“The church itself is not only a product of that mission but is obligated and destined to extend it by whatever means possible.”

The church of Jesus needs to wake up from the exile of passivity and embrace.

If we can embrace the adventure and risk and equip our churches to lay down their lives and abandon their inherent loss-aversion.

Who knows what innovation, what freshness, what new insights from the Spirit will emerge.

You cannot sell a Christendom approach to a post-Christian world. They are anti-Christian.

The ultimate solution to the problem of spiritual complacency is to create a systematically embedded culture of holy urgency.

But herein lies the rub: Christianity has been on a long-term trend of decline in every Western cultural context that we can identify.

In short, we find the faith of leap.

Christianity is an adventure of the spirit or it is not Christianity.

Expressions of the Holy Spirit’s power, evangelism to seekers, or Bible teaching, these so-called new movements still operate out of the fallacious assumption that the church belongs firmly in the town square, that is, at the heart of Western culture.

Because we believe that somewhere in the nest of paradigms contained in the phrase “missional church” lies nothing less that the future viability of Western Christianity.

Those of us with too much invested in the way things are will never embrace the revolutionary cause required for wholesale change.

We must have a sophisticated process to form people into adventurer-disciples.

Unless the church is equipping believers to embrace the values and vision of the kingdom of God and turn away from the materialism, consumerism, greed, and power of the present age.

Judgments about who belongs in the Hall of Fame are extremely subjective.

There is no doubt that to walk with Jesus means to walk on the wilder side of life.

In missional churches, the baby birds have been pushed out of the nest and are learning to fly for themselves.

My ordination in the Church of God in Christ was at age 9, and I later became a Baptist minister, which I am today.

Do you remember the church across the sands? You stood outside and planned to travel the lands, where the pilgrims go.

I learned more stuff in church than I did in the world.

I was crawling around inside of her. She was a church pianist. My dad was a brilliant singer. I was hearing it.

I did a concert at five years old in the garden of one of the church members, and we raised some money to buy a new piano in our little church.

Theres a lot of churches that hide their dirty laundry under the rug, and I know about that from being in the church 27 years. Oh, yeah.

For me, the Church is the enemy.

People like Clyde McPhatter who came out of the black churches – like Sam Cooke and Aretha Franklin – were all church singers who became great pop singers because gospel singing is very close to the blues.