I realize that I live on the bubble of insanity. I feel the weight of human suffering, loneliness and despair on me all the time. It's not getting easier; if anything, it's always right on the edge of my skin.
Erwin McManus
There are few things more powerful than a life lived with passionate clarity.
We are constantly learning and growing and changing. We are really an experiment. We are endeavoring to discover if a community of faith can exist purely for the good of others.
God has given us an imagination, and our imagination is really the principle tool from which all creativity and artistry comes from.
I think we've overstated that God is the God who wants us to obey. Obedience is not the end game. Obedience is only our calling so that we can step into our freedom.
One trend I see is the rejection of growth for self-discovery and the pursuit of authentic community. So we keep whittling our spiritual community to a smaller and smaller and more exclusive inner circle. The problem is if the diagnoses are wrong, so will be the cure.
I think we are all trying to figure out what it means to be the Church as opposed to just doing church.
I've worked in the business world and, as a futurist, the whole 20 years that I've led at Mosaic.
You can plant a church and grow a church. That's not that hard to do, but it's harder to be a viable source of transformation in a city or your time or space.
I had someone a month ago tell me at a campaign lunch that you can't be a Christian and a Democrat. I think that that view is dissipating very, very fast.
The reality is that every human being is placed on this planet, and one of the things that drives humans is their need for meaning, and if you can make every job meaningful, then you will guarantee that every job will be done to its highest level of excellence.
I have so much confidence in the reality of Jesus that I feel no pressure to try to make people act or be a certain way. I'm banking everything on the fact that God actually changes people.
If we keep asking the wrong questions, we are just going to get better wrong answers. The solution to lack of community isn't to give up on the community.
The word 'entertain' means to hold someone's attention, and what we want is a faith that is vibrant and alive and beautiful and real.
I think that's a part of what motivates me in my teaching and writing. Once the Gospel feels mainstream and becomes a nicely organized, orchestrated belief system, frankly, I don't think there is even an attraction to the human spirit.
Religion as a whole specializes in sin management. It's all about organizing humanity in such a way that we cause as little damage as possible.
One of the things you'll discover... as you listen to your own soul is that you spend a great amount of your life trying to bring meaning to your own life. And, by the way, most people are not going to church, so the place they're actually trying to find meaning in their life is at work.
I have an incredible confidence in the resilience of the human spirit and the creative ability of the Holy Spirit. So, if you can get people asking the right questions, it really will start moving in the right direction.
The system of Christian celebrity was not a good space for me, and it was brutal on my kids - my son in college was frequently confronted by people railing against me as a heretic.
It is the creative and enterprising spirit of people that is indispensable. Everything else is supplemental.
We're a part of the insurrection, trying to turn Christianity upside down. We're an experimental church: God's research and development arm.
Los Angeles has been known as the center of creativity but has often been equally known for the absence of spirituality.
I became a Christian because I met God.
I think Christianity is the same as Buddhism and Hinduism - whenever a religion begins to say that these are the things you have to do to be loved by God, you have a religion.
There is something powerful about singing to God as an act of worship, but it is time to reframe our perspective and our language to genuinely encompass all of life as worship.
We need to understand that Christianity is about changing; it is not about a religion.
I think many times Christians don't really take the opportunity to hear what people are saying and seeing in the world around them.
When we look at history, we see history is made up of the heroes of their times. Yet, somehow we miss this when we put on the lens of the Scriptures.
God has leveraged the human spirit to move in His direction, and all the material we need to bring a person to the realization that they were created by God actually already exists inside that person.
People outside of the faith really appreciate Mosaic and really love what we're doing.
The Bible has been trapped in modernity. Everything has to work perfectly. And if everything doesn't fit in a Lego-oriented functionality, then we don't deal with it as Christians.
Often we talk about God's ability to change lives without fully understanding how to access that power.
We focus, in some ways, on how to disengage Jesus and the Bible from everything people know about Christianity as a religion.
Wherever and whenever God is moving in a new and fresh way, there emerges a new song!
From the beginning, our community has been focused on people outside of Christianity. But that emphasis means that a lot of hard work is represented in every person who is baptized.
The Bible is not an antiquated text. The scriptures are the text that will lead us into the future.
If you come at the Bible as if it's a document of encyclopedic information, you've pretty much killed any kind of life change in a seeker and unbeliever.
I think the exploration and the search for who Jesus is, and that 2,000 years later we're still trying to figure out who He was, and did He really rise from the dead... And I think for me, the answer is 'yes,' and that's why we're talking about Him today.
If you look at it from just a pure economic basis, technology is replacing all of the jobs robots can do, and machinery is replacing the jobs that humans once held. If we don't train our children to imagine, to create, they're going to be unemployable.
I love what Monet, Picasso, Van Gogh and Jesus all said - that love is really the driving principle of the creative act. In fact, they would say that great art is always inspired by love.
When researchers try to break down what is happening at Mosaic, far too often they see the skin and miss the heart.
I know it sounds crazy, but as soon as Christians start telling non-Christians how to live their lives, we've lost the Christian faith.
Our job is not to change people; our job is to connect people to Jesus, and it's Jesus' job to change people.
You have a generation that is saying we are tapping out of religion in many ways. But what they are not saying is that we are tapping out of a serious search for meaning in life.
The bulk of our community is probably between the ages of 20 and 34.
My primary assessment would be because American Christians tend to be incredibly self-indulgent, so they see the church as a place there for them to meet their needs and to express faith in a way that is meaningful for them.
I think the opportunity to bring together the people in the world of politics, business and entertainment and have an opportunity to listen to their best learning and thinking is a great opportunity.
I hope my greatest contribution will be to try to extract principles of truth that will cause us to live our lives in a more effective way and to advance Jesus' purpose in the world.
While we would love to have no criticism, probably if we had no critique, we wouldn't be doing anything meaningful.
For Christians, they need to access the power of Jesus and not look at Christianity as a religion. It is our Lord Jesus that makes you change, and Christians need to actualize it and put it into practice.
