Onward Quotes

“We overcome, not because we’re a moral majority or a righteous remnant, but because we’re blood-covered sinners who know that if the gospel can change us, it can change anyone.”
― Russell D. Moore, Onward: Engaging the Culture without Losing the Gospel

“kindness is not “niceness.” Kindness does not avoid conflict; kindness engages conflict, but with a goal of reconciliation.”
― Russell D. Moore, Onward: Engaging the Culture without Losing the Gospel

“Those who would pretend to enforce the kingdom with tanks or guns or laws or edicts do not understand the nature of the kingdom Jesus preached.”
― Russell D. Moore, Onward: Engaging the Culture without Losing the Gospel

“Not everything that offends us should offend us, and not everything that offends us is persecution.”
― Russell D. Moore, Onward: Engaging the Culture without Losing the Gospel

“A religion that needs state power to enforce obedience to its beliefs is a religion that has lost confidence in the power of its Deity.”
― Russell D. Moore, Onward: Engaging the Culture without Losing the Gospel

“The shaking of American culture is no sign that God has given up on American Christianity. In fact, it may be a sign that God is rescuing American Christianity from itself.”
― Russell D. Moore, Onward: Engaging the Culture without Losing the Gospel

“How often do I rage rather than lament?”
― Russell D. Moore, Onward: Engaging the Culture without Losing the Gospel

“The problem was that, from the very beginning, Christian values were always more popular in American culture than the Christian gospel.”
― Russell D. Moore, Onward: Engaging the Culture without Losing the Gospel

“Years ago, I happened upon a television program of a “prosperity gospel” preacher, with perfectly coiffed mauve hair, perched on a rhinestone-spackled golden throne, talking about how wonderful it is to be a Christian. Even if Christianity proved to be untrue, she said, she would still want to be a Christian, because it’s the best way to live. It occurred to me that that is an easy perspective to have, on television, from a golden throne. It’s a much more difficult perspective to have if one is being crucified by one’s neighbors in Sudan for refusing to repudiate the name of Christ. Then, if it turns out not to be true, it seems to be a crazy way to live. In reality, this woman’s gospel—and those like it—are more akin to a Canaanite fertility religion than to the gospel of Jesus Christ. And the kingdom she announces is more like that of Pharaoh than like that of Christ. David’s throne needs no rhinestone. But the prosperity gospel proclaimed in full gaudiness in the example above is on full display in more tasteful and culturally appropriate forms. The idea of the respectability of Christian witness in a Christian America that is defined by morality and success, not by the gospel of crucifixion and resurrection, is just another example of importing Jesus to maintain one’s best life now. Jesus could have remained beloved in Nazareth, by healing some people and levitating some chairs, and keeping quiet about how different his kingdom is. But Jesus persistently has to wreck everything, and the illusions of Christian America are no more immune than the illusions of Israelite Galilee. If we see the universe as the Bible sees it, we will not try to “reclaim” some lost golden age. We will see an invisible conflict of the kingdoms, a satanic horror show being invaded by the reign of Christ. This will drive us to see who our real enemies are, and they are not the cultural and sexual prisoners-of-war all around us. If we seek the kingdom, we will see the devil. And this makes us much less sophisticated, much less at home in modern America.”
― Russell D. Moore, Onward: Engaging the Culture without Losing the Gospel

“We are Americans best when we are not Americans first.”
― Russell D. Moore, Onward: Engaging the Culture without Losing the Gospel

“A church that loses its distinctiveness is a church that has nothing distinctive with which to engage the culture. A worldly church is of no good to the world.”
― Russell D. Moore, Onward: Engaging the Culture without Losing the Gospel

“As American culture changes, the scandal of Christianity is increasingly right up front, exactly where it was in the first century. The shaking of American culture will get us back to the question Jesus asked his disciples at Caesarea Philippi: “Who do you say that I am?” As the Bible Belt recedes, those left standing up for Jesus will be those who, like Simon Peter of old, know how to answer that question. Once Christianity is no longer seen as part and parcel of patriotism, the church must offer more than “What would Jesus do?” moralism and the “I vote values” populism to which we’ve grown accustomed. Good.”
― Russell D. Moore, Onward: Engaging the Culture without Losing the Gospel

“Whenever we are tempted to despair about the shape of American Christianity, we should remember that Jesus never promised the triumph of the American church. He promised the triumph of the church. .”
― Russell D. Moore, Onward: Engaging the Culture without Losing the Gospel

“On a Sunday this January, probably of whatever year it is when you read this (at least as long as I’m living), I will probably be preaching somewhere in a church on “Sanctity of Human Life Sunday.” Here’s a confession: I hate it. Don’t get me wrong. I love to preach the Bible. And I love to talk about the image of God and the protection of all human life. I hate this Sunday not because of what we have to say, but that we have to say it at all. The idea of aborting an unborn child or abusing a born child or starving an elderly person or torturing an enemy combatant or screaming at an immigrant family, these ought all to be so self-evidently wrong that a “Sanctity of Human Life Sunday” ought to be as unnecessary as a “Reality of Gravity Sunday.” We shouldn’t have to say that parents shouldn’t abort their children, or their fathers shouldn’t abandon the mothers of their babies, or that no human life is worthless regardless of age, skin color, disability, or economic status. Part of my thinking here is, I hope, a sign of God’s grace, a groaning by the Spirit at this world of abortion clinics and torture chambers (Rom. 8:22–23). But part of it is my own inability to see the spiritual combat zone that the world is, and has been from Eden onward. This dark present reality didn’t begin with the antebellum South or with the modern warfare state, and it certainly didn’t begin with the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision. Human dignity is about the kingdom of God, and that means that in every place and every culture human dignity is contested.”
― Russell D. Moore, Onward: Engaging the Culture without Losing the Gospel

“We ought to be listening to see who the world-system wants to devalue and degrade, most often first with words, so that we can know for whom we should be speaking and standing.”
― Russell D. Moore, Onward: Engaging the Culture without Losing the Gospel

“The devil wishes to assure some people that there’s no need for repentance, and others that there’s no hope for mercy. Some people are deceived into thinking they are too good for the gospel while others are accused into thinking they are too bad for the gospel.”
― Russell D. Moore, Onward: Engaging the Culture without Losing the Gospel

“Our end goal is not a Christian America, either of the made-up past or the hoped-for future. Our end goal is the kingdom of Christ, made up of every tribe, tongue, nation, and language.”
― Russell D. Moore, Onward: Engaging the Culture without Losing the Gospel

“The kingdom of God ought to reshape our vision of what matters and who matters,”
― Russell D. Moore, Onward: Engaging the Culture without Losing the Gospel

“the first step to a kingdom-focused cultural engagement is the recovery of a church that practices church discipline.”
― Russell D. Moore, Onward: Engaging the Culture without Losing the Gospel

“We can learn to be pilgrims again, uneasy in American culture, as we should have been all along. But we are not pilgrims cringing in protective silos, waiting for the sound of trumpets in the sky. We are part of a kingdom, a kingdom we see from afar (Heb. 11:13) and a kingdom we see assembling itself all around us in miniature, in these little outposts of the future called the church.”
― Russell D. Moore, Onward: Engaging the Culture without Losing the Gospel

“The closeness of American culture with the church caused many sectors of the American church to read the Bible as though the Bible were pointing us to America itself. That’s why endless recitations of 2 Chronicles 7:14 focused on revival in the nation as a means to national blessing, without ever seeming to ask who the “my people” of this text actually are, and what it means, in light of the gospel, to be “blessed.”
― Russell D. Moore, Onward: Engaging the Culture without Losing the Gospel

“We should protect our legacy of a free church in a free state. We ought to pray and work for a “quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty” (1 Tim. 2:2 kjv). But that is not the ultimate sign of our success. It is better for our future generations to be willing to go to jail—for the right reasons—than to exchange the gospel of the kingdom for a mess of Esau’s pottage. Sometimes jails filled with hymn-singing, letter-writing, gospel-preaching Christians can do extraordinary things.”
― Russell D. Moore, Onward: Engaging the Culture without Losing the Gospel

“For a long time, the church in America has assumed that its cultural conservatism was American, that most people at least ideally wanted to live up to our conception of the good life. Those with eyes to see ought to recognize that if those days ever existed, they are no more.”
― Russell D. Moore, Onward: Engaging the Culture without Losing the Gospel

“We find it difficult to distinguish between spiritual combatants… and their hostages.”
― Russell D. Moore, Onward: Engaging the Culture without Losing the Gospel

“This is why churches that try the most self-consciously to avoid social issues and political questions become, unwittingly, the most political of all. The founders of my church tradition, in concert with others, spoke much of the “spirituality of the church” as a reason for avoiding “political” issues. To some degree, they were right. The church does not bear the sword that’s been given to the state; the church advances by spiritual, not carnal, means. But the “spirituality of the church” was a convenient doctrine. My denomination was founded back in the nineteenth century by those who advocated for human slavery, and who sought to keep their consciences and their ballots and their wallets away from a transcendent word that would speak against the sinful injustice of a regime of kidnapping, rape, and human beings wickedly deigning to buy and sell other human beings created in the image of God. Slavery, they argued (to their shame), was a “political” issue that ought not distract the church from its mission: evangelism and discipleship. What such a move empowered was not just social injustice (which would have been bad enough), but also personal sin. When so-called “simple gospel preaching” churches in 1856 Alabama or 1925 Mississippi calls sinners to repentance for fornicating and gambling but not for slaveholding or lynching, those churches may be many things but they are hardly non-political. By not addressing these issues, they are addressing them, by implicitly stating that they are not worthy of the moral scrutiny of the church, that they will not be items of report at the Judgment Seat of Christ. These churches, thus, bless the status quo, with all the fealty of a court chaplain. The same is true of a church in twenty-first-century America that doesn’t speak to the pressing issues of justice and righteousness around us, such as the horror of abortion and the persisting sins of racial injustice.”
― Russell D. Moore, Onward: Engaging the Culture without Losing the Gospel

“Our vote for President of the United States (for those of you who are Americans) is important. We are held accountable, as we’ll discuss, for the discharge of our ruling responsibilities in this life. But our vote for President is less important than our vote to receive new members for baptism into our churches. A President is term-limited and, for that matter, so is the United States (and every other nation). The reception of members into the church, however, marks out the future kings and queens of the universe. Our church membership rolls say to the people on them, and to the outside world, “These are those we believe will inherit the universe, as joint-heirs with Christ.” That’s a matter of priority of each, not a pullback from either.”
― Russell D. Moore, Onward: Engaging the Culture without Losing the Gospel

“Christian attempts at social witness have often swung wildly back and forth between chest-beating optimism to withdrawal and despair. One minute we are “reclaiming America for Christ,” the next we pronounce that American culture is “slouching toward Gomorrah.” We lose sight both of the fact that all of human history—from Eden onward—is a war zone, and that God’s kingdom triumph is proven not by our electoral success or our cultural influence—as important as that is in being obediently “salt” and “light” in our culture. Our triumph is proven in the resurrection of the world’s rightful ruler.”
― Russell D. Moore, Onward: Engaging the Culture without Losing the Gospel

“Our end goal is not a Christian America, either of the made-up past or the hoped-for future. Our end goal is the kingdom of Christ, made up of every tribe, tongue, nation, and language. We are, in Christ, the heirs of this kingdom.”
― Russell D. Moore, Onward: Engaging the Culture without Losing the Gospel

“Moreover, seeing ourselves as a majority led at times to both a theological downgrade and a counter-productive public stance. The application of the promises to Israel to the United States of America, for example, caused many to miss, as we will see in the next chapter, the meaning of the kingdom of God, and thus to bypass Jesus Christ himself. The idea of America as a Christian nation is able to get “Amens” in the churches only as long as the churches believe America is, at least in some ways, with us and not against us. But what happens when the cultural climate starts to shift in obvious ways? If the church believes the United States is a sort of new Israel, then we become frantic when we see ourselves “losing America.” We then start to speak in gloomy terms of America as, at best, Babylon, a place of hopeless exile, or, at worst, Gomorrah, slouching toward the judgment of God.”
― Russell D. Moore, Onward: Engaging the Culture without Losing the Gospel

“Total disengagement is itself a privilege of a cultural Christendom that is fast passing away.”
― Russell D. Moore, Onward: Engaging the Culture without Losing the Gospel