Ed Stetzer Quotes
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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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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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Christians need to grasp the hypocrisy of engaging online in a way that would be wholly intolerable if we were face-to-face with others.
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Change requires decision making, and decision making requires action. Most churches don't make turnarounds because they never get to the action. Discussion only begets more discussion. Together, and led by the pastor, the church must decide on a course of action.
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Your denomination is not defined by a style. So don’t let style become a point of contention.
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Therefore, it is vital for churches to provide a clear target explaining the attitudes and behaviors of a disciple; you must have a clear definition of disciple.
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If your church loves the way you do church more than your children, it loves the wrong thing.
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I mean, he himself defined his ministry as being focused on the poor, the captive, the blind, the oppressed (Luke 4:18). So, therefore, we join him on mission not only when we proclaim his saving gospel but when we confront injustice, when we touch human need, when we seek to bring about changes that transform this world to look more like it will be when Jesus returns.
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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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Everything created in the world should be seen in the context of existing for God's glory.
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Americans now believe that having equal rights in a political system also means that each person’s opinion about anything must be accepted as equal to anyone else’s.
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Global evangelism does not take place in a demilitarized zone but on the battleground of spiritual warfare. Satan, in vengeance and jealousy for that which belongs to God, is deceiving the nations and holding them in bondage to a lie.
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The cultural distance between our churches and communities continues to widen, making it harder and harder to communicate the gospel. Being missional means moving intentionally beyond our church preferences, making missional decisions rather than preferential decisions. Today, people, churches, and denominations desperately need to apply the lens of intentional missiology to North America, not just international fields. The most effective comeback churches will be those that intentionally think like missionaries in their context.
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Jesus did not send us to declare the gospel only where people are responsive or where our witness is welcome. He did not expect us to be on mission to disciple peoples only where there is no danger or risk involved. He was unequivocal in His mandate to disciple the nations (peoples)—all of them!
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God does not want us distracted. He does not want our loyalties to be divided. Our allegiances are to be His alone. He loves us that intensely.
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If Satan can get us to interpret our mission task as populating heaven with as many people as possible, we will resort to going only to those places of receptivity and harvest and neglect doing what is needed to reach the unreached and penetrate the dominions of darkness with the light of the gospel.
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But too many Christians are content in their own salvation and allow an ethnocentric provincialism to dismiss the imperative of God’s mission to the nations.
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Teaching people to become like Jesus, outside of the power of Jesus, dishonors Jesus.
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Together we are called to ask, What does it mean to be followers of Christ in our local community? In what ways do our values and beliefs shape how we live out the gospel and its implications in our cultural context? How can we best communicate the hope and truth in Jesus’ Kingdom to our friends, neighbors, coworkers, and family?
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A mature Christian recognizes that correcting every wrong on the Internet would take more hours than a full-time job. If you snap every time your great-aunt’s friend’s cousin thrice-removed makes a snarky comment about “all the contradictions in the Bible,” it will consume you and your joy.
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Being missional means moving intentionally beyond our church preferences, making missional decisions rather than preferential decisions.
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Just as the true fruit of an apple tree is not an apple, but another tree; the true fruit of a small group is not a new Christian, but another group; the true fruit of a church is not a new group, but a new church; the true fruit of a leader is not a follower, but a new leader; the true fruit of an evangelist is not a convert, but new evangelists. Whenever this principle is understood and applied, the results are dramatic.
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I don't think you can love Jesus without loving His wife.
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A disciple who grows spiritually will have a growing desire to be a witness and reach out to those who are lost.