Ed Stetzer Quotes
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Maybe the first thing we need to pray about is for God to help us see the huge field of people waiting to be harvested and to give us an incredible love for those people.
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Because God is in control and will redeem all things, I can be calm, bold, and gracious as I share the gospel.
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To engage people in culture we must remember that holiness is separation from sin, not separation from sinners.
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We have to assess: Are we making disciples along the way as we draw people to our churches?
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God is not the source of any form of worship that does not exalt and lift up the name of Jesus!
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The church is the chief place for spiritual edification and growth (Acts 20:32; Eph. 4:11-16; 2 Tim. 3:16-17; 1 Pet. 2:1-2; 2 Pet. 3:18).
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You can’t hate people and engage them with the gospel at the same time. You can’t war with people and show the love of Jesus. You can’t be both outraged and on mission.
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Almost all comeback churches identified their mood of worship as celebrative and orderly (96% and 95%, respectively) with a significant emphasis on being informal and contemporary (81% and 69%, respectively).
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If the disease is sin, the remedy is found at the Cross.
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Don't let your church be a cul-de-sac on the Great Commission highway.
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Growth happens in community because the Bible places community as a critical step of obedience for the Christ follower. So the Christ follower outside of community is living in disobedience.
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You can preach heresy at a lot of churches, and people will not object. Leaders can lead double lives, and people will let it be. But, change the order of service, and it’s time for a fight.
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In his book Vision America, Aubrey Malphurs asserted that much of the perceived church growth in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s was actually due primarily to the redistribution of believers, not genuine church growth. He stated, “The problems of the church in the 1980s carry over into the 1990s. The church as a whole continues to experience decline and the unchurched increase."
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God is able to see beforehand all that happens in our lives and in the world, and He is able to establish a plan of how it can be used for His purpose and His glory. We are assured, “All the nations You have made will come and bow down before You, Lord, and will honor Your name” (Ps. 86:9).
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Jesus did not say “make converts” or “teach them to pray a particular prayer.” Rather, this is about people who are born again through the power of the Savior who died and rose again. You and I are to participate in the work of multiplying the number of surrendered learners and followers of Christ. We are to lead people into the kingdom by way of the Cross.
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We believe the church’s purpose is to glorify God, not to make people happy. The church does not exist for believers or unbelievers; it exists for God’s glory, for the equipping of believers, and the church is God’s missionary in the world.
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If we demand things in worship that can't be in every culture, then we're demanding cultural preferences, not biblical.
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If you're regularly willing to give a critique, but not willing to take one, you're not a leader, you're a cynic.
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Contrary to Western evangelicalism’s obsession with the individual, discipleship is and always was a group project. No one in the New Testament followed independent of other followers.
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If Southern Baptist churches sent just 1 percent of their members to reach the nations and peoples of the world, instead of five thousand there would be 160,000 missionaries (according to our reported membership of sixteen million in 2009). The support should not be a problem—not financially, logistically, or in human resources. Could not 99 percent of the church adequately support the 1 percent sent to the nations to fulfill the mission of God?
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The passion of the church and every follower of Christ should be that all peoples have an opportunity to hear, understand, and respond to the gospel.
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When the church protects the powerful at the expense of the victim, we have compromised. And in the end, these compromises add up and convince the world that the church is not a community for the broken in search of healing but just another human institution that puts expediency above righteousness and justice.
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When Jesus said, “As the Father has sent Me, I also send you” (John 20:21), the mandate was not for a select group of cross-cultural missionaries. It was a commission to you, to me, and to our churches. We have a sender (Jesus), a message (the gospel), and a people to whom we are sent (those in our culture). It is worth the effort to go beyond personal preferences and attractional methods to proclaim the gospel in our church services and outside the walls.
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The idea that spiritual growth begins with discomfort is a fact many church members and church leaders have been unwilling or unable to embrace.