Quotes from Brian D. McLaren

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.

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.

when wealth is your god, weapons are your sacrament, and your own children are your sacrifice—

Acknowledging how little we know is, I think, at the core of mature faith. What we boast of as great faith may merely be a boatload of indoctrination and overconfidence.

Comfort and power can become great enemies of true spirituality, which explains why we often say that the prophets come not only to comfort the afflicted, but also to afflict the comfortable.

These special holidays give rise to various liturgical calendars that suggest we should mark our days not only with the cycles of the moon and seasons, but also with occasions to tell our children the stories of our faith community's past so that this past will have a future, and so that our ancient way and its practices will be rediscovered and renewed every year.

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.

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.

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.

Through study we welcome the light of God into our minds.

There is a difference — subtle but very significant — between having faith in my faith (i.e., faith in my intellectual concepts about God — another way of saying "leaning on my own understanding") and having faith in God. There is a corresponding difference between doubting my faith and doubting God.

Jesus faithfully and courageously represented the nonviolent and loving heart of God. Jesus and his way of nonviolent, self-giving love, the text suggests, will earn the trust of all humanity. We will ultimately migrate, in other words, toward the way of Jesus.

God is not the tribal deity of one group of "chosen" people. God is not for us and against all others. God is for us and for them, too. God loves everyone everywhere, no exceptions.

stay Christian while rejecting supremacy and embracing solidarity instead.

Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving. – Frederick Buechner

Our interpretations reveal less about God or the Bible than they do about ourselves. They reveal what we want to defend, what we want to attack, what we want to ignore, what we're unwilling to question.

All too often, the Christian industrial project reminds me less of a religion and more of the tobacco, fossil fuel, and weapons industries: willing to harm millions to keep their business going.3

Because if anything is clear in the aftermath of the Reformation, it has to be this: we human beings can interpret the Bible to say and mean an awful lot of different things. We can very easily confuse "The Bible says" with "I say the Bible says," which we can then equate with "God says.

He creates a new kind of hero: not warriors, corporate executives, or politicians, but brave and determined activists for preemptive peace, willing to suffer with Him in the prophetic tradition of justice.

Can you imagine Jesus saying, "Believe that I am the only way. Why? Because I said so, that's why! And if you don't believe, then you're going straight to hell!" But isn't that how we present him through our slogans?

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.

Surely many courageous Christians spoke out against the savagery of their so-called civilized fellow Christians? And surely many compassionate Christians spoke out for the humanity of the so-called savages? Sadly, very, very few actually did, notable among them a Dominican friar, Bartolomé de las Casas. His

Oddly, I've never heard of a church or denomination that asked people to affirm a doctrinal statement like this: The purpose of Scripture is to equip God's people for good works. Shouldn't a simple statement like this be far more important than statements with words foreign to the Bible's vocabulary about itself (inerrant, authoritative, literal, revelatory, objective, absolute, propositional, etc.)?

what today throws at you will force you to become better or bitter for tomorrow; it will push you toward breakdown or breakthrough...