Don't try to understand it. You won't succeed. Don't try to see it. You can't. Try to live it, and you will be living out of the center.

Leadership in the church is not entrusted to successful fund raisers, brilliant biblical scholars, administrative geniuses, or spellbinding preachers...but to those who have been laid waste by a consuming passion for Christ - passionate men and women for whom privilege and power are trivial compared to knowing and loving Jesus.

There is a beautiful transparency to honest disciples who never wear a false face and do not pretend to be anything but who they are.

We have been given God in our souls and Christ in our flesh. We have the power to believe where others deny, to hope where others despair, to love where others hurt.

That which is denied cannot be healed.

Trust is our gift back to God, and he finds it so enchanting that Jesus died for love of it

The kingdom is not an exclusive, well-trimmed suburb with snobbish rules about who can live there. No, it is for a larger, homelier, less self-conscious caste of people who understand they are sinners because they have experienced the yaw and pitch of moral struggle.