“A missional church is a church that must live the dialectic. It must stay in the journey.”

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.

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.

That the Jews were unholy was a belief so ingrained by the Church [by the 14th century] that the most devout persons were the harshest in their antipathy, none more so than St. Louis.

The Church [in the 14th century] gave ceremony and dignity to lives that had little of either. It was the source of beauty and art to which all had some access and which many helped to create.

This is criterion by which the Church is to be judged, not by the forms of its doctrine or ritual, but by the reality of the reality of the love which it manifests.

The problem is, many of the people in need of saving are in churches, and at least part of what they need saving from is the idea that God sees the world the same way they do.

The only thing God is building in this world is his church.

a church ought to express the joy of religion as well as its majesty.

If the church does not identify with the marginalized, it will itself be marginalized. This is God’s poetic justice.

Voluntary self-directed religion was more dangerous to the Church than any number of infidels.