Shane Claiborne Church Quotations

There are financial bankruptcies in many parts of the church. No question about that. But we see the possibility of reimagining and revitalizing the church.

We're not church planters. We are community planters and, as we work in our communities, we join local churches.

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.

We know the Church wasn't born 200 years ago. It's encouraging to see some of the post-denominational churches actually wanting to reconnect with the story and the prayer life of the larger Church.

Certainly the institutional church is ill. It's hemorrhaging young people at an astronomical rate.

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.

It is the church's responsibility, the government's responsibility, and the personal responsibility of every one of us to love.

The best critique of what is wrong is the practice of something better. So let's stop complaining about the church we've experienced and work on becoming the church we dream of.

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

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.

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.

To refer to the Church as a building is to call people 2 x 4's.

When the church takes affairs of the state more seriously than they do Jesus, Pax Romana becomes its gospel and the president becomes the Son of God.

As my friend said that when people say the church is full of hypocrites, he says we always have room for more.

There is an innocence or purity that we see in renewals and in the Mennonite church and a new an invigorated civil rights movement.

The future of the church is also about looking back and looking at where we see these wonderful renewals and what we can learn from the early church. I think it is a really exciting time where Phyllis Tickle said every few hundred years the church needs a rummage sale where we can get rid of some of the clutter.

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.

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.