Erwin McManus Quotes

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.

My goal is to destroy Christianity.

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.

While we would love to have no criticism, probably if we had no critique, we wouldn't be doing anything meaningful.

I think we are all trying to figure out what it means to be the Church as opposed to just doing church.

You're not supposed to die with your potential. A life well lived squeezes all the potential placed within and does something with it.

When you begin to create the life of your dreams - or maybe better stated, when you begin to live the life that God dreams for you - you take responsibility to prepare for the future.

Gratitude changes your perspective about life. You see the future, experience the present, and remember the past in a dramatically different way.

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.

God allows and at times causes us to go through the kinds of circumstances that strip away all falsehood and leave us with our real selves. God's ultimate intent is not to leave us faithless, but to leave us faith-full. There are few things as exhilarating as going through the fire and finding that you had the resilience to make it through. All of us wonder at times whether we have what it takes. God wants to bring us to a place where we have no doubt of the work He has done within us.

God clarifies in the midst of obedience, not beforehand.

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.

The needs of the world are too big for us to be living such small lives.

We were created to be expressions of the goodness and wholeness of God.

What is the future you're creating right now?

Truth should never travel faster than love.

When we stop believing the world can become a better place, when we stop caring about the lives and conditions of others, we lose a part of ourselves.

It's not your freedom to choose that makes you free. It's what you choose in that freedom that makes you free.

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.

If you were meant to fly, not even running really fast is that impressive.

Jesus did not have a value for prayer for prayer's sake. He had a value for the intimate communion between God and man.

To live outside of God's will puts us in danger; to live in his will makes us dangerous.

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.

Our job is not to change people; our job is to connect people to Jesus, and it's Jesus' job to change people.

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.

This thing that haunts you, that never seems satisfied, the cravings in your soul that you are unable to satiate through all the success that the world can bring this is your soul screaming for God.

A world without God cannot wait for us to choose the safe path. If we wait for someone else to take the risk, we risk that no one will ever act and that nothing will ever be accomplished.

You are an artist. What work of art will you leave behind?

A person God himself deems as wise is one who not only hears His voice, but immediately begins to act upon His instruction.

Faith is the determination to create with our lives what only our hearts can conceive.

The world doesn't need more great leaders, it needs more great people who lead.

I refused to let go of what I had.

Promise Keepers was looking for a movement that can actualize the hope of Jesus, the hope that we see. And 'Uprising' was what they were looking for.

The Christian faith grew through story - not text. Only later did the stories become Scripture. While the Scripture must be held in the highest regard, we must not neglect the power of story.

People outside of the faith really appreciate Mosaic and really love what we're doing.

The epicenter of creativity and imagination should be the Church, reflecting the character and glory of God.

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.

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.

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.

I think many times Christians don't really take the opportunity to hear what people are saying and seeing in the world around them.

The history of God's people is not a record of God searching for courageous men and women who could handle the task, but God transforming the hearts of cowards and calling them to live courageous lives.

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 know it sounds crazy, but as soon as Christians start telling non-Christians how to live their lives, we've lost the Christian faith.

Greatness comes with discipline.

Los Angeles has been known as the center of creativity but has often been equally known for the absence of spirituality.

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.

A life well lived is the most exquisite work of art.

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.

The journey to freedom is paved by the substance of our character.

We need both to aspire and accomplish. Without a vision for your life, without a sense of purpose, you will begin to die a slow death.

Is it possible that the creative act is simply the materialization of the future- making the invisible, visible?

God gives God-sized dreams to people with God-shaped hearts.

When you're passionate about God, you can trust your passions.

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.

Two thousand years ago, God started a revolt against the religion He started. So don't ever put it past God to cause a groundswell movement against churches and Christian institutions that bear His name.

The church must acclimate to a changing world, or she will destine herself to irrelevance or even extinction ... One of those dramatic changes in our environment is the shift from words to images. To do church in a way that is entirely text driven is the kiss of death.

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.

You are both a work of art and an artist at work.

The bulk of our community is probably between the ages of 20 and 34.

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.

Courage frees us from the fears that would rob us of life itself.

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.

We are all hypocrites in transition. I am not who I want to be, but I am on the journey there, and thankfully I am not whom I used to be.

It is amazing where God will take you when you are willing to follow. Life is full of surprises when we choose mystery over security.

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.

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 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 future awaits those with the courage to create it.

Often we talk about God's ability to change lives without fully understanding how to access that power.

We're a part of the insurrection, trying to turn Christianity upside down. We're an experimental church: God's research and development arm.

Jesus' death wasn't to free us from dying, but to free us from the fear of death. Jesus came to liberate us so that we could die up front and then live. Jesus Christ wants to take us to places where only dead men and women can go.

The church does not exist for us. We are the church, and we exist for the world.

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.

The limitations you are willing to accept establish the boundaries of your existence.

Behind real freedom, there lies discipline.

I think a lot of us are not on a path; we're in a rut. We have confused comfort with peace, belief with faith, safety with wisdom, wealth with blessing, and existence with life.

We focus, in some ways, on how to disengage Jesus and the Bible from everything people know about Christianity as a religion.

The greatest enemy to the movement of Jesus Christ is Christianity.

We want to help everyone find meaning in their life and help translate the story that each person actually matters in the world.

The shape of your character is the shape of your future.

All the evidence you need to prove God is waiting within you to be discovered.

We have to ask ourselves, 'Am I really trying to discern God's will, or determine whether I want to do it?'

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.

When you live your life knowing the mission and calling and voice of God in your soul and you know where that compass is driving you forward, you will become a rare commodity in a world searching for direction.

You need to remember who God is, forget the painful wounds and let Him renew you.

I guess when I really think about it, God's voice sounds a lot like my voice.

Within a moment there is monumental potential. That is the mystery of a moment. It is small enough to ignore and big enough to change your life forever

Problems, obstacles, and challenges can either become the markers of our limits and limitations, or they can become the springboard into a whole new world.

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.

In some sense we are all hypocrites in transition.

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.

The most important moments rarely come at a convenient time

People who are fully alive look out of their minds to those who simply exist.