A Quote by Francis Chan
Proclaiming the gospel to a lost world cannot be just another activity to add to the church's crowded agenda. It must be central to who we are. It forms our identity.
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Faith in the gospel restructures our motivations, our self-understanding, our identity, and our view of the world. Behavioral compliance to rules without heart-change will be superficial and fleeting… We can only change permanently as we take the gospel more deeply into our understanding and into our hearts. We must feed on the gospel, as it were, digesting it and making it part of ourselves. That is how we grow.
I was examining what religious identity meant in Africa. Along the edge of the Islamic world, what patterns were shaping identity? And the truth is, when I looked at the rise of violent forms of religion, no single identity was prevalent. It's central to note that in Nigeria, that tree is rooted primarily in Christianity. It's not just Islamic militants in the Middle Belt.
Proclaiming the gospel is not an activity in which we periodically and temporarily engage.
The mission proper to the Church is that of proclaiming the Gospel.
Proclaiming the gospel to all mankind is a fundamental part of the mission of the Church.
It is one thing to understand the gospel but is quite another to experience the gospel in such a way that it fundamentally changes us and becomes the source of our identity and security.
There's a little bit of gospel in everything I do. But I don't know if I will ever do a gospel album. There's a big universe out here, and I don't want to just sing to the church. I want to sing to the world and bring them a message of love. I love going to church and singing gospel songs, but right now there's a message that the world needs.
Every Christian has unique opportunities to engage the most pressing social issues of our day by praying, proclaiming the gospel, and participating with God in all that he is doing in the world.
Being the church that Jesus intended means that we must participate in God’s eternal purposes for his world. Renewal means more than reinventing ourselves; it means rediscovering the primal power of the Spirit and the gospel already present in the life of the church—reconnecting with this purpose and recovering the forgotten ways. This purpose and potential have always been there, but individuals and communities have largely lost touch with them.
I played a million different sports when I was growing up. I started when I was probably five or six, and we'd just go from activity to activity to activity. I think, finally, my parents just realized that we were missing something in our lives. They realized that it was time for us as a family to start going to church.
Jesus is the prime exemplar of life in God's presence. He lived out of an awareness of the identity God had given him, not the identity the world wanted to give him; he led an active, ongoing prayer life; he took time apart from the world to be with his Father; he made his Father's agenda his agenda; he made his Father's love for people evident in tangible ways; and so on. These are all characteristics that we should emulate in our lives.
We are Christians because we find our identity, life, and purpose in Christ. We are evangelical because we believe the gospel and esteem it as the great central truth of God's revelation to men.
In Tar Baby, the classic concept of the individual with a solid, coherent identity is eschewed for a model of identity which sees the individual as a kaleidoscope of heterogeneous impulses and desires, constructed from multiple forms of interaction with the world as a play of difference that cannot be completely comprehended.
If a man has a sense of identity that does not depend on being shored up by someone else, it cannot be eroded by someone else. If a woman has a sense of identity that does not depend on finding that identity in someone else, she cannot lose her identity in someone else. And so we return to the central fact: it is necessary to be.
The borderlanders are people who are kind of caught in the middle. They think there must be another world out there. There probably is a God, but they are either turned off by the church or wounded by the church or wary of the church for whatever reason.
Those who are marginal in the world are central in the Church, and that is how it is supposed to be! Thus we are called as members of the Church to keep going to the margins of our society. The homeless, the starving, parentless children, people with AIDS, our emotionally disturbed brothers and sisters - they require our first attention.
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