Quotes from Brian D. McLaren

It's not about the church meeting your needs; it's about joining the mission of God's people to meet the world's needs.

That in itself is an act of peacemaking, because we're seeking to align our wills with God's will, our dreams with God's dream.

The cross is almost a distraction and false advertisement for God.

Scripture is something God had 'let be,' and so it is at once God's creation and the creation of the dozens of people and communities and cultures who produced it.

Ultimately, I hope Jesus will save Buddhism, Islam and every other religion, including the Christian religion, which often seems to need saving about as much as any other religion does.

Through its appropriation of "texts of terror" and especially through the application of those texts to the Jews, the Christian religion created the conditions for the oppression of Palestinians.

I love writers who are insightful enough to be cynical but choose not to be.

People have no idea how strong a pull sex, money, and power have on them until they try to resist their pull.

In the previous few minutes, I had seen the most beautiful thing that eyes can see: the glory of God shining in the radiance of creation. I had heard the most beautiful thing that ears can hear: friends telling friends that they love one another. And I had felt the most beautiful thing that any heart can ever feel: the love of God and the love of others.

It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.

If you don't want to worship a guy you can beat up, then I might humbly suggest you reconsider Caesar and the Greco-Roman narrative. It sounds like 'Christ and him crucified' is not for you. At least not yet.

The cross calls humanity to stop trying to make God's kingdom happen through coercion and force, which are always self-defeating in the end, and instead, to welcome it through self-sacrifice and vulnerability.

That is what mature faith requires — not pride over how much one sees and understands, but humility, the feeling that one is still a child, certain of so little, still so dependent on God and others, with so much still to learn — including so much more to learn about humility.

But in the end you cannot serve two masters, Theos and Elohim, the god of the Greco-Roman philosophers and Caesars and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the violent god of profit proclaimed by the empire and the compassionate God of justice proclaimed by the prophets. You can try to hybridize them and compromise them for centuries, but like oil and water they eventually separate and prove incompatible. They refuse to alloy. They produce irreconcilable narratives and create different worlds.

Too often we put the gospel of Jesus through the strainer of consumerist-capitalism and retain only the thin broth that this modern-day Caesar lets pass through.

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.

The romance of Creator and creation is far more wonderful and profound than anyone can ever capture in words.

We must not define Jesus and his kingdom by fitting them within conventional understandings of kings and kingdoms. Rather, we must judge and deconstruct those conventional definitions in light of Jesus and his example.

It turns out that the famous dictum, associated with Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov, can run both ways: yes, without God everything is theoretically permissible... but believers can find ways to use God to justify just about anything as well.

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.

and somehow, the more we would face our own demons of pride, greed, and lust, the more gentle and kind we would become toward others, the less judgmental, the less harsh, the more empathetic, because we realize as never before that everyone is pitched in an invisible inner battle, and the battle isn't easy for anyone.

I guess you could say that the Bible is a book that doesn't try to tell you what to think. Instead, it tries to teach you how to think. It stretches your thinking; it challenges you to think bigger and harder than you ever have.

To everyone, Jesus issues an invitation to abandon the story they will lose themselves in, and instead, to enter the story they will find themselves in.

Why is it that the choice among churches always seems to be the choice between intelligence on ice and ignorance on fire? —as quoted by Diana Butler Bass1