“You plant the gospel. You don’t plant churches.”

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.

Whether [new Protestant church movements] place their emphasis on new worship styles.

The appetite for adventure and risk is not exclusive to young Christians. In face.

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.

Leave the matter of religion to the family altar, the church, and the private school, supported entirely by private contributions. Keep the church and state forever separate.

Declare Church and State forever separate and distinct, but each free within their proper spheres, and that all church property shall bear its own proportion of taxation.

Whether I’m running on the beach without my shirt or whether I’m going out with my kids or going to church or going out to dinner.

I never weary of great churches. It is my favorite kind of mountain scenery.

Preachers at black churches are the last people left in the English-speaking world who know the schemes and tropes of classical rhetoric: parallelism, antithesis, epistrophe, synecdoche, metonymy, periphrasis, litotes – the whole bag of tricks.

That is why prayer is so exhausting and so vital. If we believed it, the prayer meeting would be as full as the church.

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

Time is visible in all places. Clock towers, wristwatches, church bells divide years into months, months into days, days into hours, hours into seconds, each increment of time marching after the other in perfect succession.