter with church?”
― James MacDonald, Vertical Church: What Every Heart Longs for. What Every Church Can Be.

“When we ask people what they want in church instead of giving them what they were created to long for, we play in the very idolatry that church was created to dismantle.”
― James MacDonald, Vertical Church: What Every Heart Longs for. What Every Church Can Be.

“Most of what is wrong in horizontal church flows from attempts to get green apples interested in Jesus. Green apples are very articulate about that they do and don't want in church. They don't want to hear about money, because that is one of their idols; they don't want to be told about sin, because that assaults pride; no interest in pressure to decide for Jesus, because that threatens their autonomy. Sadly when church becomes what green apples must have or they won't come. It ceases to be what it must be for God to attend. Church needs to be offensive to green apples or it can be helpful to those who are ripe.”
― James MacDonald, Vertical Church: What Every Heart Longs for. What Every Church Can Be.

“God forgive the church of Jesus Christ for trading its birthright access to the transcendent for the pot of stew that is horizontal helpfulness. How shortsighted and human centered. The outcome of this disaster is that we have created a Creator in our own image who weeps, cares, and longs to help, but in the end we doubt He can because we have made Him so much like ourselves. In making God our buddy, we find Him nice for cuddling but not much help when the hurricane comes.”
― James MacDonald, Vertical Church: What Every Heart Longs for. What Every Church Can Be.

“Praying is what confirms our true belief that we cannot succeed without God, and its absence confirms the exact opposite.”
― James MacDonald, Vertical Church: What Every Heart Longs for. What Every Church Can Be.

“If you don’t tell your kids/grandkids what God has done for you, don’t expect their hearts to be captured by your God! Worst”
― James MacDonald, Vertical Church: What Every Heart Longs for. What Every Church Can Be.

“Prayer is the easiest thing to assume in church and the hardest thing to maintain. Prayer is the first thing our flesh stops when times get easy, and true prayer is the last thing we resort to when times get tough.”
― James MacDonald, Vertical Church: What Every Heart Longs for. What Every Church Can Be.

“At the height of his effectiveness, John Wesley was asked the secret of his impact for Christ around the world and reportedly answered, “When you set yourself on fire, people love to come and see you burn.”
― James MacDonald, Vertical Church: What Every Heart Longs for. What Every Church Can Be.

“The reason God responds to persistence is because prayer is changing the one who prays. As we pray, God is making us spiritually fit to receive what He is already willing to do. Prayer changes us into the people who can participate in the greater work of God without being spoiled by it through pride or becoming discouraged by the increased weight of greater fruitfulness.”
― James MacDonald, Vertical Church: What Every Heart Longs for. What Every Church Can Be.

“When the people of God are not told the works of God, they lose the wonder of God, and everyone does that which is right in his or her own eyes.”
― James MacDonald, Vertical Church: What Every Heart Longs for. What Every Church Can Be.

“when we want decisions more than we want disciples, we get tares instead of true converts and Ichabod, departed glory for the church.”
― James MacDonald, Vertical Church: What Every Heart Longs for. What Every Church Can Be.

“If we believe God is present in our worship as He promises to be,20 then we must frame all language of worship as to Him and not merely about Him.”
― James MacDonald, Vertical Church: What Every Heart Longs for. What Every Church Can Be.

“The people sang to the Lord, not about Him.”
― James MacDonald, Vertical Church: What Every Heart Longs for. What Every Church Can Be.

“An overemphasis upon imminence in preaching has banished transcendence and tended to a theology of God being technically present as an observer but effectively absent as a participant. When”
― James MacDonald, Vertical Church: What Every Heart Longs for. What Every Church Can Be.

“From the furnace of manifest presence, born of unashamed adoration and unapologetic preaching, comes an army of worshippers unafraid in their witness, determined to see others discover what they have found in the LORD.”
― James MacDonald, Vertical Church: What Every Heart Longs for. What Every Church Can Be.

“Prayer is the easiest thing to assume in church and the hardest thing to maintain.”
― James MacDonald, Vertical Church: What Every Heart Longs for. What Every Church Can Be.

“Turning to him, Spurgeon said, “If you had gone up the way you came down, you could have come down the way you went up.”
― James MacDonald, Vertical Church: What Every Heart Longs for. What Every Church Can Be.

“Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a well-known theologian who suffered greatly for resisting Hitler’s Germany and was executed just twenty-three days before the Nazis surrendered. Bonhoeffer had much to say about biblical preaching: “Do not try to make the Bible relevant. Its relevance is axiomatic.… Do not defend God’s Word, but testify to it.… Trust to the Word. It is a ship loaded to the very limits of its capacity.”28 Eric Metaxas added the comment, “He wished to impress upon his ordinands that when one truly presented the Word of God, it would undo people because it had the innate power to help them see their own need and would give the answer to that need in a way that was not larded over with ‘religion’ or false piety.’”29”
― James MacDonald, Vertical Church: What Every Heart Longs for. What Every Church Can Be.

“Wayne Grudem, my friend and seminary professor, put it well: “God does not have size or spatial dimensions and is present at every point of space with His whole being, yet God acts differently in different places.”19”
― James MacDonald, Vertical Church: What Every Heart Longs for. What Every Church Can Be.

“In his recent book Unexplainable, he said, “[God] wants to do the inconceivable, the uncommon, the unexpected, the remarkable, the incomprehensible, so that He—God—is the only explanation for what occurs in our lives.”3”
― James MacDonald, Vertical Church: What Every Heart Longs for. What Every Church Can Be.

“The core of humanity’s sin problem is not a horizontal behavior to be corrected but a Vertical relationship to be restored.”
― James MacDonald, Vertical Church: What Every Heart Longs for. What Every Church Can Be.

“All church activities that dilute, diminish, or detract from worship destroy Verticality, deny the priority of doxology, and forfeit what Vertical Church is all about—glory.”
― James MacDonald, Vertical Church: What Every Heart Longs for. What Every Church Can Be.