A Bigger Table Quotes

“One of the biggest, most damaging mistakes too many Christians so willingly make is assuming that God is as much of a judgmental jerk as we are. But what if we could make room for difference and space for disagreement in our spiritual communities? What if we could give permission for moral failure and freedom to not be certain, and the chance to gloriously fail without needing those things to become black marks against people or death-penalty offenses? What if we made space for people who are as screwed up as we are?”
― John Pavlovitz, A Bigger Table: Building Messy, Authentic, and Hopeful Spiritual Community

“I knew without blinking that I didn't have to choose between loving God and loving my brother - and he didn't have to choose between being gay and being adored by God.”
― John Pavlovitz, A Bigger Table: Building Messy, Authentic, and Hopeful Spiritual Community

“Jesus was far more relational then he was theological.”
― John Pavlovitz, A Bigger Table: Building Messy, Authentic, and Hopeful Spiritual Community

“Frame the spiritual journey as a stark good-vs.-evil battle of warring sides long enough and you’ll eventually see the Church and those around you in the same way too. You’ll begin to filter the world through the lens of conflict. Everything becomes a threat to the family; everyone becomes a potential enemy. Fear becomes the engine that drives the whole thing. When this happens, your default response to people who are different or who challenge you can turn from compassion to contempt. You become less like God and more like the Godfather. In those times, instead of being a tool to fit your heart for invitation, faith can become a weapon to defend yourself against the encroaching sinners threatening God’s people—whom we conveniently always consider ourselves among. Religion becomes a cold, cruel distance maker, pushing from the table people who aren’t part of the brotherhood and don’t march in lockstep with the others.”
― John Pavlovitz, A Bigger Table: Building Messy, Authentic, and Hopeful Spiritual Community

“Discrimination hinders people from finding community, and it robs the Church of the tremendous gifts that diversity brings.”
― John Pavlovitz, A Bigger Table: Building Messy, Authentic, and Hopeful Spiritual Community

“This is often the primary difference between him and so many of those of us who follow him. When we encounter the many ills of the world, we find ourselves growing more and more callous toward people, more and more judgmental, less and less hopeful. Rather than seeing the hurting humanity we encounter every day as an opportunity to be the very loving presence of Jesus, we see them as reason to withdraw from it all. Faith becomes about retreating from the world when it should be about moving toward it. As we walk deeper into organized religion, we run the risk of eventually becoming fully blind to the tangible suffering around us, less concerned about mending wounds or changing systems, and more preoccupied with saving or condemning souls. In this way, the spiritual eyes through which we see the world change everything. If our default lens is sin, we tend to look ahead to the afterlife, but if we focus on suffering, we’ll lean toward presently transforming the planet in real time—and we’ll create community accordingly. The former seeks to help people escape the encroaching moral decay by getting them into heaven; the latter takes seriously the prayer Jesus teaches his disciples, that they would make the kingdom come—that through lives resembling Christ and work that perpetuates his work, we would actually bring heaven down. Practically speaking, sin management seems easier because essentially all that is required of us is to preach, to call out people’s errors and invite them to repentance, and to feel we’ve been faithful. But seeing suffering requires us to step into the broken, jagged chaos of people’s lives to be agents of healing and change. It’s far more time consuming and much more difficult to do as a faith community. It is a lot easier to train preachers to lead people in a Sinner’s Prayer than it is to equip them to address the systematic injustices around them.”
― John Pavlovitz, A Bigger Table: Building Messy, Authentic, and Hopeful Spiritual Community

“Individually and collectively, we will have to be the resistance—offering daily, bold, defiant pushback against all that feels wrong here. This pushback will come as we loudly and unapologetically speak truth where truth is not welcome. It will come as we connect with one another on social media and in faith communities and in our neighborhoods, and as we work together to demand accountability from our elected officials and pastoral leaders. It will come in the small things: in the art we create and the conversations we have and the quiet gestures of compassion that are barely visible. It will come in the way we fully celebrate daily life: having dinner with friends, driving through the countryside, playing in the yard with our children, laughing at a movie we love. It will come as we use the shared resources of our experience and our talents and our numbers to ensure that our children inherit a world worth being here for. It will come as we transform our grief into goodness.”
― John Pavlovitz, A Bigger Table: Building Messy, Authentic, and Hopeful Spiritual Community

“The distinction between seeing sin and seeing suffering is revelatory if we really let it seep into the deepest hollows of our hearts.”
― John Pavlovitz, A Bigger Table: Building Messy, Authentic, and Hopeful Spiritual Community

“I can’t fathom the transformation of a basket of food to accommodate a multitude (heck, I’m not even sure how our toaster works), but I can see the boundless compassion of the open table and endeavor to re-create that on whatever spot I stand at any given moment and with the people in my midst. Jesus feeds people. That’s what he does. And as striking as what he does is, equally revelatory is what he doesn’t do here. There’s no altar call, no spiritual gifts assessment, no membership class, no moral screening, no litmus test to verify everyone’s theology and to identify those worthy enough to earn a seat at the table. Their hunger and Jesus’ love for them alone, nothing else, make them worthy. This is a serious gut check for us.”
― John Pavlovitz, A Bigger Table: Building Messy, Authentic, and Hopeful Spiritual Community

“One of the most freeing lessons I ever learned as a pastor is that I cannot do spiritual things; I can only do physical things. I can only respond in flesh and blood to what I believe God is saying, and then rest in the results. God is the only One who can do soul stuff. My most pressing job as a pastor is often to get out of the way—and it ain’t easy.”
― John Pavlovitz, A Bigger Table: Building Messy, Authentic, and Hopeful Spiritual Community

“But what if we could make room for difference and space for disagreement in our spiritual communities? What if we could give permission for moral failure and freedom to not be certain, and the chance to gloriously fail without needing those things to become black marks against people or death-penalty offenses? What if we made space for people who are as screwed up as we are?”
― John Pavlovitz, A Bigger Table: Building Messy, Authentic, and Hopeful Spiritual Community

“* Gen. 19:1–11; Lev. 18:22; 20:13; Rom. 1:26–28; 1 Cor. 6:9–10; 1 Tim. 1:9–10 are known as the “clobber verses” of Scripture, used by nonaffirming Christians to justify prohibitions against the LGBTQ community.”
― John Pavlovitz, A Bigger Table: Building Messy, Authentic, and Hopeful Spiritual Community

“It’s one thing to personally accept Christ’s boundless grace, and another to avoid hoarding it for ourselves”
― John Pavlovitz, A Bigger Table: Building Messy, Authentic, and Hopeful Spiritual Community