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

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.

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.

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

In missional churches, the baby birds have been pushed out of the nest and are learning to fly for themselves.

The ones that are running rampant within our churches largely go unaddressed.

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

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

The [book of the bible] Song Of Songs is an amazing erotic love poem that the church has tried very hard not to notice.

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

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

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