“Interestingly, it’s as though the gospel story of Jesus is the archetypal heroic journey.”

The safety-obsessed church lacks the inner dynamic to foster profound missional impact in our time.

It’s not so much that the church has a mission, it’s that the mission of God has a church.

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

If we are going to make the change from community to communitas, and not just end up with an unsustainable adrenaline-junkie culture.

But the standard churchy spirituality doesn’t require any real action, courage, or sacrifice from its attendees.

If we could be freed from our aversion to loss, our whole outlook on risk would change.

To obstruct this is to block God’s purposes in and through his people.

Currently, young Christians reach adulthood bored with church experience, and with little or no sense of their calling as missionaries.

Heroes are important not only because they symbolize what we believe to be important.

There’s no such religious force in the West as powerful as consumerism.

But because they also convey universal truths about personal self-discovery and self-transcendence, one’s role in society, and the relation between the two.

And if they begin with this mistaken belief about their position in Western society, all their church planting.

Every disciple is to be an agent of the kingdom of God.

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

Whether we like it or not, we are all on a journey, a Quest if you will, every day of our lives, and the path we must take is full of perils, and our destiny can never be predicted in advance.

The surface of our consciousness; film, television, literature, sports, and travel are in a sense vicarious adventures.