Quotes from Ed Stetzer

Culturally appropriate evangelism answers the actual questions being asked by a given culture rather than those questions the church believes the culture should ask.

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.

If the disease is sin, the remedy is found at the Cross.

Too often we attempt to teach people to swim in a classroom." If you have ever taken swimming lessons, you immediately get the importance of getting in the water and practicing under the watchful eye of a swimming rabbi. Jesus invited the original twelve to go swimming with Him.

The church stands no hope of engaging the age of outrage unless we root out the lie that the solution to sin lies anywhere outside of the gospel of Jesus Christ. He is "the true God and eternal life" (1 John 5:20). Salvation is not coming on Air Force One. And Jesus will not come riding on a donkey or an elephant. Those who fail to see such things have been lost to the idolatry of the moment.

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.

God does not use extraordinary striving. He uses extraordinary availability to reach the world with the message of his Kingdom.

We celebrate those comebacks because they inspire us to believe that seemingly impossible things really are possible.

you cannot "save" a church without focusing on the important things that make it a church—scriptural authority, biblical leadership, teaching and preaching, ordinances, covenant community, and mission.

The passion of the church and every follower of Christ should be that all peoples have an opportunity to hear, understand, and respond to the gospel.

Community is essential when it comes to successfully living out the Christian walk in a day-to-day context. So the math is simple: More community = More disciples Understanding the nature of groups helps you

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.

This leads us to an important spiritual principle for growth: comeback leaders know that our Lord considers commitment to Him and His desires an indispensable ingredient to growing spiritually and numerically.

become part of culture, proclaim the Good News, be the presence of Christ, and contextualize biblical life and church for that culture—they are missional churches.

Rooting out bad habits is not enough. If we merely attack what is wrong, we create a vacuum that will inevitably be filled by some new behavior or addiction that does not shape our worldview according to the gospel. The solution, I believe, is discipleship, the process of becoming more like Christ.

Belief followed by strategy and culture moves people to community.

In his work The Book of Church Growth, Thom Rainer explained, "Prayer is the power behind the principles. There simply is no more important principle in church growth than prayer. The prayers of the early church unleashed the power of God to add thousands to the church. It happened then. It is happening in some churches today. And it can happen in your church."13

Philip Nation is right when he says the foundational truth of discipleship is this: "Love is the central discipline of the Christian life. Everything else will flow from that as the centerpiece of spiritual formation.

We don't own mission, and it is not ours to define.

God is not the source of any form of worship that does not exalt and lift up the name of Jesus!

When we live out a gospel-driven Christian worldview, the gospel is not just something we grasp at conversion; it is something that influences how we see and respond to the world in all areas of our lives. When Christians participate in an unhelpful way in this age of outrage, this transformation has not happened; instead, they have allowed their worldview to become infected.

The answer for Christians in the age of outrage is not some silver-bullet study that will give a new piece of knowledge. Rather, it begins with looking at our habits, the things that we love every day through our choices and actions.

Lyle Schaller asserted, "The final thing leaders will need is courage … the willingness to tell the truth, to say what is not politely or politically acceptable. … The most common expression of the courage to tell the truth is to say, 'It ain't workin'.'"6

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!