Shane Claiborne Quotes

Perhaps there is no more dangerous place for a Christian to be than in safety and comfort, detached from the suffering of others.

The Christian icon is not the Stars and Stripes but a cross-flag, and its emblem is not a donkey, an elephant, or an eagle, but a slaughtered lamb.

Most good things have been said far too many times and just need to be lived.

All around you, people will be tiptoeing through life, just to arrive at death safely. But dear children, do not tiptoe. Run, hop, skip, or dance, just don't tiptoe.

How can we worship a homeless man on Sunday and ignore one on Monday?

God comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable.

When we ask God to move a mountain, God may give us a shovel.

There are some things to die for but none to kill for.

It is a beautiful thing when folks in poverty are no longer just a missions project but become genuine friends and family with whom we laugh, cry, dream and struggle.

I learned more about God from the tears of homeless mothers than any systematic theology ever taught me.

I wondered if there were other restless people asking the question with me: What if Jesus meant the stuff he said?.

We give people fish. We teach them to fish. We tear down the walls that have been built up around the fish pond. And we figure out who polluted it.

Christianity is at its best when it is peculiar, marginalized, suffering, and it is at its worst when it is popular, credible, triumphal, and powerful.

The more I get to know Jesus, the more trouble he seems to get me into.

If we believe terrorists are past redemption, we should just rip up like 1/2 the New Testament because it was written by one.

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

There is nothing more sickening than talking about poverty over a fancy dinner.

It's hard to hear the gentle whisper of the Spirit amid the noise of Christendom.

A pastor friend of mine said, "Our problem is that we no longer have martyrs. We only have celebrities.

It doesn't matter who you are. Everyone has something to offer the movement of justice

The more I have read the Bible and studied the life of Jesus, the more I have become convinced that Christianity spreads best not through force but through fascination.

Prayer is not so much about convincing God to do what we want God to do as it is about convincing ourselves to do what God wants us to do.

The work of community, love, reconciliation, restoration is the work we cannot leave up to politicians. This is the work we are all called to do.

In the Bible, God uses brothel owners, pagan kings, murderers and mercenaries as instruments of good; at one point God even speaks to a guy named Balaam through his donkey.

Mother Theresa always said, "Calcuttas are everywhere if only we have eyes to see. Find your Calcutta."

The church is a place where broken people can fall in love with a beautiful God.

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.

Charity is merely returning what we have stolen.

Christians pretty much live like everybody else, they just sprinkle a little Jesus in along the way.

The greatest sin of political imagination: Thinking there is no other way except the filthy rotten system we have today.

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.

To all my nonbelieving, sort-of-believing, and used-to-be-believing friends: I feel like I should begin with a confession. I am sorry that so often the biggest obstacle to God has been Christians.

My goal is to speak the truth in love. There are a lot of people speaking the truth with no love, and there are a lot of people talking about love without much truth.

Violence is for those who have lost their imagination.

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.

You can't really learn God's hope like you learn the logic of an argument or the details of a story. It's more like learning to belly laugh. You catch hope from someone who has it down in their gut.

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.

I engage with local politics because it affects people I love. And I engage in national politics because it affects people I love.

The world is looking, not for Christians who are perfect, but for Christians who are honest and who are willing to be honest with some of our contradictions and hypocrisy.

We are setting ourselves up for disappointment if our hope is built on anything less than Jesus.

We have to use our discontentment to engage rather than disengage - our hope has to be more powerful than our cynicism.

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

When we realize that we are both wretched and beautiful, we are freed up to see others the same way.

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

Rather than finding the devil "out there," we battle the devil within us. The revolution starts inside each of us.

One thing that's clear in the Scriptures is that the nations do not lead people to peace; rather, people lead the nations to peace.

There is a difference between feeding someone and eating dinner with them. If every Christian at home just made room for the stranger we would end homelessness overnight.

Dance until they kill you, and then we'll dance some more.

Every 70-year-old needs a young person in their lives to mentor, and every 20-year-old needs a senior.

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.