“There’s nothing like the local church when it’s working right. Its beauty is indescribable. Its power is breathtaking. Its potential is unlimited. No other organization on earth is like the church. Nothing even comes close.”

Our conduct will never change God’s character.

You can never underestimate the amount of energy and frequency you must give to vision casting. You can never underestimate it.

I’m praying to the God who has always been faithful to me, who has never let me down no matter how frightened I was or how difficult the situation looked.

He [God] wants us to talk to him as to a friend or father – authentically, reverently, personally, earnestly.

And when enough churches are thriving, you can affect a region, a country, and eventually the entire world with the positive, life-changing power of Jesus Christ and the redeeming and restoring work of his people.

Most unmarried people have no idea what it takes to make a marriage work; they grossly underestimate the price people have to pay to build long-term, mutually satisfying relationships.

If you’re a serious minded leader, you will read. You will read all you can. You will read when you feel like it, and you will read when you don’t.

Nothing on earth has greater potential to change lives and carry out His kingdom work in your community, than your local church.

Our minds, like the needle in that compass, can focus on a variety of subjects throughout the day. But in the end, when they’re left alone to settle, they’ll focus on the objects of our greatest affection.

Don’t steamroll your way into a conversation before establishing any relational credibility.

Many leadership problems are driven by low self-awareness.

Leadership grit begets grit. Lead by example.

We live in a world that is crying out for better leadership.

People won’t give their best unless their leader challenges them to do so.

And they fail to understand that the only people with the strength to pay that price are those who have plumbed the depths of their relationship with God, and have dealt with their own brokenness.

Nothing that matters in this world happens unless leaders lead it.

My objection to the church isn’t that the preachers are cruel, hypocritical, actually wicked, though some of them are that, too .

Upon this theology he rarely pondered. The kernel of his practical religion was that it was respectable, and beneficial to one’s business, to be seen going to services; that the church kept the Worst Elements from being still worse.

The doors of churches, hotels, concert halls and reading rooms are alike closed against the Negro as a man, but every place is open to him as a servant.

Sailors ought never to go to church. They ought to go to hell, where it is much more comfortable.

The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe with blood for centuries.

About Jesus Christ and the Church, I simply know they’re just one thing, and we shouldn’t complicate the matter.

When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know, the end result is tyranny and oppression no matter how holy the motives.

In no instance have… the churches been guardians of the liberties of the people.