Happy New Year, dear friends! Besides a favorite pic of my grandkids above and one of our church plant below, here are my favorite quotes from 2021 on…

How We Treat People:

• “The Bible calls on us to develop a theological imagination within which we see the world as a community and not a collection of hostilities.” -Esau McCaulley
• “Condemnation, especially with its usual accompaniments of anger and contempt and self-righteousness, blinds us to reality of the other person. We cannot ‘see clearly’ how to assist our brother, because we cannot see our brother.” -Dallas Willard
• “Don’t let being ‘right’ talk you out of being kind.” -Bob Goff
• “Let’s remember why we are here. We love people, we serve, and we show them why God’s way is better. Let’s concentrate on that rather than tearing people down or rejecting them or denigrating them in some way.” -Phillip Yancy
• “We’ve got to get rid of the ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ mentality that pervades so much of evangelicalism. How can we love ‘them’ if we are so focused on how ‘them’ is against ‘us?’…that one of ‘us’ could become ‘them’ is so threatening, that we cannot love. We can only oppose. For fear that others of ‘us’ could become ‘them’ if we don’t take a stand against the ‘them-ness’ of the one that once was ‘us’… not saying doctrine does not matter. Just saying love over all.” -Phil Vischer

Politics:

• “How do we repair our politics? The answer is almost impossibly complex, but here’s a powerful start. Friendship. Cultivate and sustain genuine friendship. Why? Because friendships don’t just enrich and restore our lives, they also enrich and restore our land.” -David French
• “The Sermon on the Mount is the politics of Jesus in outline form. Christians must continually ask, ‘Do my politics align with Jesus’ politics?’” -Brian Zahnd
• “If Christians see ourselves as people who are ‘losing’ a culture rather than people who have been sent on a mission to a culture, we will be outraged and hopeless instead of compassionate and convictional. If we do not love our mission field, we will have nothing to say to it.” -Russell Moore
• “Challenging an evangelical movement about conduct that is ‘not in step with the truth of the gospel’ (Gal. 2:14) often prompts a charge of fostering disunity- along with warnings about how important it is to remain unified in trying times. Yet unity is not… the hoarding of temporal influence…” -Russell Moore
• “Anytime the church gets in bed with politics, the church gets pregnant, and the offspring does not look like our Father in heaven.” -J.D. Greear
• “The way of the world is to use power and coercion to get things done; the way of the Christian is to use love, gentleness, and service to redeem the race. The world uses the authority of kings and generals to compel justice; the Christian becomes a servant and provides justice. ” -Eugene Peterson, As Kingfishers Catch Fire, 155.

The Gospel:

• “True Christians consider themselves not as satisfying some rigorous creditor, but as discharging a debt of gratitude.” -William Wilberforce
• “Do not despair over every relapse, which the God of patience has the patience to forgive and under which a sinner certainly should have the patience to humble himself. No, fear nothing and do not despair; he who says, “Come here” is with you on the way; from him there is help and forgiveness on the way of conversion that leads to him, and with him is rest.” -Søren Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity
• “God gets in the dirt three times that I can think of. To create Adam, to bury Moses, and to defend a woman caught in adultery. God is with us in the joy of birth, the pain of death, and kneels beside us in our shame. We can rest. God can handle our dirt.” -tweet from Heather Thompson Day

Church Planting & Outreach:

• May a merciful God preserve me from a Christian Church in which everyone is ‘good.’ I want to be in a church of the fainthearted, the failed, the feeble and the ailing… who believe in the forgiveness of sins. -Martin Luther
• “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.” -Madeline E’LEngle
• “What kind of church would we become if we simply allowed broken people to gather, and did not try to ‘fix’ them but simply to love and behold them, contemplating the shapes that broken pieces can inspire?” -Makoto Fujimura, Art and Faith: A Theology of Making
• “In earlier times… a lot of our evangelism began in Gen. 3. We have to begin in Genesis 1. We don’t live in a moralistic age where we need to prove people to be sinners. We live in an anxious age where we need to prove to people they’re worth something.” -Sam Allberry
• “In a world where we increasingly walk on eggshells—unsure when, if, and how we’re allowed to speak publicly on contested issues—Christianity can become a grace-filled haven for curious questioners, doubting dissidents… We should foster environments where the smart kids, the curious artists, the scientists, and the ‘freethinkers’ feel welcome and—perhaps more than anywhere else in the world—inspired. Let the world be in the business of de-platforming, disinviting, and shutting down debate. Christianity should invite it.” -Brett McCracken

Theology & the Accuracy of the Gospels:

• “One of the main reasons that theology (trying to think straight about who God is) matters is that we are called to love God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength. It matters that we learn more about who God is so we can praise him more appropriately.” -N.T. Wright (Simply Christian, 148-149)
• “Assessing… [the historical worth of the gospels] can be done, if at all, only by the kind of painstaking historical work which I and others have attempted… I simply record it as my conviction that the four canonical gospels, broadly speaking, present a portrait of Jesus of Nazareth which is firmly grounded in real history.” -N.T. Wright, Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense (New York: HarperOne, 2006), 98.

Guidance:

• “Yet… a gracious hand leads us in ways that we know not, and blesses us not only without, but even against, our plans and inclinations.” -William Wilberforce