Top 100 Shane Claiborne Quotes
#1. 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.
Shane Claiborne
#2. 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.
Shane Claiborne
#3. As my friend said that when people say the church is full of hypocrites, he says we always have room for more.
Shane Claiborne
#4. Christians who have had so much to say with our mouths and so little to show with our lives. I am sorry that so often we have forgotten the Christ of our Christianity.
Shane Claiborne
#5. Jesus taught us a prayer of community and reconciliation, belonging to a new people who have left the land of 'me'.
Shane Claiborne
#6. Believe in miracles. And live in a way that might necessitate one.
Shane Claiborne
#7. Jeanne de Chantal, seventeenth-century founder of the Order of the Visitation, said, No matter what happens, be gentle with yourself.
Shane Claiborne
#8. We shall do even greater things because the love that lived in the radical Christ now lives within millions of ordinary radicals all over the planet.
Shane Claiborne
#10. The work of community, love, reconciliation, restoration is the work we cannot leave up to politicians. This is the work we are all called to do.
Shane Claiborne
#11. Recognizing that something is wrong is the first step toward changing the world.
Shane Claiborne
#12. We have a relational problem with those who are suffering or who are different from us. All of us are most comfortable around people who are like us culturally and economically.
Shane Claiborne
#13. The church is like Noah's ark. It stinks, but if you get out of it, you'll drown.
Shane Claiborne
#14. I engage with local politics because it affects people I love. And I engage in national politics because it affects people I love.
Shane Claiborne
#15. I used to think you all were missionaries bringing the gospel to your neighborhood, but now I see that it is in your neighborhood that you have learned the gospel, and that you are actually missionaries to the church.
Shane Claiborne
#16. Too often we just do what makes sense to us and ask God to bless it.
Shane Claiborne
#17. There are folks who burn the Koran and hold signs saying, "God hates fags" and all sorts of sick things - and they often hijack the headlines with hatred. We know that is not what Christ was like.
Shane Claiborne
#18. When we were starting our community a bunch of older Benedictine nuns said to us, "If you have any questions or want to pick our brains, please do - we've been doing community for about 1,500 years together so we've learned a few things."
Shane Claiborne
#19. When I fed the hungry, they called me a saint. When I asked why people are hungry, they called me a communist. Charity
Shane Claiborne
#20. Certainly the institutional church is ill. It's hemorrhaging young people at an astronomical rate.
Shane Claiborne
#21. [Jesus] said that they will know we are Christians - not by our bumper stickers and T-shirts - but by our love.
Shane Claiborne
#22. We often miss the irony that the same Paul who writes "submit to the authorities" goes to jail and is condemned for subverting the authorities! He
Shane Claiborne
#23. So there goes Jesus spinning power on its head again. His power was not in crushing but in being crushed, triumphing over the empire's sword with his cross. Mustard must be crushed, ground, broken for its power to be released.
Shane Claiborne
#24. It is the church's job, as Dr.[Martin Luther] King says, to be the conscience of the state, not the chaplain of the state.
Shane Claiborne
#25. Christians are meant to be God's holy counterculture, showing the world what a society of love can look like. It is about political imagination and what it means to be the peculiar people of God. As
Shane Claiborne
#26. Jesus still has a really great reputation and the Spirit is still moving. I've got a lot of hope for a generation that takes Jesus seriously, once again.
Shane Claiborne
#27. We can also cling to the treasures of our faith and get rid of the things that are cluttering that. It is a time we are seeing some trending away from the things that were cluttering our faith.
Shane Claiborne
#28. Victimization is about powerlessness, and justice is about amplifying the voices of those who have been silenced. Healing
Shane Claiborne
#29. Mother Theresa always said, Calcuttas are everywhere if only we have eyes to see. Find your Calcutta.
Shane Claiborne
#30. 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.
Shane Claiborne
#31. We should refuse to get sucked into political camps and insist on pulling the best out of all of them. That's what Jesus did - challenge the worst of each camp and pull out the best of each.
Shane Claiborne
#32. I just have a more holistic sense of what it means to be for life, knowing that life does not just begin at conception and end at birth, and that if I am going to discourage abortion, I had better be ready to adopt some babies and care for some mothers.
Shane Claiborne
#33. People always want to define you by what you do. I started saying: 'i am not too concerned with what i'm going to do. I am more interested in who i am becoming. I want to be a lover of God and people.
Shane Claiborne
#34. 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.
Shane Claiborne
#35. 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.
Shane Claiborne
#36. Let's keep refusing to accept the world as it is and insisting on building the world we dream of. Don't let the haters have the last word.
Shane Claiborne
#37. Jesus did not send us into the world to make believers but to make disciples.
Shane Claiborne
#38. We need good laws, but no law can change a human heart - only God can do that.
Shane Claiborne
#39. 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.
Shane Claiborne
#40. We have been mentored from the very beginning by Catholic folks who are invigorating the best of the monastic spirit.
Shane Claiborne
#41. We give people fish. We teach them to fish. We tear down the walls that have been built up around the fish pond. And we figure out who polluted it.
Shane Claiborne
#42. It's hard to hear the gentle whisper of the Spirit amid the noise of Christendom.
Shane Claiborne
#43. Prayer is not so much about convincing God to do what we want God to do as it is about convincing ourselves to do what God wants us to do.
Shane Claiborne
#44. Faith is believing in the impossible because we have a God who is master of impossible.
Shane Claiborne
#45. People are poor not just because of their sins; they are poor because of our sins (and people are rich because of our sins). On the wall of New Jerusalem is a sign that reads, We cannot fully recover until we help the society that made us sick recover.
Shane Claiborne
#46. I believe in a God of scandalous grace. I have pledged allegiance to a King who loved evildoers so much he died for them, teaching us that there is something worth dying for but nothing worth killing for.
Shane Claiborne
#47. No one has seen God, but as we love one another, God lives in us.
Shane Claiborne
#48. 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.
Shane Claiborne
#49. Biological family is too small of a vision. Patriotism is far too myopic. A love for our own relatives and a love for the people of our own country are not bad things, but our love does not stop at the border.
Shane Claiborne
#50. Us the ability to think with your mind, to hear with your ears, to see with your eyes, to speak with your mouth, to walk with your feet, to love with your heart. We ask this through Christ our Lord. Amen.
Shane Claiborne
#51. There's an understanding of common prayer that I think we're seeing grow, more and more. When I travel, I hear from people who are deeply touched that our common prayer takes time to remember some of the terrible tragedies that have happened around the world.
Shane Claiborne
#52. But liturgy is meant to be an interruption. It disrupts our reality and refocuses it on God. It reshapes our perceptions and lives with new rhythms, new holy days, a whole new story.
Shane Claiborne
#53. There is a difference between feeding someone and eating dinner with them. If every Christian at home just made room for the stranger we would end homelessness overnight.
Shane Claiborne
#54. That is the power of the Eucharist. At the communion table you have rich and poor together in the early church and they were being challenged.
Shane Claiborne
#55. It's always a good idea to have a nun next to you when you get arrested!
Shane Claiborne
#56. Lord, we know that you will come again in glory to raise the living and the dead. Resurrect us now from the death of comfort, complacency, sloth, and shallowness that we might witness to your love in life and death. Amen.
Shane Claiborne
#58. Every time our government chooses to use military force to bring about change in the world, it once again teaches our children the myth of redemptive violence, the myth that violence can be an instrument for good.
Shane Claiborne
#59. There is a movement bubbling up that goes beyond cynicism and celebrates a new way of living, a generation that stops complaining about the church it sees and becomes the church it dreams of.
Shane Claiborne
#60. Prayer is less about trying to get God to do something we want God to do and more about getting ourselves to do what God wants us to do and to become who God wants us to become.
Shane Claiborne
#61. The true atheist is the one who refuses to see God's image in the face of their neighbour.
Shane Claiborne
#62. The more I get to know Jesus, the more trouble he seems to get me into.
Shane Claiborne
#63. We need to be politically engaged, but peculiar in how we engage. Jesus and the early Christians had a marvelous political imagination. They turned all the presumptions and ideas of power and blessing upside down.
Shane Claiborne
#64. Irish rock star Bono has said, Grace defies reason and logic. Love interrupts, if you like, the consequences of your actions, which in my case is very good news indeed, because I've done a lot of stupid stuff.
Shane Claiborne
#65. We're not church planters. We are community planters and, as we work in our communities, we join local churches.
Shane Claiborne
#66. That is part of our critique of some of the charity and service work is that we can still keep relationships at a distance by creating programs that offer services but we don't really create a reconciled community.
Shane Claiborne
#67. 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.
Shane Claiborne
#68. So live real good, and get beat up real bad. Dance until they kill you, and then we'll dance some more. That's how this thing seems to work.
Shane Claiborne
#69. It is the church's responsibility, the government's responsibility, and the personal responsibility of every one of us to love.
Shane Claiborne
#70. [Mahatma] Ghandi said in a world with so many hungry people it just makes sense that God would come as food. God sent the living bread and the living water in a world where there is so much thirst and so much hunger.
Shane Claiborne
#71. There is nothing more sickening than talking about poverty over a fancy dinner.
Shane Claiborne
#72. One thing that's clear in the Scriptures is that the nations do not lead people to peace; rather, people lead the nations to peace.
Shane Claiborne
#73. We might hope to change the world through better, bigger programs to stop global warming, but global warming will not end unless people become less greedy and less wasteful, gaining a fresh vision of what it means to love our global neighbor.
Shane Claiborne
#74. To refer to the Church as a building is to call people 2 x 4's.
Shane Claiborne
#75. I say let's be idealists. "Faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not yet see" (Hebrews 11:1).
Shane Claiborne
#76. You can't really learn God's hope like you learn the logic of an argument or the details of a story. It's more like learning to belly laugh. You catch hope from someone who has it down in their gut.
Shane Claiborne
#77. The world is looking, not for Christians who are perfect, but for Christians who are honest and who are willing to be honest with some of our contradictions and hypocrisy.
Shane Claiborne
#78. There is one big misunderstanding of the monastics leaving society.
Shane Claiborne
#79. We have placed such idolatrous faith in our ability to protect ourselves that we call it more courageous to die killing than to die loving.
Shane Claiborne
#80. Faith is being idealistic, because we have made an idol out of the status quo.
Shane Claiborne
#81. Little movements of communities of ordinary radicals are committed to doing small things with great love.
Shane Claiborne
#82. Erasmus of Rotterdam, a sixteenth-century priest who was committed to reforming the church from within, said, When faith came to be in writings rather than in hearts, contention grew hot and love grew cold. That which is forced cannot be sincere, and that which is not voluntary cannot please Christ.
Shane Claiborne
#83. This is what Jesus had in mind: folks coming together, forming close-knit communities and meeting each other's needs
no kings, no major welfare systems, no presidents necessary. His is a theology and practice for the people of God, not a set of suggestions for empire.
Shane Claiborne
#84. Christendom seems unprepared for people who take the gospel that seriously.
Shane Claiborne
#85. I learned more about God from the tears of homeless mothers than any systematic theology ever taught me.
Shane Claiborne
#86. I wondered if there were other restless people asking the question with me: What if Jesus meant the stuff he said?.
Shane Claiborne
#87. Rather than finding the devil "out there," we battle the devil within us. The revolution starts inside each of us.
Shane Claiborne
#89. Our churches should attract the people Jesus attracted and frustrate the people Jesus frustrated.
Shane Claiborne
#90. There is a certain power when old and young come together - we can do more together than we can on our own.
Shane Claiborne
#91. Lord, you have appointed some to be prophets; give us ears to hear and mouths to speak. You have appointed some to sing of your goodness in the streets; make us bold to celebrate you. You have called some to be still, listen, and act; give us steadiness of mind and singularity of purpose. Amen.
Shane Claiborne
#92. We have not shown the world another way of doing life. Christians pretty much live like everybody else, they just sprinkle a little Jesus in along the way.
Shane Claiborne
#93. The more I have read the Bible and studied the life of Jesus, the more I have become convinced that Christianity spreads best not through force but through fascination.
Shane Claiborne
#94. One of the great dangers in political engagement is misplaced hope.
Shane Claiborne
#95. To all my nonbelieving, sort-of-believing, and used-to-be-believing friends: I feel like I should begin with a confession. I am sorry that so often the biggest obstacle to God has been Christians.
Shane Claiborne
#96. Somehow Jesus's reputation has survived all the embarrassing things that Christians have done in his name.
Shane Claiborne
#97. It is a beautiful thing when folks in poverty are no longer just a missions project but become genuine friends and family with whom we laugh, cry, dream and struggle.
Shane Claiborne
#98. 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.
Shane Claiborne
#99. One by one, these disciples would infect the nations with grace. It wasn't a call to take the sword or the throne and force the world to bow. Rather, they were to live the contagious love of God, to woo the nations into a new future.
Shane Claiborne
#100. The love that makes community is the willingness to do someone else's dirty work.
Shane Claiborne
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