Shane Claiborne World Quotations

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.

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.

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.

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.

Recognizing that something is wrong is the first step toward changing the world.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Jesus did not send us into the world to make believers but to make disciples.

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.

Faith is not accepting the world as it is but insisting on building the world God wants.

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.

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.

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