We have to create, and sustain, communities where this life is being lived in such a way that when we speak of it we are obviously telling the truth. That is the hard part. As long as our churches are places where we struggle to sustain an hour or two’s public worship per week, with [...]
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quotes
As we call people (back) to faith in God through Jesus Christ, we must help them to articulate an answer to the question ‘What do we have to become Christians for?’ At least part of the answer to this question will have to be: ‘In order to be enlisted into God’s ministry of reconciliation, peace, [...]
‘Mission’ is a word that spans the total distance between God and the world’s salvation. The whole dynamic of the church’s life may be conveyed by this single verb.” — Paul S. Minear in Images of the Church in the New Testament
Jesus came to bring good news to the poor, not those who serve the poor! … The healing power in us will not come from our capacities and our riches, but in and through our poverty. We are called to discover that God can bring peace, compassion and love through our wounds.” — Jean Vanier, [...]
“The goal of our missional life is not to grow churches. The goal of church is to grow missionaries. The goal of the gospel is not to get people to church. The result of the gospel is that people will find each other and gather because of the deep meaning of a common experience.” (pg [...]
The call of community isn’t about finding people just like us, or at the exclusion of any people. Community in the biblical sense is clearly about unlike people finding Christ at the center of their inclusive life together. — Hugh Halter & Matt Smay, The Tangible Kingdom
There is all sorts of talk about the need for churches to be creative. While I agree, I think the assumption is usually that this creativity happens in the form of programmed expressions from the stage in a Sunday service. This quote reminds us why creativity should be so much more that that: The reality [...]
God did not create a divine subculture and then wait for humanity to wise up and join in. God joined a story. God got dirty. God entered. God engaged. And this is the calling of the church as well–to join in and participate in God’s story at work in the world. In that sense to [...]
And salvation only does what it’s meant to do when those who have been saved, are being saved, and will one day fully be saved realize that they are saved not as souls but as wholes and not for themselves alone but for what God now longs to do through them. — NT Wright, Surprised [...]
So far from sitting on clouds playing harps, as people often imagine, the redeemed people of God in the new world will be agents of his love going out in new ways, to accomplish new creative tasks, to celebrate and extend the glory of his love. — NT Wright, Surprised by Hope
Ambiguity is the element of tentatIveness, of risk, of gamble, in committtng to a path of understanding and action that is definite but also open-ended. If the church is commItted to learning Jesus as a living person, then It is also committed to ambiguity as an inevItable–and positive!–dimension of its existence. –Luke Timothy Johnson, Living [...]
Contextualization, on the other hand, suggests the experimental and contingent nature of all theology. Contextual theologians therefore, rightly, refrain from writing “systematic theologies” where everything fits into an all-encompassing and eternally valid system. — David Bosch, Transforming Mission
