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The church is like Noah's ark. It stinks, but if you get out of it, you'll drown.

Shane Claiborne

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Shane Claiborne
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: July 11
Author
Writer
Eastern Tennessee
Stinks
Ark
Noah
Stink
Drown
Church
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More quotes by Shane Claiborne

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It is the church's job, as Dr. [Martin Luther] King says, to be the conscience of the state, not the chaplain of the state.
Shane Claiborne
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It's hard to hear the gentle whisper of the Spirit amid the noise of Christendom.
Shane Claiborne
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There is extreme poverty in Appalachia, where I was, and increasingly poverty is not just an urban thing.
Shane Claiborne
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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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There is a difference between feeding someone and eating dinner with them. If every Christian at home just made room for the stranger we would end homelessness overnight.
Shane Claiborne
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Because you can poke someone's eye out legally doesn't mean you should and that it's right. The Bible teaches us a more perfect justice.
Shane Claiborne
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We've heard from people all around the world, telling us that this is their reality. People need a way to connect the sometimes really hard reality in which they wake up each morning with the movement of the Spirit.
Shane Claiborne
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Whenever folks say radical Christianity is a phase of youth, I tell them they need to meet our 80-year-old nun or my friend Tony Campolo.
Shane Claiborne
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God comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable.
Shane Claiborne
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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.
Shane Claiborne
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Liturgy and worship were never meant to be confined to the cathedrals and sanctuaries. Liturgy at its best can be performed like a circus or theater - making the Gospel visible as a witness to the world around us.
Shane Claiborne
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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.
Shane Claiborne
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We say it is idealistic to think we can continue to live the way we live - with 5% of the world using half the world's resources, with $20,000 a second being spent on war.
Shane Claiborne
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The question for me is not are we political, but how are we political? We need to be politically engaged, but peculiar in how we engage.
Shane Claiborne
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There is real value in these local congregations. For me, a lot of it is the value of the sacraments we share. In neighborhoods like ours, the churches provide stability.
Shane Claiborne
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Biological family is too small of a vision. Patriotism is far too myopic. A love for our own relatives and a love for the people of our own country are not bad things, but our love does not stop at the border.
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.
Shane Claiborne
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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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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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Our churches should attract the people Jesus attracted and frustrate the people Jesus frustrated.
Shane Claiborne