“It just seems to me that the church is out of alignment with its founder, which is astonishing.”
“What I love about the American spirit is the ‘can do’ entrepreneurial, is willingness to give it a go. And so some of the best experiments in missional expression have come from America within the last 10 to 15 years.”
“We’re not meant to kind of rally around certain ideologies. We’re meant to rally around Jesus.”
Andy Stanley: Is Your Church Choosing Political Sides Without Realizing It?
“I came from apartheid South Africa and South Africans couldn’t jump over their shadows, too. In the post-apartheid era, they had the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was an attempt to kind of confess our sins. And I wonder whether that hasn’t really been done [in the U.S.].”
“How do we collectively repent for things that we personally have not done but have been collectively done? And I think we need to explore that together and to learn how to lament.”
“We co-opt Jesus. We make him like us when we must become like him.”
“You can’t go wrong if you become more like Jesus.”
“The evangelical church is calibrated to the gospel…The problem is I search the Scriptures and I can see nowhere we are called to be gospel-centered. Nowhere. I don’t know where we got that from. We meant to be Jesus-centered people—gospel-focused, maybe.”
“You can’t become like the gospel. It’s a doctrine…Discipleship is that we must become like Jesus.”
“We seek to legislate our views of other people, and that gets us into all kinds of trouble. So I do think embracing marginality will actually teach us. Where you stand determines what you see and what you do. If you stand at the center of society, you’re seeing a very different view than the New Testament view. The New Testament church was marginal, it was persecuted. That continued for a long, long time.”
