Todd Hiestand » Quotables

The Bible and Mission

Todd — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 20:55:22 +0000

“The Bible renders to us the story of God’s mission through God’s people in their engagement with God’s world for the sake of the whole of God’s creation…”

The Mission of God
Christopher Wright

Begin Reimagining Your Life…

Todd — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 17:57:49 +0000

“We can begin [to reorganize our lives around the Kingdom of God] by surrounding ourselves with other people who are asking the same questions – who are suspicious of the emptiness of consumption and who dare to risk just a little bit more and dare to love just a little bit deeper.”

- Shane Claiborne as quoted by Tom Sine in The New Conspirators

Guder and The Missional Church

Todd — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 14:23:22 +0000

“We believe that we are the church, that is, we are a community of God’s people called and set apart for witness to the good news of Jesus Christ. We are blessed to be a blessing. As the Father has sent Christ, so Christ sends us. Jesus Christ has defined us as his witnesses where we are. We believe therefore that the Holy Spirit not only calls us but also enables and gifts us for that mission. Our task is to determine the particular focus and direction of our mission. We are to identify the charisms given by the Spirit for mission. We have the responsibility and the capacity, through the Holy Spirit, to shape ourselves for faithful witness. Our purpose defines our organizational structures – which means that our mission challenges us to re-form our structures so that we can be faithful in our witness.”

Darrell Guder in Missional Church

Poverty

Todd — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 21:48:40 +0000

“Poor people die not only because of the world’s indifference to their poverty, but also because of ineffective efforts by those who do care…”

William Easterly, in the book The White Man’s Burden

Christian Contrairians

Todd — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 16:35:29 +0000

“The stickler is that Christianity doesn’t make a very good religion in this sense. Christianity is not a faith of conservation and preservation. It is a faith of creation, participation, movement, and change. For conservation to happen, something needs to be stopped. Something needs to be limited. Something needs to be ignored. And too often that ’something’ is the unstoppable, unlimited, impossible – to -ignore activity of God at work in the world.”

Doug Pagitt (From the first chapter in his new book. Read the first chapter here)

NT Wright on Preaching the Resurrection

Todd — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 16:24:23 +0000

“So many people think preaching the Resurrection means doing a little bit of apologetics in the pulpit to prove it really is true. Others simply say, “Jesus is raised, therefore there is a life after death.” This isn’t the point! Those types of sermons may be necessary, but there’s more to it than that. To preach the Resurrection is to announce the fact that the world is a different place, and that we have to live in that “different-ness.” The Resurrection is not just God doing a wacky miracle at one time. We have to preach it in a way that says this was the turning point in world history.”

NT Wright (thanks Bob for the link)

Life Together Quote

Todd — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 15:25:46 +0000

“It is not simply to be taken for granted that the Christian has the privilege of living among other Christians.”

Dietrich Bonhoffer in Life Together

Privatizing the Faith

Todd — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 02:21:24 +0000

“The community that confesses that Jesus is Lord has been, from the very beginning, a movement launched into the public life of mankind. The Greco-Roman world in which the New Testament was written was full of societies offering to those who wished to join a way of personal salvation through religious teaching and practice. There were several commonly used Greek words for such societies. At no time did the church use any of these names for itself. It was not, and could not be, a society offering personal salvation for those who cared to avail themselves of it teaching and practice. It was from the beginning a movement claiming the allegiance of all peoples, and it used for itself with almost totally consistency the name ecclesia – the assembly of all citizens called to deal with the public affairs of the city…the church could have escaped persecution by the Roman Empire if it had been content to be treated as a “cultus privatus” – one of the many forms of personal religion. But it was not. Its affirmation that “Jesus is Lord” implied a public, universal claim that was bound to eventually clash with the cultus publicus of the empire…”

Lesslie Newbigin in The Open Secret

Eugene Peterson on Life and Christ

Todd — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 13:07:24 +0000

“Rescue me from the person who tells me about life and omits Christ, who is wise in the ways of the world and ignores the movement of the Spirit.”

- Eugene Peterson in A Long Obedience in the Same DirectionA Long Obedience in the Same Direction

Newbigin on Private and Public Truth

Todd — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 22:41:18 +0000

“We read [scripture], naturally, as part of our real history, secular history, the history of which we are a part. What other history is there? There are not different histories, but there are different ways of understanding history…it is clearly an illusion to imagine that there are two kinds of history – sacred and profane, salvation history and secular history.”
- Lesslie Newbigin in Foolishness to the Greeks