“Put simply, the church finds itself in a post-Christendom era, and it had better do some serious reflection or face increasing decline and eventual irrelevance.”

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.

This submission to the threshold of a cross is at the very root of our following Jesus; it changes the game completely.

All their reproduction will simply mirror this misapprehension.

Real leaders ask hard questions and knock people out of their comfort zones and then manage the resulting distress.

I found out the hard way that if we don’t disciple people, the culture sure will.

It not only abandons its biblical mandate, it is rendered missionally ineffective.

Go among the people. Don’t assume you know what church looks like.

Truth is narrow, but grace is wide.

Our point isn’t to make an examination of popular film but to illustrate that the yearning for a heroic adventure lies just beneath.

At some point preoccupation with safety can get in the way of living full lives.

There’s no such thing as an unsent Christian. You have already been SENT.

As someone who worked hard for a Labour victory in the 90s, do I regret it? Not really. It was bound to happen. And it’ll happen with the next government, and the one after it. Because all governments serve us. They serve the filth.

It is fortunate, I think, that nature is not bounded by human reason and by laboratory work and experimentation, for by the laws of pure reason and by microscopic investigation, it might easily have been proved, long before this, that children could not be born.

The beautiful vagabonds, endowed with every grace, masters of all climes, and knowing no bounds.

You are bound to want a player at some stage who is represented by this guy and you will have to try to work around the personality of the agent.

Paleontologists have tried to turn Archaeopteryx into an earth-bound, feathered dinosaur.

It was a community like any other, bound by ties deeper than most, and people here went to their deaths as people did anywhere: with great reluctance, dragging the messy jumble of their lives behind them.

If you see certainty in that which is uncertain, you are bound to suffer

People can’t be just tied together. They have to connect. Otherwise, they’ll find themselves bound hand and foot.