A Fellowship of Differents Quotes

“Grace is more than being lucky to be on God’s side. Grace is God’s goodness showered on people who have failed. Grace is God’s love on those who think they are unlovable. Grace is God knowing what we are designed to be. Grace is God believing in us when we have given up. Grace is someone at the end of their rope finding new strength. But there’s more to grace. Grace is both a place and a power. Grace is God unleashing his transforming power. Grace realigns and reroutes a life and a community. Grace is when you turn your worst enemy into your best friend. Grace takes people as they are and makes them what they can be. Grace ennobles; grace empowers. Grace forgives; grace frees. Grace transcends, and grace transforms.”
― Scot McKnight, A Fellowship of Differents: Showing the World God's Design for Life Together

“Give generously of what you have, and if you don’t have much, give little generously.”
― Scot McKnight, A Fellowship of Differents: Showing the World God's Design for Life Together

“I hope you agree with me that the hope for the world is the local church, and that the heart of God’s plan is found in creating a whole new society in a local church. If”
― Scot McKnight, A Fellowship of Differents: Showing the World God's Design for Life Together

“Put differently, we’ve made the church into the American dream for our own ethnic group with the same set of convictions about next to everything. No one else feels welcome. What Jesus and the apostles taught was that you were welcomed because the church welcomed all to the table.”
― Scot McKnight, A Fellowship of Differents: Showing the World God's Design for Life Together

“You Are More Than Your Past When God Holds Your Future.3”
― Scot McKnight, A Fellowship of Differents: Showing the World God's Design for Life Together

“My neighbor is someone hurting, who needs help, who cannot help themselves, who appears on my path, who has been robbed, who is half dead, who is naked, who is unable to ask for help, of a different race, who is a stranger, who has been stripped, who is a foreign traveler, who has been beaten up, who might require me to take a risk, who can’t walk, who looks horrible, who is of a different religion, who is destitute, who is a victim of injustice, who has been passed by, who can’t say Thank You, who has been wounded, whom nobody wants to help, who is lonely, who will cost me some time, who is visible, who is a victim, who has been violated, who is vulnerable, who is a human being, who feels humiliated, who feels helpless, who is poor, who is someone I’m afraid to help, who is dangerous to help, who is discouraged, who might cost me money, who needs tender loving care, who feels defeated, and who is someone I am able to help.2”
― Scot McKnight, A Fellowship of Differents: Showing the World God's Design for Life Together

“The church is the place to get the kind of help you need” and to “love you to wholeness.”
― Scot McKnight, A Fellowship of Differents: Showing the World God's Design for Life Together

“Understand that these early Christians did not meet in churches and sit apart from one another in pews, and then when the music ended get in their chariots and go home. No, their churches were small, and they met in homes or house churches. A recent study by a British scholar has concluded that if the apostle Paul’s house churches were composed of about thirty people, this would have been their approximate make-up:1
• a craftworker in whose home they meet, along with his wife, children, a couple of male slaves, a female domestic slave, and a dependent relative • some tenants, with families and slaves and dependents, also living in the same home in rented rooms • some family members of a householder who himself does not participate in the house church • a couple of slaves whose owners do not attend • some freed slaves who do not participate in the church • a couple homeless people • a few migrant workers renting small rooms in the home
Add to this mix some Jewish folks and a perhaps an enslaved prostitute and we see how many “different tastes” were in a typical house church in Rome: men and women, citizens and freed slaves and slaves (who had no legal rights), Jews and Gentiles, people from all moral walks of life, and perhaps, most notably, people from elite classes all the way down the social scale to homeless people.”
― Scot McKnight, A Fellowship of Differents: Showing the World God's Design for Life Together

“Understand that these early Christians did not meet in churches and sit apart from one another in pews, and then when the music ended get in their chariots and go home. No, their churches were small, and they met in homes or house churches. A recent study by a British scholar has concluded that if the apostle Paul’s house churches were composed of about thirty people, this would have been their approximate make-up:1
• a craftworker in whose home they meet, along with his wife, children, a couple of male slaves, a female domestic slave, and a dependent relative”
― Scot McKnight, A Fellowship of Differents: Showing the World God's Design for Life Together

“The church, if it is going to be the church God designed it to be, must become a space for the full story of God’s artistic grace — the story about where we were, where we are now, and where we will be someday.”
― Scot McKnight, A Fellowship of Differents: Showing the World God's Design for Life Together

“What about the poor? How many poor people, unemployed people, financially struggling people are in your church? Are they even willing to let those facts be known? If not, why not?”
― Scot McKnight, A Fellowship of Differents: Showing the World God's Design for Life Together

“How involved are women in your church? How are women involved? Are they at the table where decisions are made? Or do men make the decision and women do the work? In the words of Carolyn Custis James, who called her book about women Half the Church: “It is no small matter that women comprise half the church. In many countries women make up a significantly higher percentage of believers — 80 percent in China and 90 percent in Japan . . . maybe these high percentages of women should make us wonder what God is doing, for he often forges significant inroads for the gospel by beginning with women. . . . When you stop to think of it, in sheer numbers, the potential we possess for expanding the kingdom is staggering.”6 Is your church unleashing the spiritual power of women? Is their voice heard?”
― Scot McKnight, A Fellowship of Differents: Showing the World God's Design for Life Together

“Fully 90 percent of American churches draw 90 percent of their people from one ethnic group, and only about 8 percent of American churches can be called multiracial, multiethnic, or interracial. But let’s scrape the mud off even that 8 percent. Studies show that interracial churches are often little more than a white-culture church sprinkled with ethnic mixture in the congregation.4 That is, interracial churches tend toward the coercive forces of a salad made the American Way or the Weird Way.”
― Scot McKnight, A Fellowship of Differents: Showing the World God's Design for Life Together

“The reality is that each of our churches has created a Christian culture and Christian life for likes and sames and similiarities and identicals. Instead of powering God’s grand social experiment, we’ve cut up God’s plan into segregated groups, with the incredibly aggravating and God-dishonoring result that most of us are invisible to one another.”
― Scot McKnight, A Fellowship of Differents: Showing the World God's Design for Life Together

“Let’s be even more honest. While we might like to think we have smothered everyone with one tasty culture, what we have actually accomplished is closer to the Weird Way of making and eating a salad. We like ourselves, our way of thinking, our music, and our . . . our everything. So we separate all the difference and differents and scatter them across the towns and cities so that each group worships on its own. Churches for men and not really for women, churches for the wealthy and churches for the middle class and churches for the poor, churches for whites and Mexican Americans and African Americans and Asian Americans and Indian Americans. Churches for liberals and churches for fundamentalists, churches for those who follow Calvin, Wesley, Luther, Aquinas, Menno — or for those who follow Hybels, Warren, Stanley, Hamilton, Chandler, or Driscoll. Sunday morning then becomes an exercise in cultural and spiritual segregation, and this has a colossally important impact on the Christian life itself!”
― Scot McKnight, A Fellowship of Differents: Showing the World God's Design for Life Together

“The church God wants is one brimming with difference,”
― Scot McKnight, A Fellowship of Differents: Showing the World God's Design for Life Together