Top 215 Quotes & Sayings by Shane Claiborne

As an American, and especially as a Christian, I am convinced that a love for our own people is not a bad thing, but love doesn't stop at borders. Love is infinitely boundless and all about holy trespassing and offensive friendships.

The work of community, love, reconciliation, restoration is the work we cannot leave up to politicians. This is the work we are all called to do.

The more I have read the Bible and studied the life of Jesus, the more I have become convinced that Christianity spreads best not through force but through fascination.

I engage with local politics because it affects people I love. And I engage in national politics because it affects people I love.

Money has power. And so withholding money has power too, especially when a bunch of people do it together.

We are setting ourselves up for disappointment if our hope is built on anything less than Jesus.

To all my nonbelieving, sort-of-believing, and used-to-be-believing friends: I feel like I should begin with a confession. I am sorry that so often the biggest obstacle to God has been Christians.

Liturgy and worship were never meant to be confined to the cathedrals and sanctuaries. Liturgy at its best can be performed like a circus or theater - making the Gospel visible as a witness to the world around us.

Christians who have had so much to say with our mouths and so little to show with our lives. I am sorry that so often we have forgotten the Christ of our Christianity.

We need to be politically engaged, but peculiar in how we engage. Jesus and the early Christians had a marvelous political imagination. They turned all the presumptions and ideas of power and blessing upside down.

It doesn't matter who you are. Everyone has something to offer the movement of justice

You can't really learn God's hope like you learn the logic of an argument or the details of a story. It's more like learning to belly laugh. You catch hope from someone who has it down in their gut.

When we ask God to move a mountain, God may give us a shovel.

The church is a place where broken people can fall in love with a beautiful God.

Maybe we are a little crazy. After all, we believe in things we don't see. The Scriptures say that faith is "being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see" (Heb. 11:1). We believe poverty can end even though it is all around us. We believe in peace even though we hear only rumours of wars. And since we are people of expectation, we are so convinced that another world is coming that we start living as if it were already here.

Christianity can be built around isolating ourselves from evildoers and sinners, creating a community of religious piety and moral purity. That’s the Christianity I grew up with. Christianity can also be built around joining with the broken sinners and evildoers of our world crying out to God, groaning for grace. That’s the Christianity I have fallen in love with.

The more I get to know Jesus, the more trouble he seems to get me into.

And I think that's what our world is desperately in need of - lovers, people who are building deep, genuine relationships with fellow strugglers along the way, and who actually know the faces of the people behind the issues they are concerned about.

The world is looking, not for Christians who are perfect, but for Christians who are honest and who are willing to be honest with some of our contradictions and hypocrisy.

It's hard to hear the gentle whisper of the Spirit amid the noise of Christendom.

Recognizing that something is wrong is the first step toward changing the world.

So even as we see the horror of death, may we be reminded that in the end, love wins. Mercy triumphs. Life is more powerful than death. And even those who have committed great violence can have the image of God come to life again within them as they hear the whisper of love. May the whisper of love grow louder than the thunder of violence. May we love loudly.

I am convinced that if we lose kids to the culture of drugs and materialism, of violence and war, it's because we don't dare them, not because we don't entertain them. It's because we make the gospel too easy, not because we make it too difficult. Kids want to do something heroic with their lives, which is why they play video games and join the army. But what do they do with a church that teaches them to tiptoe through life so they can arrive safely at death?

If you have two coats you have stolen one. We have no right to have more than we need when someone else has less than they need.

And since we are people of expectation, we are so convinced that another world is coming that we start living as if it were already here.

A pastor friend of mine said, "Our problem is that we no longer have martyrs. We only have celebrities.

My goal is to speak the truth in love. There are a lot of people speaking the truth with no love, and there are a lot of people talking about love without much truth.

It is a beautiful thing when folks in poverty are no longer just a missions project but become genuine friends and family with whom we laugh, cry, dream and struggle.

If we believe terrorists are past redemption, we should just rip up like 1/2 the New Testament because it was written by one.

Charity wins awards and applause, but joining the poor gets you killed. People do not get crucified for charity. People are crucified for living out a love that disrupts the social order, that calls forth a new world. People are not crucified for helping poor people. People are crucified for joining them.

How can we worship a homeless man on Sunday and ignore one on Monday?

I am sorry that so often the biggest obstacle to God has been Christians. Christians who have had so much to say with our mouths and so little to show with our lives. I am sorry that so often we have forgotten the Christ of our Christianity.

Perhaps there is no more dangerous place for a Christian to be than in safety and comfort, detached from the suffering of others.

We might hope to change the world through better, bigger programs to stop global warming, but global warming will not end unless people become less greedy and less wasteful, gaining a fresh vision of what it means to love our global neighbor.

We give people fish. We teach them to fish. We tear down the walls that have been built up around the fish pond. And we figure out who polluted it.

I wondered if there were other restless people asking the question with me: What if Jesus meant the stuff he said?.

We don't actually have rich and poor together instead we have a family. What does it mean? If you have resources, you hold them with open hands. The mark of the early church was that they began sharing and it said there were no needy persons among them. They ended poverty as they created this new loving community.

I just have a more holistic sense of what it means to be for life, knowing that life does not just begin at conception and end at birth, and that if I am going to discourage abortion, I had better be ready to adopt some babies and care for some mothers.

If the people of God were to transform the world through fascination, these amazing teachings had to work at the center of these peculiar people. Then we can look into the eyes of a centurion and see not a beast but a child of God, and then walk with that child a couple of miles. Look into the eys of tax collectors as they sue you in court; see their poverty and give them your coat. Look in to the eys of the ones who are hardest for you to like, and see the One you love. For God loves good and bad people.

Mother Theresa always said, "Calcuttas are everywhere if only we have eyes to see. Find your Calcutta."

Biological family is too small of a vision. Patriotism is far too myopic. A love for our own relatives and a love for the people of our own country are not bad things, but our love does not stop at the border.

There are congregations on nearly every corner. I'm not sure we need more churches. What we need is a church. I say one church is better than fifty. I have tried to remove the plural form churches from my vocabulary, training myself to think of the church as Christ did, and as the early Christians did. The metaphors for her are always singular - a body, a bride. I heard one gospel preacher say it like this, as he really wound up and broke a sweat: "We've got to unite ourselves as one body. Because Jesus is coming back, and he's coming back for a bride not a harem.

Let's keep refusing to accept the world as it is and insisting on building the world we dream of. Don't let the haters have the last word.

One thing that's clear in the Scriptures is that the nations do not lead people to peace; rather, people lead the nations to peace.

Faith is not accepting the world as it is but insisting on building the world God wants.

The Christian icon is not the Stars and Stripes but a cross-flag, and its emblem is not a donkey, an elephant, or an eagle, but a slaughtered lamb.

Most good things have been said far too many times and just need to be lived.

All around you, people will be tiptoeing through life, just to arrive at death safely. But dear children, do not tiptoe. Run, hop, skip, or dance, just don't tiptoe.

Christianity is at its best when it is peculiar, marginalized, suffering, and it is at its worst when it is popular, credible, triumphal, and powerful.

We do need to be born again, since Jesus said that to a guy named Nicodemus. But if you tell me I have to be born again to enter the Kingdom of God, I can tell you that you have to sell everything you have and give it to the poor, because Jesus said that to one guy, too. But I guess that's why God invented highlighers, so we can highlight the parts we like and ignore the rest.

Rather than finding the devil "out there," we battle the devil within us. The revolution starts inside each of us.

God comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable.

There's something beautiful about that Scripture that says, "Your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams" (Acts 2:17). We need each other. There is power when the old and young dream together.

There is nothing more sickening than talking about poverty over a fancy dinner.

I learned more about God from the tears of homeless mothers than any systematic theology ever taught me.

Prayer is not so much about convincing God to do what we want God to do as it is about convincing ourselves to do what God wants us to do.

Over and over, when I ask God why all of these injustices are allowed to exist in the world, I can feel the Spirit whisper to me, You tell me why we allow this to happen. You are my body, my hands, my feet.

Only Jesus would be crazy enough to suggest that if you want to become the greatest, you should become the least. Only Jesus would declare God's blessing on the poor rather than on the rich and would insist that it's not enough to just love your friends. I just began to wonder if anybody still believed Jesus meant those things he said.

There are some things to die for but none to kill for.

Philadelphia caught my attention in 1995 when a group of homeless families were living in an abandoned cathedral. Even from the beginning they connected theology with what they were doing. They put a banner on the front of the cathedral that said, "How can we worship a homeless man on Sunday and ignore one on Monday."