People on the receiving end of mission work are not clients who need fixing. We are all children of God who deserve to be seen.

Faith has not been over-intellectualized. The intellect has been depersonalized, stripped of identity, and removed from the emotional and relational context that give the words of faith their life and meaning.

Faith is not an intellectual endeavor. Faith is a relationship. To know facts is not the point. To be known is the heart of discipleship.

“Look at what we were” is the enemy of “look what God is doing.”

Emotion is the landscape upon which rationality is possible.

There is no justice that is not social because there is no individual that is not first community. There is no social that is not justice because there is no community without the vulnerability of forgiveness.

When we tell a story, we create the world in which to illustrate the nature of a particular truth or action. When we speak of objective fact, we create the illusion that there is meaning in what we say or do that is not itself a product of the stories that wrote us.

People love to win far more than we’re able to love. Until we learn to love more than we desire to win the world will never change.

The reason we cannot know God without scripture is not because scripture is or contains God. We cannot know God without scripture because scripture is and defines the identity of God’s people who are the means by which God chooses one for the sake of all. To know God is to be God’s chosen people and to be is to both embrace and transform that which made us what we are. If we are who we have been made by the history that actually happened, knowing anything clearly is accepting and rejecting the stories that wrote us.