“We are made in the image of a God who is and who is acting. Thus, we must be who we are – bearers of the image of a relational God – and do what we were made by God to do – be fruitful in self-giving relationships. To be true to our identity as Christians, we must be in Christ and be doing mission, loving God and loving our neighbor. We are not who we truly are unless we are doing both.”
“The gospel is not a message of personal salvation from the world but a message of a world transfigured right down to its basic structures.” – Wink
“To work for human transformation as a Christian means working for the redemption of people, their social systems, and the environment that sustains their life – a whole gospel for all of life. This is the kingdom of God.”
“We are to see the world as created, fallen, and being redeemed, all at the same time….As a story, the parts are inseparable, each giving meaning to the other…Understanding creation helps us understand what was meant to be. Understanding the fall helps us recognize what is working against life in poor communities and why. Understanding the redemption story helps us know what can be and how and what can help us get there.”
“Christians cannot, indeed they must not, simply believe the gospel; they must practice it so that by God’s grace they might embody it’s reality – what the Christian scripture calls the down payment of God’s future glory.” – Dyrness
“With God’s help we can recompose our own stories so that we discover our true identity and true vocation, namely, being God’s children journeying toward God’s kingdom.”
“Knowing who we truly are and pursuing our true vocation is the key to more life, not just more things or even more knowledge.”
“Both identity and vocation are critical from a biblical perspective. We must know who we are and the purpose for which we were created. Therefore, restoring identity and recovering vocation must be the focus of a biblical understanding of human transformation.”
“Discipleship is too often reduced to developing one’s relationship with God, with little or no attention to developing one’s relationship with the community and the environment….If the ‘real’ world of Christians is solely the spiritual world, then discipleship is necessarily limited solely to spiritual things. This is an artificial limitation with tragic consequences.”
“Building community is what good neighbors do…people need good neighbors much more than they need good theology or good development theory.”
“Sin is not ultimately the bad things we do; sin is the inclination toward serving death as the ultimate reality rather than serving the God who brings life out of death.”
“Too often Christianity has become risk insurance; it is not about facing the monster [death] but about something good to do just in case…Life is a gamble, and in a world of individual risk management…church and faith can easily become a placebo to mitigate the anxiety of risk…religion has radically changed for Western people. It has changed from being about a community facing life and death to being a charm to carry as we toss the dice of life – hoping our church attendance and religious practice keeps us from snake eyes and the appearance of the blood-thirsty monster.”
“When our lives become about risk management rather than facing danger in our communities, we give over the fundamental operations of our lives to institutions.”
“We have shouted to the world that church is about community; the church of the future will not be about institutions or doctrine but about being together. We have shouted this, but maybe this is not what we should be shouting. Maybe we should be shouting, with so many others in the world, that we are lonely, that we are alone, that death kills all in our communities, and we are scared. Maybe the world does not believe because we have offered personal options for community instead of belonging in a community that knows and speaks of the despair of loneliness.”
“It is no longer important what you do; what is important is what you can buy….We often form identity not through vocation but through our possessions.”
“We still desire love…but ultimately our attention is not on love (a constant commitment to each other) but on intimacy, on the feelings of closeness.”
“The transition from identity being built on work and love to consumption and intimacy has the advantage of allowing us the freedom to quickly adapt to the future, changing our very self-definition with new information and new belonging…consumption and intimacy take little time – just a slide of the credit card or the gaze from another ….and you are in the land of new identity; you are ready to define yourself differently.”
“The style of our bodies becomes how we broadcast our self-definition. I use my body to hang my consumptions on, and I use my consumption to attract intimacy to my body.”
“My identity then can easily slip away from me, leaving me alone, leaving me without any knowledge of who I am and where I belong.”
“Here is the church presenting itself as a place able to be consumed, a place that offers intimacy.”
“The church can revive, revitalize, and reemerge all it wants, but until it has something to say to this question, “Who am I?” it has not left the mountain top of self-obsession to enter the valley of despair, the valley where identity is destroyed in the harsh aftertaste of consumption and the brokenness of lost intimacy.”
“But the church can only be this place welcome for those crushed if it stops asking, Who are we as the church? and begins asking, Who is this God that enters death? The primary question for our ministries is not, What is the church? But, who is God for us and how can the church witness to this God?”
“The church should be a weird community in a world that hides from death. The church should be a community of people that talk about despair, that confront it, knowing that when they do God is present, working life out of experiences of death.”
“[The church] exists in death because it knows from the view of the cross that this coming of God’s future only happens through death. But death is not the church’s obsession; no the church’s obsession is God and God’s future, a future where death is no more, where death that has been insidiously grafted within our structures is destroyed. Where the hungry are fed, the oppressed find freedom, and the sick are healed. The church exists in death, for if it doesn’t it has no footing in reality; but standing in death the church lives and acts for the future.”