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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
Hard
Lasts
Pursued
Things
Last
Preparing
Read
Scripture
Didn
Fit
Dream
College
Mobility
Together
Started
Upward
Firsts
Wonder
Scriptures
First
Working
Wondering

More quotes by Shane Claiborne

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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.
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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.
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Philadelphia caught my attention in 1995 when a group of homeless families were living in an abandoned cathedral. Even from the beginning they connected theology with what they were doing. They put a banner on the front of the cathedral that said, How can we worship a homeless man on Sunday and ignore one on Monday.
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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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I think of the Catholic worker movement and Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin and others.
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[People] need to find words that can reconnect them with each other. That is the gift of good liturgy, yeah. We're not talking about fluffy stuff. We're talking about real life for people around the world. Our prayers should be said like the daily breath that gives us life.
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The monastic folks have the spirit of being in the world but not of the world, sort of peculiar people who have gone to the desert to live on the margins of the empire.
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I wondered if there were other restless people asking the question with me: What if Jesus meant the stuff he said?.
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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.
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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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.
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The future of the church is also about looking back and looking at where we see these wonderful renewals and what we can learn from the early church. I think it is a really exciting time where Phyllis Tickle said every few hundred years the church needs a rummage sale where we can get rid of some of the clutter.
Shane Claiborne
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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.
Shane Claiborne
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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.
Shane Claiborne
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I think in the end, God's justice is redemptive, it's restorative, it's about giving life, not taking life.
Shane Claiborne
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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.
Shane Claiborne
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I'm just not convinced that Jesus is going to say, When I was hungry, you gave a check to the United Way and they fed me.
Shane Claiborne
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Sometimes our tunnel vision is limited to what we see outside our window. Until racial injustice becomes personal then I don't think it moves us in our gut.
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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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.
Shane Claiborne