Quotes from Jennifer Hatmaker

The starving, the unwanted old and unborn, the criminal, those of wrong color, ideology, sex, nation, class—whatever category renders a person least in our minds—bear the face of Jesus.

It is not your responsibility to explain what God is doing with your life. He has not provided enough information to figure it out. Instead, you are asked to turn loose and let God be God. Therein lies the secret to the "peace that transcends understanding.

Do we really need to be fed more of the Word, or are we simply undernourished from an absence of living the Word? Maybe we love God, but are we loving others? If our faith is about us, then we are not just hungry—our spirits are starving.

My people are crumbling and dying and starving, and you're blessing blessed people and serving the saved.

People in America are not ignorant of Christianity. They've heard the message, seen our churches on every corner, they flick by our Christian TV shows, they see our fish symbols on the backs of our cars. They've seen so much of pop Christian culture that they have a programmed response to us: Ignore, ignore, ignore. What's needed is a change of parameters—something that will alter their emotional response.

If people around me aren't moved by my Christ or my church, then I must be doing a miserable job of representing them both.

We cannot think our way into a new kind of living. We must live our way into a new kind of thinking.

However, if you're navigating the tension between your Bible and your life, or Jesus' ancient ideas and the modern wayward church, or God's kingdom on earth and reality, then welcome. Sometimes it's better to wade through murky waters with a fellow explorer than with an authority. Questions can still be investigated with another learner instead of with one who has only answers.

Never once did Jesus charge them with something they did wrong. His entire indictment was on what they didn't do right. It was a sin of neglect, a crime of omission. And it went far beyond ignoring poverty. Jesus explained that when we ignore the least, we ignore Him.

Our only hope is to follow the example of Jesus and get back out there, winning people over with ridiculous love

It's not magic; it's hard work by vested people who share a vision for God's kingdom in their city. An influential church is nothing more than a bunch of believers who get in the game and live on mission.

If the kingdom of God belongs to the poor, the bottom dwellers, then rich American Christians are going to have the hardest time finding it.

There is no time limit, no statute of limitations. Sharing our lives with dear people to win them to Jesus is the substance of Christianity, the delightful work we've been commissioned to.

This is the mission we are all called to as believers, the noble task of the church. It's not enough to be theologically brilliant without the heart of a missionary. It's sometimes intangible work planted in the messy soil of relationships instead of the cleaner territory of theology.

Serving people is not heaven's requirement, only a response to heaven's mercy.

What makes the gospel good news isn't the concept, but the real-life person who has been changed by it.[90]

The kingdom advances in our small neighborhoods and small acts of love and small moments of faithfulness and small feats of courage. It is not encapsulated in programs and top-down structures but activated through the body of Christ daring to be faithful everywhere we've been planted.

Hey, here's something crazy: In the Word, poverty, widows, hunger—these are not metaphors. There are billions of lambs that literally need to be fed. With food.

If we took Jesus' famous teachings away and just focused on the way He lived, He would still be radical.

Jesus didn't, and we shouldn't. He doesn't need us to stick up for him; he needs us to represent him, to be like him, to look like him and to talk like him, to be with people that he would be with, and to take the side of the "ignorant" instead of those in the "know."[91]

In all our efforts, if we are not about people, our labors aren't really about Jesus but about us.

path of descent becomes our own liberation. We are freed from the exhausting stance of defense. We are no longer compelled to be right and are thus relieved from the burden of maintaining some reputation. We are released from the idols of greed, control, and status. The pressure to protect the house of cards is alleviated when we take the lowest place.

It's about building bridges with those who won't come to us on Sunday, not as a project but because Jesus loves them and told us to. It's a dangerous journey that requires honesty and vulnerability.

Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the church's prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Oh, priceless scholarship, what would we do without you? Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God. Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament.