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But as I pursued that dream of upward mobility preparing for college, things just didn't fit together. As I read Scriptures about how the last will be first, I started wondering why I was working so hard to be first.

Shane Claiborne

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Shane Claiborne
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: July 11
Author
Writer
Eastern Tennessee
Together
Started
Upward
Firsts
Wonder
Scriptures
First
Working
Wondering
Hard
Lasts
Pursued
Things
Last
Preparing
Read
Scripture
Didn
Fit
Dream
College
Mobility

More quotes by Shane Claiborne

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The death penalty has succeeded in America, not in spite of Christians, but because of us. The Bible Belt is the Death Belt. Wherever Christians are most concentrated is where executions are happening, and that's deeply troubling to me.
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It is the church's responsibility, the government's responsibility, and the personal responsibility of every one of us to love.
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The early Christians felt a deep collision with the empire in which they lived, and with politics as usual. They carelessly crossed party lines and built subversive friendships. And we should do that too.
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Over and over, when I ask God why all of these injustices are allowed to exist in the world, I can feel the Spirit whisper to me, You tell me why we allow this to happen. You are my body, my hands, my feet.
Shane Claiborne
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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.
Shane Claiborne
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I moved to Philadelphia to go to school at Eastern partly because I wanted to study the Bible and I also went to study sociology. I like how Karl Barth said we have to read the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other so that our faith doesn't just become a ticket into heaven and a license to ignore the world around us.
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Our churches should attract the people Jesus attracted and frustrate the people Jesus frustrated.
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I do believe that the Church is God's primary instrument for ushering in the Kingdom (God's dream) on earth as it is in heaven, but God is not limited to use only the Church, or only Christians for that matter.
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Somehow Jesus's reputation has survived all the embarrassing things that Christians have done in his name.
Shane Claiborne
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I just have a more holistic sense of what it means to be for life, knowing that life does not just begin at conception and end at birth, and that if I am going to discourage abortion, I had better be ready to adopt some babies and care for some mothers.
Shane Claiborne
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A lot of times people say whatever the government touches, they don't do that well, so why would we trust them with the power over life and death? Do we really believe the system is that perfect that it won't make any mistakes? You can't reverse these mistakes.
Shane Claiborne
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One by one, these disciples would infect the nations with grace. It wasn't a call to take the sword or the throne and force the world to bow. Rather, they were to live the contagious love of God, to woo the nations into a new future.
Shane Claiborne
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That is the power of the Eucharist. At the communion table you have rich and poor together in the early church and they were being challenged.
Shane Claiborne
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There is an innocence or purity that we see in renewals and in the Mennonite church and a new an invigorated civil rights movement.
Shane Claiborne
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I think they [ monastic folks ] were going to the desert to build a new society and in a sense to build a new world, a new culture together where it was easier to be good and holy.
Shane Claiborne
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As my friend said that when people say the church is full of hypocrites, he says we always have room for more.
Shane Claiborne
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It's unilaterally true that it costs more to maintain the death penalty than the alternatives to it, and we can leverage more resources to victims families. We can do all sorts of creative ways of healing the pain that people have done by channeling the energy and resources to other more redemptive forms of justice.
Shane Claiborne
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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.
Shane Claiborne
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That is part of our critique of some of the charity and service work is that we can still keep relationships at a distance by creating programs that offer services but we don't really create a reconciled community.
Shane Claiborne
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God doesn't want to change the world without you.
Shane Claiborne