Brian D. McLaren Quotes
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.
To be a Christian in a generously orthodox way is not to claim to have the truth captured, stuffed, and mounted on the wall
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.
We need not a new set of beliefs, but a new way of believing, not simply new answers to the same old questions, but a new set of questions.
I had to face the possibility that the art of living in the way of Jesus was no longer carried on in a holistic way by any single tradition.
I’m sure I am wrong about many things, although I’m not sure exactly which things I’m wrong about. I’m even sure I’m wrong about what I think I’m right about in at least some cases.
... why are so many religious people arguing about the origin of the species but so few concerned about the extinction of the species?
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.
The Christian faith, I am proposing, should become (in the name of Jesus Christ) a welcome friend to other religions of the world, not a threat
I don't think we've got the gospel right yet.I don't think the liberals have it right. But I don't think we have it right either. None of us has arrived at orthodoxy.
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.
If your goal is to produce firefighters and rescue workers, you have to produce people willing to enter burning buildings.
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.
Accumulating orthodoxy makes it harder year-by-year to be a Christian than it was in Jesus' day.
This is why I believe that many of our current eschatologies, intoxicated by dubious interpretations of John’s Apocalypse are not only ignorant and wrong, but dangerous and immoral.
Our message and methodology have changed, do change, and must change if we are faithful to the ongoing and unchanging mission of Jesus Christ.
You know what, the thing that breaks my heart is that there's no way I can answer it without hurting someone on either side.
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.
There's one thing worse than a failed old religion: a naïve and arrogant new one.
In religion as in parenthood, uncritical loyalty to our ancestors may implicate us in an injustice against our descendants: imprisoning them in the errors of our ancestors.
We must understand the essence of our faith to be something other than a list of opinions, propositions, or statements that our group holds but cannot prove. (p. 22)
