Shane Claiborne Quotes

It is the church's responsibility, the government's responsibility, and the personal responsibility of every one of us to love.

This common prayer project has taken years of energy, but we see it not as a way to leave our individual churches, but as a movement we hope to see permeate the larger Church.

We're not church planters. We are community planters and, as we work in our communities, we join local churches.

There is extreme poverty in Appalachia, where I was, and increasingly poverty is not just an urban thing.

The more you look at the death penalty, that's where you see that we're actually not killing the worst of the worst. We're killing the poorest of the poor. Where actually one of the biggest determinants of who gets executed is how many resources they have to defend themselves.

The church is like Noah's ark. It stinks, but if you get out of it, you'll drown.

Christianity is at its best when it is peculiar, marginalized, suffering, and it is at its worst when it is popular, credible, triumphal, and powerful.

As an American, and especially as a Christian, I am convinced that a love for our own people is not a bad thing, but love doesn't stop at borders. Love is infinitely boundless and all about holy trespassing and offensive friendships.

Over and over, when I ask God why all of these injustices are allowed to exist in the world, I can feel the Spirit whisper to me, You tell me why we allow this to happen. You are my body, my hands, my feet.

If you have two coats you have stolen one. We have no right to have more than we need when someone else has less than they need.

God's people are not to accumulate stuff for tomorrow but to share indiscriminately with the scandalous and holy confidence that God will provide for tomorrow. Then we need not stockpile stuff in barns or a 401(k), especially when there is someone in need.

It's not that hard to say slavery is wrong after we've abolished it.

It is a dangerous day when we can take the cross out of the church more easily than the flag. No wonder it is hard for seekers to find God nowadays.

The end of war begins with people who believe that another world is possible and that another empire has already interrupted time and space and is taking over this earth with the dreams of God.

So if the world hates us, we take courage that it hated Jesus first. If you're wondering whether you'll be safe, just look at what they did to Jesus and those who followed him. There are safer ways to live than by being a Christian.

When we realize that we are both wretched and beautiful, we are freed up to see others the same way.

MOST of the ugliness in the human narrative comes from a distorted quest to possess beauty. COVETING begins with appreciating blessings: MURDER begins with a hunger for justice. LUST begins with a recognition of beauty. GLUTTONY begins when our enjoyment of the delectable gifts of GOD starts to consume us. IDOLATRY begins when our seeing a reflection of God in something beautiful leads to our thinking that the beautiful image bearer is worthy of WORSHIP.

I think a lot of people view the death penalty as a debate class or something. The cost and what's at stake is really, really a big deal.

I think they [ monastic folks ] were going to the desert to build a new society and in a sense to build a new world, a new culture together where it was easier to be good and holy.

The Christian icon is not the Stars and Stripes but a cross-flag, and its emblem is not a donkey, an elephant, or an eagle, but a slaughtered lamb.

I think we've misinterpreted some of the scriptures to justify the death penalty. So whereas a lot of folks in America feel like we can do far better justice  -  it's more expensive to do the death penalty than the alternatives  -  there's so many reasons that people come to the conclusion to abolish the death penalty.

Maybe we are a little crazy. After all, we believe in things we don't see. The Scriptures say that faith is "being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see" (Heb. 11:1). We believe poverty can end even though it is all around us. We believe in peace even though we hear only rumours of wars. And since we are people of expectation, we are so convinced that another world is coming that we start living as if it were already here.

There are some Christians who totally disengage from politics and set their minds on heaven so much that their faith is so heavenly minded that it is no earthly good.

The Eucharist is a symbol of that as you have bread, the staple food of the poor, and wine, a luxury of the rich, which are brought together at the table.

It's always a good idea to have a nun next to you when you get arrested!

When it comes to the big issues like immigration, everyone has a role. The government has a role. The church has a role. Every Christian has a role.

There's something beautiful about that Scripture that says, "Your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams" (Acts 2:17). We need each other. There is power when the old and young dream together.

We say it is idealistic to think we can continue to live the way we live - with 5% of the world using half the world's resources, with $20,000 a second being spent on war.

Charity wins awards and applause, but joining the poor gets you killed. People do not get crucified for charity. People are crucified for living out a love that disrupts the social order, that calls forth a new world. People are not crucified for helping poor people. People are crucified for joining them.

We are faithful not to the triumphant golden eagle (ironically, also an imperial symbol of power in Rome) but to the slaughtered Lamb.

God doesn't want to change the world without you.

When the church takes affairs of the state more seriously than they do Jesus, Pax Romana becomes its gospel and the president becomes the Son of God.

The Catholic understanding has been that the death penalty has been become, like, outdated because in industrialized countries. We have other ways of protecting societies from dangerous people without killing them. And in fact, it's important to remember that much of the world has done away with the death penalty.

What the Black lives matter movement is doing is they are making it personal. They are making it hash tagged, exposing the racial injustice that continues to haunt our country in a way that you can't ignore. There is power in injustice becoming personal.

The dreams get anchored in aged wisdom not some utopian fantasy.

If every Christian family brought in a child who needed a family we would put the foster care system out of business.

Somehow Jesus's reputation has survived all the embarrassing things that Christians have done in his name.

I engage with local politics because it affects people I love. And I engage in national politics because it affects people I love.

When I think of some of the great renewals in the church I think of folks like St. Francis and Clare of Assisi who, through their lifestyle, were challenging the patterns of materialism and militarism and it affected the Christianity of their age.

Karl Barth said it well: "We have to read the Bible in one hand... and the newspaper in the other." Our faith should not cause us to escape this world but to engage it.

In closing, to those who have closed the door on religion - I was recently asked by a non-Christian friend if I thought he was going to hell. I said, 'I hope not. It will be hard to enjoy heaven without you.' If those of us who believe in God do not believe God's grace is big enough to save the whole world... well, we should at least pray that it is.

I would love to see the Church on the right side of history.

The future of the church is also about looking back and looking at where we see these wonderful renewals and what we can learn from the early church. I think it is a really exciting time where Phyllis Tickle said every few hundred years the church needs a rummage sale where we can get rid of some of the clutter.

Discontentment is a gift. It's the stuff that changes the world.

We see God all the time here. People only hear bad things about our neighborhood. Kensington is known as the badlands. I always say you have to be careful when you call a place the badlands because that is exactly what they said about Nazareth. Nothing good can come from there. I think we see God in the margins.

I believe you know Jesus said "a doctor doesn't come to the healthy, but the sick, and it's not the righteous but the sinners that I've come for," so I think that that's the scandal of God's love and grace that no one is beyond redemption, and we can see that all through scripture, you know.

The time has come for a new kind of conversation, a new kind of Christianity, a new kind of revolution.

For even if the whole world believed in resurrection, little would change until we began to practice it. We can believe in CPR, but people will remain dead until someone breathes new life into them. And we can tell the world that there is life after death, but the world really seems to be wondering if there is life before death.