Brian D. McLaren Quotes
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I don’t think we should give up on ritual. I don’t think we should give up on any possible means of experiencing God.
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I am convinced that Jesus didn’t come to start a new religion; he came to proclaim a new kingdom.
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Such a possibility raises a question: if one dares to let one’s traditional and inherited Christian understanding of God be converted under the influence of Jesus, can one still be considered a Christian? Or, conversely, if one refuses to let one’s traditional understanding be converted under the influence of Jesus, can one still be considered a Christian? Be that as it may, growing numbers of us are coming to realize this simple truth: for the world to migrate away from violence, our God must migrate away from violence.
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To be truly good means more than not robbing people . . . To be truly good means more than being righteously religious . . . To be truly good means being a good neighbor. . . . And to be a good neighbor means recognizing that there are ultimately no strangers. . . . Everybody is my neighbor! . . . Everybody is my brother! . . . There are no isolated monads wounded on the other side of the street! . . . We're all connected.
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When any sector of the church stops learning, God simply overflows the structures that are in the way and works outside them with those willing to learn.
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Something deep in our conscience tells us that hostility is part of the problem to be overcome in the world, not the means by which problems will be overcome. Hostility is a symptom of the disease, not part of the cure.
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Songs: What if for the next three hundred years, we sang about love and justice which has been defined by philosopher Cornel West as “what love looks like in public” as much as we’ve sung about sin and forgiveness over the last three hundred years? Imagine if every week God were praised and worshipped above all as the source and epitome of love.
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As I said before, evolution doesn’t bother me. If you tell me that God created the earth “by hand” in six days some thousands of years ago, I am impressed. If you tell me instead that God set a whole cosmos in motion some billions of years ago, a cosmos perfectly calibrated within the narrowest of margins to produce at least one planet where life would be developed through cause-effect chains that were designed into it by a purposeful Designer… I am no less impressed; in fact, I may be even more impressed. The “how” and “when” of it all seem almost inconsequential to me compared to the “what” and “why” which lie beyond cause and effect.
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Trying to stop people from learning, sharing, and loving is a losing game because it means working against God and the plotline of God's universe.
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Politicians compete for the highest offices. Business tycoons scramble for a bigger and bigger piece of the pie. Armies march and scientists study and philosophers philosophise and preachers preach and labourers sweat. But in that silent baby, lying in that humble manger, there pulses more potential power and wisdom and grace and aliveness than all the rest of us can imagine.
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If we speak of an angry God at all, we will speak of a God angry at indifference, angry at apathy, angry at racism and violence, angry at inhumanity, angry at waste, angry at destruction, angry at injustice, angry at hostile religious clannishness. That anger is never against us (or them); it is against what is against us (and them).
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Jesus called disciples so He could send them out as apostles. They were called together to learn so they could be sent out to teach and serve.
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What is the most significant conversation you have every day?” People would respond piously, “Your conversation with God, of course.” “No,” Lewis would reply. “It’s the conversation you have with yourself before you speak to God, because in that conversation with yourself, you decide whether you are going to be honest and authentic with God, or whether you are going to meet God with a false face, a mask, an act, a pretense.
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It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.
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Our relationships with God go through similar phases sometimes. We aren’t comfortable with each other. The conversation doesn’t flow as well. We aren’t sure we can trust as before — or we aren’t sure we can be trusted as before. At those tough times, I have learned that there is a lot to be said for just hanging in there. For keeping on going to church. For saying your prayers. For keeping the communication lines open. For sustaining your relationship on pure, stubborn commitment when all the warm feelings of affection seem gone forever. That kind of willpower, I am learning, is one of the purest forms of faith — a kind of faith you just don’t develop until you are forced to, when your relationship with God seems to have gone bad. Sometimes faith means believing that doubt is just a stage, a rotten mood that will pass, and that in time, by the grace of God, you will get over it, and be old friends again in a new, deeper way.
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My concern is that by making heaven after this life the destination of our way, we are spiritually forming people who run away from fire, disease, and the violence of our world.
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This is a book about getting naked—not physically, but spiritually. It’s about stripping away the symbols and status of public religion—the Sunday-dress version people often call “organized religion.” And it’s about attending to the well-being of the soul clothed only in naked human skin.
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Sometimes, we become so familiar with the primal sacred story of the Bible that we need some fresh takes on it, telling us the same thing in different ways, or giving us some new vantage points to see what was always there, things we'd missed before.
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Learning is not the consequence of teaching or writing, but rather of thinking...so a playful, provocative, unclear but stimulating book could actually be more worth your money than a serious, clear book that tells you what to think but doesn't make you think.
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But before Christianity was a rich and powerful religion, before it was associated with buildings, budgets, crusades, colonialism, or televangelism, it began as a revolutionary nonviolent movement promoting a new kind of aliveness on the margins of society.
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We’re seeking — imperfectly at every turn, no doubt — an incarnational theology, a theology that brings radical good news of great joy for all the people, good news that God loves the world and didn’t send Jesus to condemn it but to save it, good news that God’s wrath is not merely punitive but restorative, good news that the fire of God’s holiness is not bent on eternal torment but always works to purify and refine, good news that where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more.
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We might say that whatever our God is like, whether or not our God exists, our God is still powerful because our image of God transforms us. Like an image in a mirror, our God concept reflects back to us the image of what we aspire to become. Powerful and vengeful? Kind and merciful? Dominating and in control? Relational and respectful? Like God, like believer, we might say. Our image of God, our image of ourselves, and our processes of individual and cultural development move together as in a dance.
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The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better.
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Our choice, it seems, is whether we will let our past and present sufferings be sufficient to soften and break us, or whether we will resist and harden ourselves so even more suffering is required.