“Think of mission like the paddles of a defibrillator applied to the chest of a dying church.”

The kingdom of God is a crash-bang opera: the king is dramatic, demanding, and unavoidable.

The mission of God flows directly through every believer and every community of faith that adheres to Jesus.

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.

When the church is in mission, it is the true church.

Mission is the practical demonstration, whether by speech or by action, of the glorious lordship of Jesus.

Many church folk, in their self-conscious attempt to be overtly morally upright, emit all the wrong signals, thus messing with people’s perception of the gospel.

The missional church is not a new trend or the latest new technique for reaching postmodern people.

The quest for heroic adventure then is a quest for the gospel, although it might not be seen that way by everyone.

In a world that demands service we position ourselves as servants.

If a can opener no longer has the capacity to open cans, what is it?

We will have to take risks, to chance failure, to be willing to walk away from the familiar paths that have brought us to this point.

Being the church that Jesus intended means that we must participate in God’s eternal purposes for his world.

A retreatist spirituality is not a spirituality that can, or will, transform the world in Jesus’s name.

Our preferences for stability and security blind us to the opportunities for adventure when they present themselves.

Building community for its own sake is like attending a cancer support group without having cancer.

We have to assume now that all mission is cross-cultural.

In Germany, an effort one thousandth the scale of the American was applied to the problem of producing atomic energy that would drive engines.

If you listen to that song and knew anything about me, you’d say, “Oh yeah, he wrote that about his daughter,” but I try not to write them that they are so specific that they wouldn’t apply to anybody that has a child.

Basically what’s happening is I’m pleading guilty to possessing and having plants and not guilty to the charges of supply.

To be most effective, flattery is always best applied with a trowel.

Instructions are supposed to translate the law into lay terms that the jury can apply to the facts as they determine them.

My own childhood showed me that when it comes to loving your kids, concepts like that don’t apply.

The Fourth Amendment doesn’t apply to corporations.

The institutions that we’ve built up over the years to protect our individual privacy rights from the government don’t apply to the private sector.