"Western history is now in a time of transition from the modern to an uncertain postmodern period. Indications of a postmodern worldview suggest that mystery, with its emphasis on complexity and ambiguity, community, with its emphasis on the interrelation of all things, and symbolic forms of communication, with an emphasis on the visual, are all central to the new way of thinking." -Robert Webber


"Christians in America are more Modern than they are Christian, and so Christians in America spend more time defending Modernism than they do Christianity." -Leonard Sweet


"Human kingdoms advance by force and violence with falling bombs and flying bullets, but God's Kingdom advances by stories, fictions, tales that are easily ignored and easily misunderstood." -Brian McLaren


"One is not justified by grace by believing in justification by faith. One is justified by faith by believing in Jesus." -N.T. Wright


"In contemporary North America more people believe in an afterlife than believe in God." -Anonymous


"Chuch people think about how to get people into church; Kingdom people think about how to get the church into the world." -Howard Snyder


"The Church exists today as resident aliens, an adventurous colony in a society of unbelief." -Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon


"We don't think ourselves into a new way of living, we live oursleves into a new way of thinking." -Richard Rohr


"I wonder if we're ready to consider the possiblity - just the possiblity now - that our Protestant-evangelical reaction to Darwin is amazingly similar to the Roman Catholic reaction to Copernicus and Galileo." -Brian McLaren


"In order to change culture we must engage it. And in order to engage culture we must know it." - Anonymous


"Cultural engagement is crucial, but we must remember that authentic engagement is never condescending. It's not "top down". It's shared knowing marked by equanimity... If we are truly going to incarnate the gospel in this new world, we as Christ's followers would do well to learn the spiritual rhythms of non-Christians and a dance that is, first of all, fully human. As we seek humble engagement instead of power, we will earn the right to draw others into the subtle rhythms of grace."
-Sally Morgenthaler


"We must understand and embrace the idea that our conceptions of Jesus are not Jesus himself. Sometimes when we Evangelicals talk about having faith in Jesus we're actually asking people to believe in our trusty conceptual framework rather than in the person of God." -Anonymous


"Liturgy offers an alternative to a rationalistic, abstract-belief-system faith. To be a good modern evangelical meant to have a belief system that could explain everything. That takes a lot of work - and never works very well (at least not in my experience)... In a more liturgical setting, I can participate in the Eucharist, recite the creeds, kneel, make the sign of the cross... physical, felt actions of the body, not merely abstract intellectual 'movements'. In other words, for people weary of trying to figure something out, it's more attractive to "behave myself into believing" than to "reason myself into believing." -Brian McLaren


"The medium is the message." -Marshall McLuhan


"Seeing is not believing - or so the saying goes. Well, neither is thinking believing. Intellectual ascent alone - thinking the right thoughts about the big issues as a means to salvation (salvation of any form)- is a bankrupt modern construct." -Darren King


"Show me how you live and I'll tell you what you believe." -Anonymous


"The work of theology must happen in full community. Of course it must include the ideas of those who have come before us, but to simply accept the work of our forebears in the faith as the end of the conversation is to outsource the real work of thinking, and that turns theology into a stagnant philosophy rather than an active pursuit of how we are to live God’s story in our time. The communities that are best equipped for the task of spiritual formation in the post-industrial age are those who make the practice of theology an essential element of their lives together." -Doug Pagitt


"One of the great insights of postmodern literary criticism is that no one, whether an author or a reader, objectvely approaches a text. Each of us is full of presuppositions that color the way we read and what we write. The point of this critique is not that we should quit reading and writing but that we need to be honest about what we bring to a text when we have it in front of us." -Tony Jones


"I have elsewhere proposed that the OT experience of and reflection upon exile is a helpful metaphor for understanding our current faith situation in the [west], and a model for pondering new forms of ecclesiology...

The exiled Jews of the OT were of course geographically displaced. More than that, however, the exiles experienced a loss of the structured, reliable world which gave them meaning and coherence, and they found themselves in a context where their most treasured and trusted symbols of faith were mocked, trivialized, or dismissed. Exile is not primarily geographical, but it is social, moral and cultural."
-Walter Brueggemman


"Faith is not simply a decision that is made or a commitment that is promised... Rather, faith is a new life that we practice. And that life is practiced in the context of relationship." -Leonard Sweet


"Every religion that does not affirm that God is hidden is not true." -Blaise Pascal


"There are two reasons people become religious: to escape mystery, to approach mystery." -M. Scott Peck