Almost Christian Quotes

“Faith does not mean mimicking Jesus, but participating in his self-giving love—not because we have somehow chosen to be like him, but because, incredibly, God has chosen to become like us.”
― Kenda Creasy Dean, Almost Christian : What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church

“divine grace is a gift, but not one we get to keep. Christ sends us into the world as he was sent: to embody God’s good news as we tell it, to enact the divine plan of salvation in word and deed.”
― Kenda Creasy Dean, Almost Christian : What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church

“The essential mark of maturity in Christians—as in peach trees—is generativity. Mature faith bears fruit. Mature Christians are branches on which God’s love is multiplied and offered for the nourishment of others. As Jesus pointed out, “My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples” (John 15:8). By nurturing and offering the life-giving fruits of the Spirit (e.g., love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control [Gal. 5:22–23]), we become branches of divine grace, vehicles Christ uses to extend himself to others.”
― Kenda Creasy Dean, Almost Christian : What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church

“Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, say Smith and Denton, seems to be “colonizing many historical religious traditions and, almost without anyone noticing, converting believers in the old faiths to its alternative religious vision of divinely underwritten personal happiness and interpersonal niceness.”23”
― Kenda Creasy Dean, Almost Christian : What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church

“Adults need spiritual apprenticeships as much as their children do—and adults need them first. Group spiritual direction, covenant groups, practice in oral prayer, lay leadership in worship, singing hymns and praise songs—and of course, the formal practice of testimony itself—are congregational practices that give adults, and not just teenagers, opportunities to put faith into words.”
― Kenda Creasy Dean, Almost Christian : What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church

“Words matter to Christians not primarily because they spread our ideas or accomplish our goals, but because they proclaim our love. For both God and humans, love is a self-communicating impulse. Love goes out from itself toward the beloved; love cannot be contained. God reaches for us in the act of creation, in deliverance, in the gift of the Holy Spirit, but above all in the Incarnation, the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. So we preach, pray, dance, and sing because—like the ebullient leper who ignores Jesus’ instructions to stay mum about his miraculous healing—we tell anyway (Mark 1:40–45).”
― Kenda Creasy Dean, Almost Christian : What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church

“If we say we want to translate the gospel with young people, this is what we are saying: we are willing to put the very power of the gospel itself—the very power of the Word of God—into the hands of teenagers, people who do not view culture the way we view culture, who do not hear God the way we hear God, who will not worship the way we worship, who will not “do church” the way we want them to simply because they will be listening to Jesus and not to us.”
― Kenda Creasy Dean, Almost Christian : What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church

“The issue is not whether young people can read the Bible (they can). The real issue is . . . well, really, why would they want to? What have they seen in the church that would suggest that the Bible is a source of power and wonder? When have they seen their parents derive life and joy from reading scripture?”
― Kenda Creasy Dean, Almost Christian : What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church

“We may question what we believe, but most of us are pretty clear about who we love, and who loves us. It is such a preposterous claim—God-with-us (oh please)—that young people are unlikely to believe it unless we give them opportunities to do some sacred eavesdropping on us as we seek, delight, and trust in God’s presence with us.”
― Kenda Creasy Dean, Almost Christian : What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church

“The church’s first witness, as the theologian John Howard Yoder reminds us, is the way we live before the eyes of the watching world.4 You may recall that, two nights before the Passover, Jesus was having supper at the house of Simon the leper, when in walked a woman with an alabaster jar. She smashed it and poured its precious contents of nard—worth about $35,000 in today’s dollars—over Jesus.”
― Kenda Creasy Dean, Almost Christian : What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church

“In other words, Jesus not only sends the church where he was sent; he sends us in the same way that he was sent, as human translations of divine love, people whose words and actions do not grasp for God as much as they reveal a God who grasps for us.”
― Kenda Creasy Dean, Almost Christian : What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church

“If teenagers lack an articulate faith, maybe it is because the faith we show them is too spineless to merit much in the way of conversation. Maybe teenagers’ inability to talk about religion is not because the church inspires a faith too deep for words, but because the God-story that we tell is too vapid to merit more than a superficial vocabulary.”
― Kenda Creasy Dean, Almost Christian : What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church

“mentoring models of Christian formation are difficult to pull off primarily because so few adults are willing—not because they lack the interest, but because they lack spiritual vocabularies, and therefore confidence, to convey their religious convictions to another”
― Kenda Creasy Dean, Almost Christian : What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church

“Sociologists paint American Christians as restless people who come to church for the same reasons people once went to diners: for someone to serve us who knows our name, for a filling stew that reminds us of home and makes us feel loved, even while it does a number on our spiritual cholesterol.13”
― Kenda Creasy Dean, Almost Christian : What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church

“What if the blasé religiosity of most American teenagers is not the result of poor communication but the result of excellent communication of a watered-down gospel so devoid of God’s self-giving love in Jesus Christ, so immune to the sending love of the Holy Spirit that it might not be Christianity at all?”
― Kenda Creasy Dean, Almost Christian : What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church

“As young people contribute to the faith community, their competence as members of that community grows; it is in doing the work of ministry that Christ shapes us into ministers.”
― Kenda Creasy Dean, Almost Christian : What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church

“Legitimate peripheral participation means that adolescents make real contributions to our shared life in God, even while they are still figuring out how to be part of the community of faith. As teenagers become more proficient in the church’s language and practices, they become more central to the life of the congregation, and contribute more fully to Christ’s mission—until they suddenly discover that they are in a position to help lead in that mission, to bring newcomers on board, and to create the community anew.”
― Kenda Creasy Dean, Almost Christian : What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church

“Youth groups can be vehicles for Christian fellowship, but unless teenagers learn to share one another’s suffering (not to mention the suffering of people outside the group), Christian youth groups can devolve into gatherings of like-minded friends.”
― Kenda Creasy Dean, Almost Christian : What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church

“What we can say with some certainty is that American young people have enormous trouble putting faith into words. It was unclear whether the young people we interviewed in the NSYR were unfamiliar with religious language or just uncomfortable using it in public (a number of youth we talked to thought talking about religion at school was illegal). The difficulty escalated when the conversation turned to particulars (the name “Jesus” was especially absent from our interviews).”
― Kenda Creasy Dean, Almost Christian : What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church

“When we downshift Christian education from the paradigm of expertise to a paradigm of love, we do not dilute the importance of rigorous theological reflection. On the contrary, inverting the order of instruction makes serious inquiry all the more likely. We learn best what we love most.”
― Kenda Creasy Dean, Almost Christian : What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church

“Mission is not a trip or a youth activity, a silent cousin to evangelism, or an optional model of youth ministry. Mission is the business that congregations are in.23 Christ views young people as participants in God’s mission rather than as targets of ours.”
― Kenda Creasy Dean, Almost Christian : What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church

“Foolish faith comes from the security of knowing that we live in God’s embrace, and with that knowledge comes a peculiar kind of courage. Foolish faith flies in the face of the self-fulfilling norms of consumerism and addresses issues of identity and openness, not by avoiding the cross, as Moralistic Therapeutic Deism would have us do, but by clinging to it. As G. K. Chesterton pointed out, “A man who has faith must be prepared not only to be a martyr, but to be a fool.”18 Moralistic Therapeutic Deism prepares young people to be neither.”
― Kenda Creasy Dean, Almost Christian : What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church

“With God's breath in the church we are called to exhale, but not because it's a morally good thing to do but because we can't help ourselves.”
― Kenda Creasy Dean, Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church