Shane Claiborne Quotes

76 Sourced Quotes

Liturgy and worship were never meant to be confined to the cathedrals and sanctuaries. Liturgy at its best can be performed like a circus or theater - making the Gospel visible as a witness to the world around us.

Shane Claiborne
We do need to be born again, since Jesus said that to a guy named Nicodemus. But if you tell me I have to be born again to enter the Kingdom of God, I can tell you that you have to sell everything you have and give it to the poor, because Jesus said that to one guy, too. But I guess that's why God invented highlighers, so we can highlight the parts we like and ignore the rest.

Shane Claiborne
Someday war and poverty will be crazy and we will wonder how the world allowed such things to exist.

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

Shane Claiborne
I don't know if you've read the Bible, and if you haven't, I think you may be in a better place than those of us who have read it so much that it has become stale.

Shane Claiborne
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
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
Governments can do lots of things, but there are a lot of things they cannot do. A government can provide good housing, but folks can have a house without having a home. We can keep people breathing with good health care, but they still may not really be alive.

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

Shane Claiborne
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
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
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.

Shane Claiborne
And I think that's what our world is desperately in need of - lovers, people who are building deep, genuine relationships with fellow strugglers along the way, and who actually know the faces of the people behind the issues they are concerned about.

Shane Claiborne
The history of the church has been largely a history of "believers" refusing to believe in the way of the crucified Nazarene and instead giving in to the very temptations he resisted—power, relevancy, spectacle.

Shane Claiborne
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
We are setting ourselves up for disappointment if our hope is built on anything less than Jesus.

Shane Claiborne
I had come to see that the great tragedy in the church is not that rich Christians do not care about the poor but that rich Christians do not know the poor...I truly believe that when the rich meet the poor, riches will have no meaning. And when the rich meet the poor, we will see poverty come to an end.

Shane Claiborne
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."

Shane Claiborne
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
I must say that I am still passionately pro-life, I just have a much 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
Perhaps the devil is just as likely to wear a three-piece suit as to have horns and a pitchfork. And perhaps the angels look more like the bums in the alley than like feathered white babies.

Shane Claiborne
No one has seen God, but as we love one another, God lives in us.

Shane Claiborne
Sometimes people call folks here at the Simple Way saints. Usually they either want to applaud our lives and live vicariously through us, or they want to write us off as superhuman and create a safe distance. One of my favorite quotes, written on my wall here in bold black marker, is from Dorothy Day: "Don't call us saints; we don't want to be dismissed that easily

Shane Claiborne
We were not interested in a Christianity that offered these families only mansions and streets of golds in heaven when all they wanted was a bed for their kids now. And many Christians had an extra one.

Shane Claiborne
How ironic is it to see a bumper sticker that says 'Jesus is the answer' next to a bumper sticker supporting the war in Iraq, as if to says 'Jesus is the answer - but not in the real world.

Shane Claiborne
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.

Shane Claiborne
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.

Shane Claiborne
Christianity can be built around isolating ourselves from evildoers and sinners, creating a community of religious piety and moral purity. That's the Christianity I grew up with. Christianity can also be built around joining with the broken sinners and evildoers of our world crying out to God, groaning for grace. That's the Christianity I have fallen in love with.

Shane Claiborne
Only Jesus would be crazy enough to suggest that if you want to become the greatest, you should become the least. Only Jesus would declare God's blessing on the po0r rather than on the rich and would insist that it's not enough to just love your friends. I just began to wonder if anybody still believed Jesus meant those things he said.

Shane Claiborne