Top 215 Quotes & Sayings by Shane Claiborne - Page 3

The true atheist is the one who refuses to see God's image in the face of their neighbour.

It is the church's job, as Dr. [Martin Luther] King says, to be the conscience of the state, not the chaplain of the state.

God doesn't want to change the world without you.

Little movements of communities of ordinary radicals are committed to doing small things with great love.

We need good laws, but no law can change a human heart - only God can do that.

Tony Campolo and I both speak a lot, and we began to notice that there were some crowds of old folks that desperately needed some youthful energy, and there were other crowds of young folks that desperately needed some aged wisdom.

God's people are not to accumulate stuff for tomorrow but to share indiscriminately with the scandalous and holy confidence that God will provide for tomorrow. Then we need not stockpile stuff in barns or a 401(k), especially when there is someone in need.

In closing, to those who have closed the door on religion - I was recently asked by a non-Christian friend if I thought he was going to hell. I said, 'I hope not. It will be hard to enjoy heaven without you.' If those of us who believe in God do not believe God's grace is big enough to save the whole world... well, we should at least pray that it is.

The question becomes not just how to accumulate more, but how to covet less.

The best critique of what is wrong is the practice of something better. So let's stop complaining about the church we've experienced and work on becoming the church we dream of.

The more I travel, the more I see how important it is to each population to see that their history of the good and the bad is remembered by others.

There is an innocence or purity that we see in renewals and in the Mennonite church and a new an invigorated civil rights movement.

In fact, the Gospel shows us change comes from the bottom rather than the top, from an old rugged cross rather than a gold royal throne.

We say it is idealistic to think we can continue to live the way we live - with 5% of the world using half the world's resources, with $20,000 a second being spent on war.

When it comes to the big issues like immigration, everyone has a role. The government has a role. The church has a role. Every Christian has a role.

When we truly discover how to love our neighbor as our self, Capitalism will not be possible and Marxism will not be necessary.

When I think of some of the great renewals in the church I think of folks like St. Francis and Clare of Assisi who, through their lifestyle, were challenging the patterns of materialism and militarism and it affected the Christianity of their age.

We know the Church wasn't born 200 years ago. It's encouraging to see some of the post-denominational churches actually wanting to reconnect with the story and the prayer life of the larger Church.

There are some Christians who totally disengage from politics and set their minds on heaven so much that their faith is so heavenly minded that it is no earthly good.

I think in the end, God's justice is redemptive, it's restorative, it's about giving life, not taking life.

Whenever folks say radical Christianity is "a phase" of youth, I tell them they need to meet our 80-year-old nun or my friend Tony Campolo.

There is a certain power when old and young come together - we can do more together than we can on our own.

There's an understanding of common prayer that I think we're seeing grow, more and more. When I travel, I hear from people who are deeply touched that our common prayer takes time to remember some of the terrible tragedies that have happened around the world.

When we put too much hope in a candidate or a party we set ourselves up for disappointment. When I see a poster with [Barak] Obama's image with the word "hope" under it, something in me cringes - our hope is built on nothing less than Jesus' blood and righteousness, the old hymn goes, all other ground is sinking sand.

Somehow Jesus's reputation has survived all the embarrassing things that Christians have done in his name.

The more recent effort to encourage everyone to pray in common involves so many people.

God can use anything, and anyone - even a king or a president, even a tax collector or a businessman, a priest or a prostitute, a Republican or a Democrat.

It is the church's responsibility, the government's responsibility, and the personal responsibility of every one of us to love.

To be nonpartisan doesn't mean we're nonpolitical.

Someday war and poverty will be crazy and we will wonder how the world allowed such things to exist.

Christians pretty much live like everybody else, they just sprinkle a little Jesus in along the way.

We can ignore suffering no matter where we live. There are people who live a few miles from me who never see much poverty or the injustices that live on our doorstep.

We have a relational problem with those who are suffering or who are different from us. All of us are most comfortable around people who are like us culturally and economically.

Karl Barth said it well: "We have to read the Bible in one hand... and the newspaper in the other." Our faith should not cause us to escape this world but to engage it.

There are financial bankruptcies in many parts of the church. No question about that. But we see the possibility of reimagining and revitalizing the church.

We're not church planters. We are community planters and, as we work in our communities, we join local churches.

[People] need to find words that can reconnect them with each other. That is the gift of good liturgy, yeah. We're not talking about fluffy stuff. We're talking about real life for people around the world. Our prayers should be said like the daily breath that gives us life.

I do believe that the Church is God's primary instrument for ushering in the Kingdom (God's dream) on earth as it is in heaven, but God is not limited to use only the Church, or only Christians for that matter.

Look through the prayer books. You'll see lots of dates. You'll see names of Native Americans remembered. This was an open-sourcing project among so many people.

The Catholic understanding has been that the death penalty has been become, like, outdated because in industrialized countries. We have other ways of protecting societies from dangerous people without killing them. And in fact, it's important to remember that much of the world has done away with the death penalty.

A lot of the world looks to the United States, whether we like it or not.

It's always a good idea to have a nun next to you when you get arrested!

Jesus still has a really great reputation and the Spirit is still moving. I've got a lot of hope for a generation that takes Jesus seriously, once again.

I believe you know Jesus said "a doctor doesn't come to the healthy, but the sick, and it's not the righteous but the sinners that I've come for," so I think that that's the scandal of God's love and grace that no one is beyond redemption, and we can see that all through scripture, you know.

The problem is that the Chicken-Soup-for-the-Soul stuff may feel good, but none of that typical stuff helps when somebody in your neighborhood is murdered.

Faith is being idealistic, because we have made an idol out of the status quo.

Our churches should attract the people Jesus attracted and frustrate the people Jesus frustrated.

Too often we just do what makes sense to us and ask God to bless it.

One of the great dangers in political engagement is misplaced hope.

When we were starting our community a bunch of older Benedictine nuns said to us, "If you have any questions or want to pick our brains, please do - we've been doing community for about 1,500 years together so we've learned a few things."

There are people who are dangerous, and evil is real.

There is real value in these local congregations. For me, a lot of it is the value of the sacraments we share. In neighborhoods like ours, the churches provide stability.

The question for me is not are we political, but how are we political? We need to be politically engaged, but peculiar in how we engage.

With the early Christians you couldn't have God as your father unless you have the church as your mother. This isn't accepting the church as a perfect thing.

If every Christian family brought in a child who needed a family we would put the foster care system out of business.

The early Christians felt a deep collision with the empire in which they lived, and with politics as usual. They carelessly crossed party lines and built subversive friendships. And we should do that too.

Love has no limits. Compassion has no party. It is the responsibility of every human being and every institution to end poverty and to interrupt injustice.

This common prayer project has taken years of energy, but we see it not as a way to leave our individual churches, but as a movement we hope to see permeate the larger Church.

Sometimes our tunnel vision is limited to what we see outside our window. Until racial injustice becomes personal then I don't think it moves us in our gut.

In the Bible, God uses brothel owners, pagan kings, murderers and mercenaries as instruments of good; at one point God even speaks to a guy named Balaam through his donkey.