Randy's Brew

Learning

"The most important things in our life are learned by trust, not by deduction from experiment."  -- Andy Crouch, Culture Making, 120

"Jesus Wants to Save Christians"

From the  back cover of Rob Bell and Don Golden's book Jesus Wants to Save Christians:

"There is a church in our area that recently added an addition to their building which cost more than $20 million.  Our local newspaper ran a front-page story not too long ago revealing that one in five people in our city lives in poverty.  This is a book about those two numbers.  It's a book about faith and fear, wealth and war, poverty, power, safety, terror, Bibles, bombs, and homeland insecurity; it's about empty empires and the truth that everybody's a priest; it's about oppression, occupation, and what happens when Christians support, animate, and participate in the very things Jesus came to set people free from.  It's about what it means to be a part of the church of Jesus in a world where some people fly planes into buildings while others pick up groceries in Hummers."

An Objective Hearing of Scripture

"If we may be freed by self-critical scholarly objectivity no longer to have to assume that the authority of the Bible resides in its saying things that we agree with, we may be free as well to hear more clearly what it really says instead of giving it credit for saying what we already think."  -- John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus, 214

It's What Is Inside that Counts

"What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us."  -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Thinking Missionally

"Missions is certainly not just a trip you do for two weeks every summer.  Missions is a way of life.  Every Christian is called to live missionally, to seek first the kingdom of God over the empires of this world--no longer as venturesome Westerners who go to an island of "barbarians" to translate the Bible for them.  We are to live as missionaries whether we are doctors, students, scientists, teachers, or jobless."  -- Shane Claiborne

Ouch!

"On the day of judgment, the Lord will not ask theological questions so much as He will ask if we fulfilled our social obligations.  He will ask whether or not we fed the hungry, clothed the naked, received and cared for aliens, and brought deliverance to captive peoples (see Matthew 25:31-46)."  Tony Campolo, Red Letter Christians, 24

It Takes Courage

"When you discover you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount."  -- Dakota saying

From McLaren, Again

"The more one respects Jesus, the more one must be brokenhearted, embarrassed, furious, or some combination thereof when one considers what we Christians have done with Jesus.  That's certainly true when it comes to calling Jesus Lord, something we Christians do a lot, often without the foggiest idea of what we mean.  Has he become (I shudder to ask this) less our Lord and more our Mascot?"  Brian McLaren, A Generous Orthodoxy, 88

A Different Perspective

"Learning is not the consequence of teaching or writing, but rather of thinking.  So a playful, provocative, unclear, but stimulating book could actually be more worth your money than a serious, clear book that tells you what to think but doesn't make you think."  Brian McLaren, A Generous Orthodoxy, 27

Favorite Quote

“Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.”  Jaroslav Pelikan, The Vindication of Tradition, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984, 65.