NOTE: if you do not profess to be a Christian this site is still for you. Being a follower of Christ is not a pre-requsite for being a decent human being and I welcome decent human being of all faiths – or no faith at all. I have failed to live out my faith in each and every one of these ways over the course of my life. Many remain areas of growth potential for myself. I don’t share them in judgement but rather to challenge and encouragement others on the same faith journey.
The following quotes, resources, or links have either shaped or reflect my views on the subject.
We sit down with and stand up for whoever is most marginalized, ostracized, stigmatized, demonized, dehumanized, shunned, slighted, left out and alone, not because we have made an ideological decision to be liberal or a political decision to be progressive but because we have made a spiritual decision to follow Jesus.
– Chuck Poole
Christianity is a “way” to be followed more than it is about a set of beliefs to be believed. Practice is more important than “correct” beliefs. Beliefs are not irrelevant; they do matter. But they are not the object of faith. God is the “object” of commitment and for Christians, God as known in Jesus.
– Marcus I. Borg
He didn’t show mere mercy to the adulterer and the prostitute and the tax collector; he showed favoritism toward them because these were the people who needed him most. He showered affection on them, regardless of their lifestyles. This was disgraceful to the Jewish authorities monitoring Jesus’s activity. They demanded an explanation from His disciples: Why was their rabbi keeping such company? “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick,” Jesus responded, overhearing their objections. “I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”
– Tim Alberta
We draw people to Christ not by loudly discrediting what they believe, by telling them how wrong they are and how: right we are, but by showing them a light that is so lovely that they want with all their hearts to know the source of it.
– Madeleine L Engle
The gospel is less about how to get into the Kingdom of Heaven after you die, and more about how to live in the Kingdom of Heaven before you die.
– Dallas Willard
If reading the Bible causes me to scrutinize others more than I scrutinize myself, then I am not reading the Bible correctly.
– Scott Sauls
Christianity is a lifestyle – a way of being in the world that is simple, non-violent, shared, and loving. However, we made it into an established “religion” (and all that goes with that) and avoided the lifestyle change itself. One could be warlike, greedy, racist, selfish, and vain in most of Christian history, and still believe that Jesus is one’s “personal Lord and Savior”.
– Richard Rohr
“Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody’s business. What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbors worth.”
– Thomas Merton
Matthew 25 tells us that when Jesus judges between the righteous and unrighteous, he doesn’t judge them based on their orthodoxy, their patriotism, or their individual definitions of morality. He judges them based on their compassion towards vulnerable people.
– Benjamin Cremer
If God didn’t send Jesus into the world to condemn it, I doubt he sent you.
– David Huskins
Christianity has adjusted itself much too easily to the worship of power. It should give much more offense, more shock to the world, than it is doing. Christianity should take a much more definite stand for the weak than for the potential moral right of the strong.
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer, from “My Strength is Made Perfect in My Weakness. London, Evening Worship, 1934,”
When you demonize the immigrant, the poor, and the marginalized, I’m not interested in hearing about your religious beliefs. You’ve already shown me what they are by how you’re treating the immigrant, the poor, and the marginalized.
– Rev. Benjamin Cremer
Always trust the inclusive love of Christ over the exclusive legalism of any Christian theology.
– Stephen Mattson
One of the most blatant forms of Christian hypocrisy in our time is Christians holding ordinary people accountable to the most rigid moral standards, while simultaneously holding their preferred politicians accountable to no standards at all.
– Reverend Benjamin Cremer
When interpreting the Bible, filter it through the larger biblical theology of “God is love.” If where your interpretation ends up excludes, belittles, is violent, ignores those in need, or allows you to feel superior to others, it isn’t loving. It isn’t from love. It isn’t of God.
– Rev. Mark Sandlin
“I was hungry and you formed a humanities club and discussed my hunger.
I was imprisoned and you crept off quietly to your chapel and prayed for my release.
I was naked and in your mind you debated the morality of my appearance.
I was sick and you knelt and thanked God for your health.
I was homeless and you preached to me of the spiritual shelter of the love of God.
I was lonely and you left me alone to go and pray for me.
You seem so holy, so close to God.
But I’m still very hungry and lonely and cold.”
– Author unknown
“Your ‘yes’ to God requires your ‘no’ to all injustice, to all evil, to all lies, to all oppression and violation of the weak and poor…”
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Christians should regularly ask themselves, “Is my faith more a reflection of my political, cultural, and socio-economic values and actions, or a reflection of the values and actions of Christ?
– Stephen Mattson
Your job is not to judge.
Your job is not to figure out if someone deserves something. Your job is to lift the fallen, to restore the broken, and to heal the hurting. Your job is to give away Kindness.
Those who take the Bible literally are actually undervaluing it by ignoring its complexity, history, and diversity.
– Rev. Mark Sandlin
A church that does not provoke any crisis, preach a gospel that does not unsettle, proclaim a word of God that does not get under anyone’s skin or a word of God that does not touch the real sin of the society in which it is being proclaimed: what kind of gospel is that?
– Archbishop Oscar Romero
When you die,
God isn’t going to ask you about someone else.
He won’t ask you about the two men down the street who got married.
He won’t ask you about the girl who had an abortion.
He won’t ask you about the atheist that lives on the corner.
He won’t ask you about the woman who feels more comfortable as a man.
He will ask you how you loved those people as He called you to do.
And some of you didn’t.
Every time we use religion to draw a line to keep people out, Jesus is with the people on the other side of that line.
– Pastor Brandon
Christianity is about helping others and controlling yourself. When it becomes about controlling others and helping yourself, it is no longer Christianity.
– PastorBrandon
Imagine taking afew Bible verses on human sexuality as literal divine commands from God for all society, but minimizing the 3000+ versus calling for the care of the immigrants, the marginalized, the oppressed, and the poor to be personal choice.
– PastorBrandon
The goal is not to bring people to Christianity, the goal is to bring people to LOVE. If that’s through Christianity, fine. If it’s another religion or no religion at all, fine.
What the world needs is love, not more people professing right belief.
– Rev. Dr. Caleb J. Lines
It will always baffle me how easily people will believe that the poor, the sick, the marginalized, and the immigrant are the cause of all their problems, rather than the people in the most powerful positions in our country who refuse to fix problems and exploit them instead.
A Christianity that causes the hungry to go without food, the sick to go without healthcare, the poor to be exploited, the stranger to be mistreated, and God’s creation to be ravaged, all while supporting the greedy and cruel as they satisfy their every desire, is a Christianity that can no longer claim to follow Christ.
Beware of Christians who think Genesis 1-2 provides a literal recounting of the earth’s origins, but that Jesus didn’t really mean it when he said “how you treat the hungry, thirsty, immigrant, poor, sick, and prisoner is how you treat me.”
A lot of Christians who are looking for the second coming of Jesus may be surprised to find that Jesus showed up again and again and again and they denied him food, housing assistance, medical care, over-incarcerated him, and deported him.
– Brian Recker FollowingJesus
“If I can unite in myself the thought and the devotion of Eastern and Western Christendom, the Greek and the Latin Fathers, the Russians with the Spanish mystics, I can prepare in myself the reunion of divided Christians. From that secret and unspoken unity in myself can eventually come a visible and manifest unity of all Christians.
– Thomas Merton