I learned more about God from the tears of homeless mothers than any systematic theology ever taught me.

As Christians, we should be the best collaborators in the world. We should be quick to find unlikely allies and subversive friends, like Jesus did.

There is real value in these local congregations. For me, a lot of it is the value of the sacraments we share. In neighborhoods like ours, the churches provide stability.

There are some  -  called 'death fatigue'  -  people who just grow so tired of death, so they don't want to keep perpetuating death and creating more victims and more anger and more pain. They want to heal from that, and I think that's exactly what God wants to do. And, interestingly enough, that's part of what God's original law was doing with the 'eye for an eye' thing. It was actually to limit the patterns of retaliation and then to begin to heal from that.

The best critique of what is wrong is the practice of something better. So let's stop complaining about the church we've experienced and work on becoming the church we dream of.

There are financial bankruptcies in many parts of the church. No question about that. But we see the possibility of reimagining and revitalizing the church.

My goal is to speak the truth in love. There are a lot of people speaking the truth with no love, and there are a lot of people talking about love without much truth.