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.
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.
So much of what comes out of the faith community seems so dour and somber, and we want to say, 'Hey, we're real people. You can be a person of faith and really enjoy life and laugh.'
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
How many people just get up on Monday and do the same thing they've done every single Monday - go to work and just turn on route automatic and no longer have any meaning in their life?
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.
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.
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.
