Top 75 Brian D. McLaren Quotes
#1. Jesus called disciples so He could send them out as apostles. They were called together to learn so they could be sent out to teach and serve.
Brian D. McLaren
#2. When wealth is your god, weapons are your sacrament, and your own children are your sacrifice -
Brian D. McLaren
#3. Enter faith, and a whole new factor enters the equation. Words like "impossible" seem out of place. Despair and cynicism feel like insults to God. Hope grows, and love, and therefore motivation to care, to give, to act, to try, to dream, to risk.
Brian D. McLaren
#4. 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.
Brian D. McLaren
#5. What today throws at you will force you to become better or bitter for tomorrow; it will push you toward breakdown or breakthrough ...
Brian D. McLaren
#6. If Jesus, Moses, the Buddha and Mohammed
were to bump into each other along the road
and go have a cup of tea or whatever,
I think we all know
they would treat one another far different and far better
than a lot of their followers would.
Brian D. McLaren
#7. We are not scholars researching an ancient Chinese emperor - a matter of objectivity and disinterestedness; we are sons and daughters who want to get to know our father - someone with whom we have an essential relationship.
Brian D. McLaren
#8. Isn't the real scandal not that our religious leaders might be imagined walking across a road or talking as friends together in a bar, but rather that their followers are found speaking against one another as enemies, day after day in situation after situation?
Brian D. McLaren
#9. So if God is forgotten, we want to join God in being forgotten. So if God is rejected and opposed and misunderstood and misrepresented, we want to suffer each indignity and sorrow with God.
Brian D. McLaren
#10. Why are so many religious people arguing about the origin of the species but so few concerned about the extinction of the species?
Brian D. McLaren
#11. I don't think we should give up on ritual. I don't think we should give up on any possible means of experiencing God.
Brian D. McLaren
#13. It turns out that the famous dictum, associated with Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov, can run both ways: yes, without God everything is theoretically permissible ... but believers can find ways to use God to justify just about anything as well.
Brian D. McLaren
#14. 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.
Brian D. McLaren
#15. If a spiritual community only points back to where it has been or if it only digs in its heels where it is now, it is a dead end or a parking lot, not a way.
Brian D. McLaren
#16. I love writers who are insightful enough to be cynical but choose not to be.
Brian D. McLaren
#17. I must add, though, that I don't believe making disciples must equal making adherents to the Christian religion. It may be advisable in many (not all!) circumstances to help people become followers of Jesus and remain within their Buddhist, Hindu, or Jewish contexts.
Brian D. McLaren
#18. he encouraged them to explore their doubts, ask their questions, and express themselves honestly. Many people crave certainty. They don't want to have to think, agonize, or grapple with life's difficult questions for themselves. Instead they want dogma. They want guaranteed answers.
Brian D. McLaren
#19. 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.
Brian D. McLaren
#20. Jesus faithfully and courageously represented the nonviolent and loving heart of God. Jesus and his way of nonviolent, self-giving love, the text suggests, will earn the trust of all humanity. We will ultimately migrate, in other words, toward the way of Jesus.
Brian D. McLaren
#21. Frankly, our music has too often been shallow, discordant, or played with a wooden concern for technical correctness but without feeling and passion.
Brian D. McLaren
#22. Learning is not the consequence of teaching or writing, but rather of thinking ... so a playful, provocative, unclear but stimulating book could actually be more worth your money than a serious, clear book that tells you what to think but doesn't make you think.
Brian D. McLaren
#23. Our choice, it seems, is whether we will let our past and present sufferings be sufficient to soften and break us, or whether we will resist and harden ourselves so even more suffering is required.
Brian D. McLaren
#24. In case after case in the past, there is a kind of Bible-quoting intoxication under the influence of which we religious people lose the ability to distinguish between what God says and what we say God says.
Brian D. McLaren
#25. That is what mature faith requires - not pride over how much one sees and understands, but humility, the feeling that one is still a child, certain of so little, still so dependent on God and others, with so much still to learn - including so much more to learn about humility.
Brian D. McLaren
#26. People have no idea how strong a pull sex, money, and power have on them until they try to resist their pull.
Brian D. McLaren
#27. Some people
and I pray I will be one of them
never forget what it was like, which enables them to mentor people of any age.
Brian D. McLaren
#28. If your goal is to produce firefighters and rescue workers, you have to produce people willing to enter burning buildings.
Brian D. McLaren
#29. Trying to stop people from learning, sharing, and loving is a losing game because it means working against God and the plotline of God's universe.
Brian D. McLaren
#30. Schoolchildren don't normally learn this poem about Columbus's second voyage to Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic today): "In fourteen hundred and ninety-five, sixteen hundred people he kidnapped alive." Columbus
Brian D. McLaren
#31. The life-and-death question for each of our churches and denominations may boil down to this: are we a club for the elite who pretend to have arrived or a school for disciples who are still on the way?
Brian D. McLaren
#32. We must not define Jesus and his kingdom by fitting them within conventional understandings of kings and kingdoms. Rather, we must judge and deconstruct those conventional definitions in light of Jesus and his example.
Brian D. McLaren
#33. The scarily brilliant Romantic poet and visionary William Blake dared to say what many of us have perhaps thought but kept to ourselves: A good local pub has much in common with a church, except that a pub is warmer, and there's more conversation.
Brian D. McLaren
#34. To everyone, Jesus issues an invitation to abandon the story they will lose themselves in, and instead, to enter the story they will find themselves in.
Brian D. McLaren
#35. 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.
Brian D. McLaren
#36. Too often we put the gospel of Jesus through the strainer of consumerist-capitalism and retain only the thin broth that this modern-day Caesar lets pass through.
Brian D. McLaren
#37. It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.
Brian D. McLaren
#38. I have no doubt that Jesus would actually practice the neighborliness he preached rather than following our example of religious supremacy, hostility, fear, isolation, misinformation, exclusion, or demonization.
Brian D. McLaren
#39. In other words, when the community of faith gathers, its purpose is to equip its members for a life of love and good deeds when the community scatters.
Brian D. McLaren
#40. If you don't want to worship a guy you can beat up, then I might humbly suggest you reconsider Caesar and the Greco-Roman narrative. It sounds like 'Christ and him crucified' is not for you. At least not yet.
Brian D. McLaren
#41. When would-be reformers arise, they are rejected as heretics, turncoats, troublemakers, disturbers of the peace, traitors, and enemies.
Brian D. McLaren
#42. 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.
Brian D. McLaren
#43. 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.
Brian D. McLaren
#44. 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.
Brian D. McLaren
#45. My concern is that by making heaven after this life the destination of our way, we are spiritually forming people who run away from fire, disease, and the violence of our world.
Brian D. McLaren
#46. 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.
Brian D. McLaren
#47. Jesus doesn't dominate the other, avoid the other, colonize the other, intimidate the other, demonize the other, or marginalize the other. He incarnates into the other, joins the other in solidarity, protects the other, listens to the other, serves the other, even lays down his life for the other.
Brian D. McLaren
#48. What if Jesus' secret message reveals a secret plan?. What if he didn't come to start a new religion-but rather came to start a political, social, religious, artistic, economic, intellectual, and spiritual revolution that would give birth to a new world?
Brian D. McLaren
#49. I guess you could say that the Bible is a book that doesn't try to tell you what to think. Instead, it tries to teach you how to think. It stretches your thinking; it challenges you to think bigger and harder than you ever have.
Brian D. McLaren
#50. I don't think we've got the gospel right yet. What does it mean to be 'saved'? When I read the Bible, I don't see it meaning, 'I'm going to heaven after I die.' Before modern evangelicalism nobody accepted Jesus Christ as their personal Savior, or walked down an aisle, or said the sinner's prayer.
Brian D. McLaren
#51. 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.
Brian D. McLaren
#52. I'm raising the question of whether focusing on the afterlife beyond history can unintentionally but tragically lead to the abandonment of this earth and this life.
Brian D. McLaren
#53. 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
Brian D. McLaren
#54. But before Christianity was a rich and powerful religion, before it was associated with buildings, budgets, crusades, colonialism, or televangelism, it began as a revolutionary nonviolent movement promoting a new kind of aliveness on the margins of society.
Brian D. McLaren
#55. Can you imagine Jesus saying, "Believe that I am the only way. Why? Because I said so, that's why! And if you don't believe, then you're going straight to hell!" But isn't that how we present him through our slogans?
Brian D. McLaren
#56. Comfort and power can become great enemies of true spirituality, which explains why we often say that the prophets come not only to comfort the afflicted, but also to afflict the comfortable.
Brian D. McLaren
#57. The romance of Creator and creation is far more wonderful and profound than anyone can ever capture in words.
Brian D. McLaren
#58. Something deep in our conscience tells us that hostility is part of the problem to be overcome in the world, not the means by which problems will be overcome. Hostility is a symptom of the disease, not part of the cure.
Brian D. McLaren
#59. [Fasting is] a way of making sure we haven't let the rhythms of the everyday put us to sleep, a way to make sure that our habits have not become addictions ...
Brian D. McLaren
#60. [Spiritual] Practices are not for know-it-alls. Practices are for those who feel the need for change, growth, development, learning. Practices are for disciples.
Brian D. McLaren
#61. Our message and methodology have changed, do change, and must change if we are faithful to the ongoing and unchanging mission of Jesus Christ.
Brian D. McLaren
#62. The kind of person who wants to participate in the healing of the world is very different from the kind of person who wants to leave this world behind so she can go to a better one.
Brian D. McLaren
#63. Spiritual practices are ways of becoming awake and staying awake to God.
Brian D. McLaren
#64. Americans until 1924. States like Arizona and New Mexico found ways to continue restricting voting rights until 1948, just as several southern states continue to do in this century to African Americans.
Brian D. McLaren
#65. 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.
Brian D. McLaren
#66. Sometimes, we
become so familiar with the primal sacred story of the Bible that we need some fresh takes on it, telling us the same thing in different ways, or giving us some new vantage points to see what was always there, things we'd missed before.
Brian D. McLaren
#67. The Church has little idea how unorthodox it is at any given moment. If a church can't yet be perfectly orthodox, it can, with the Holy Spirit's help and by the grace of God, be perpetually reformable.
Brian D. McLaren
#68. Too often we see the Bible through whatever lens we get from our culture.
Brian D. McLaren
#69. Joyfully celebrating the killing of a killer who joyfully celebrated killing carries an irony that I hope will not be lost on us. Are we learning anything, or simply spinning harder in the cycle of violence?
Brian D. McLaren
#70. Accumulating orthodoxy makes it harder year-by-year to be a Christian than it was in Jesus' day.
Brian D. McLaren
#71. 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.
Brian D. McLaren
#72. So we must realize this: the suicidal framing story that dominates our world today has no power except the power we give it by believing it. Similarly, believing an alternative and transforming framing story may turn out to be the most radical thing any of us can ever do.
Brian D. McLaren
#73. The cross is almost a distraction and false advertisement for God.
Brian D. McLaren
#74. This is a book about getting naked - not physically, but spiritually. It's about stripping away the symbols and status of public religion - the Sunday-dress version people often call "organized religion." And it's about attending to the well-being of the soul clothed only in naked human skin.
Brian D. McLaren
#75. Jesus was short on sermons, long on conversations; short on answers, long on questions; short on abstraction and propositions, long on stories and parables; short on telling you what to think, long on challenging you to think for yourself.
Brian D. McLaren
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