"Becoming an adventurous, liminal church means getting over risk aversion. Often the difference between a successful person (or organization) and a failure lies not in having better abilities or ideas, but in having the courage to bet on one’s ideas, to take a calculated risk — and to act."

"Many church folk, in their self-conscious attempt to be overtly morally upright, emit all the wrong signals, thus messing with people’s perception of the gospel."

"The safety-obsessed church lacks the inner dynamic to foster profound missional impact in our time."

"The ultimate solution to the problem of spiritual complacency is to create a systematically embedded culture of holy urgency."

"Because of this global uncertainty, the visionary and the adventurous amongst us will get to shape the future of the twenty-first century—the church included."

"Our preferences for stability and security blind us to the opportunities for adventure when they present themselves."

"If we are going to make the change from community to communitas, and not just end up with an unsustainable adrenaline-junkie culture, we must have a sophisticated process to form people into adventurer-disciples."

"The kingdom of God is a crash-bang opera: the king is dramatic, demanding, and unavoidable."

"But herein lies the rub: Christianity has been on a long-term trend of decline in every Western cultural context that we can identify."

"We will have to take risks, to chance failure, to be willing to walk away from the familiar paths that have brought us to this point."

"Indeed, we believe that twenty-first century Christians are yearning to see the adventure put back into Christianity, into the relationship with the living God — where it rightly belongs."

"We are the people of the ultimate Quest — we are on a wild, and sometimes dangerous, adventure to save the world."

"It is vital to see ourselves as part of an ongoing journey started by our heroes in the Scriptures."

"What we find in our heroes and martyrs is a living witness to the fact that the true life of faith can only be nobly inspired and rightly lived if one takes it on bravely and gallantly, as something of a grand adventure in which we set out into an unknown country to face many a danger, to meet many a joy, to find many a comrade, to win and lose many a battle."

"Whether we like it or not, we are all on a journey, a Quest if you will, every day of our lives, and the path we must take is full of perils, and our destiny can never be predicted in advance."

"But the standard churchy spirituality doesn’t require any real action, courage, or sacrifice from its attendees."

"Those of us with too much invested in the way things are will never embrace the revolutionary cause required for wholesale change."

"The church of Jesus needs to wake up from the exile of passivity and embrace liminality and adventure or continue to remain a religious ghetto for culturally co-opted, fearful, middle-class folk."

"This submission to the threshold of a cross is at the very root of our following Jesus; it changes the game completely."

"At some point preoccupation with safety can get in the way of living full lives."

"In order to develop a pioneering missional spirit, a capacity for genuine ecclesial innovation, let along engender daring discipleship, we are going to need the capacity to take a courageous stand when and where necessary."

"It is idle to say you are only fining a man a farthing, if he chooses to say it is his lucky farthing. It is waste of breath to call a thing a rag when he calls it a flag. This is the fallacy of those who, like Mr. Gerald Stanley Lee, the able American critic, imagine that a war must be a misunderstanding, which social intercourse and explanation would have set right."

"What was invented two thousand years ago was the spirit of Christianity."

"Turning the other cheek is a kind of moral jiu-jitsu."

"The great man is the man who can get himself made and who will get himself made out of anything he finds at hand."

"Crowds speak in heroes."

"America is a tune. It must be sung together."

"Machinery is the subconscious mind of the world."

"A man's success in business today turns upon his power of getting people to believe he has something that they want."

"It is never the machines that are dead. It is only the mechanically-minded men that are dead."

"I have seen that Man moves over with each new generation into a bigger body, more awful, more reverent and more free than he has had before."

"There is never any real danger in allowing a pedestal for a hero. He never has time to sit on it. One sees him always over and over again kicking his pedestal out from under him, and using it to batter a world with."

"Business today consists in persuading crowds."

"Let us see to it that in our schools, as far as possible, every week, some lessons from Scripture, in the language of the Scripture are learned."

"That soul is on the certain path toward light which, sincerely desiring the light, constantly submits to the claims of the light as they are made known. That soul cannot stay in darkness, any more than a flower opening its petals broadly to the sun can stay in shadow."

"There it is — in such patient silence — that we accumulate the inward power which we distribute and spend in action; that the soul acquires a greater and more vigorous being, and gathers up its collective forces to bear down upon the piecemeal difficulties of life and scatter them to dust; there alone can we enter into that spirit of self-abandonment by which we take up the cross of duty, however heavy, with feet however worn and bleeding."

""Lo! I am with you alway, even to the end of the world," is not an idle — not an unfulfilled promise. He is not with us merely as a thought, but as a life. He gathers us up into His own being. He floods us with it. There is inspiration here, certainty for any duty, for any endurance. The faith, Christ with me, can make the poorest and the hardest life luminous; joyous, glorious."

"Nobody, I believe, will deny, that we are to form our judgment of the true nature of the human mind, not from sloth and stupidity of the most degenerate and vilest of men, but from the sentiments and fervent desires of the best and wisest of the species."

"How shall I do to love? Believe. How shall I do to believe? Love."

"It is a union with a Higher Good by love, that alone is endless perfection. The only sufficient object for man must be something that adds to and perfects his nature, to which he must be united in love; somewhat higher than himself, yea, the highest of all, the Father of spirits. That alone completes a spirit and blesses it, — to love Him, the spring of spirits."

"A chaste and lucid style is indicative of the same personal traits in the author."

"As "unkindness has no remedy at law," let its avoidance be with you a point of honor."

"God's glowing covenant."

"Real happiness is cheap enough, yet how dearly we pay for its counterfeit."

"Hatred is self-punishment."

"Idleness is emptiness; the tree in which the sap is stagnant, remains fruitless."

"If our Creator has so bountifully provided for our existence here, which is but momentary, and for our temporal wants, which will soon be forgotten, how much more must He have done for our enjoyment in the everlasting world?"

"Humanity, in the aggregate, is progressing, and philanthropy looks forward hopefully."

"Education commences at the mother's knee, and every word spoken within the hearsay of little children tends towards the formation of character."

"There is one inevitable criterion of judgment touching religious faith in doctrinal matters. Can you reduce it to practice? If not, have none of it."