John Pavlovitz > Quotes

“One of the biggest, most damaging mistakes too many Christians so willingly make is assuming that God is as much of a judgmental jerk as we are. But what if we could make room for difference and space for disagreement in our spiritual communities? What if we could give permission for moral failure and freedom to not be certain, and the chance to gloriously fail without needing those things to become black marks against people or death-penalty offenses? What if we made space for people who are as screwed up as we are?”
― John Pavlovitz, A Bigger Table: Building Messy, Authentic, and Hopeful Spiritual Community

“I knew without blinking that I didn't have to choose between loving God and loving my brother - and he didn't have to choose between being gay and being adored by God.”
― John Pavlovitz, A Bigger Table: Building Messy, Authentic, and Hopeful Spiritual Community

“Jesus was far more relational then he was theological.”
― John Pavlovitz, A Bigger Table: Building Messy, Authentic, and Hopeful Spiritual Community

“Discrimination hinders people from finding community, and it robs the Church of the tremendous gifts that diversity brings.”
― John Pavlovitz, A Bigger Table: Building Messy, Authentic, and Hopeful Spiritual Community

“Frame the spiritual journey as a stark good-vs.-evil battle of warring sides long enough and you’ll eventually see the Church and those around you in the same way too. You’ll begin to filter the world through the lens of conflict. Everything becomes a threat to the family; everyone becomes a potential enemy. Fear becomes the engine that drives the whole thing. When this happens, your default response to people who are different or who challenge you can turn from compassion to contempt. You become less like God and more like the Godfather. In those times, instead of being a tool to fit your heart for invitation, faith can become a weapon to defend yourself against the encroaching sinners threatening God’s people—whom we conveniently always consider ourselves among. Religion becomes a cold, cruel distance maker, pushing from the table people who aren’t part of the brotherhood and don’t march in lockstep with the others.”
― John Pavlovitz, A Bigger Table: Building Messy, Authentic, and Hopeful Spiritual Community

“Individually and collectively, we will have to be the resistance—offering daily, bold, defiant pushback against all that feels wrong here. This pushback will come as we loudly and unapologetically speak truth where truth is not welcome. It will come as we connect with one another on social media and in faith communities and in our neighborhoods, and as we work together to demand accountability from our elected officials and pastoral leaders. It will come in the small things: in the art we create and the conversations we have and the quiet gestures of compassion that are barely visible. It will come in the way we fully celebrate daily life: having dinner with friends, driving through the countryside, playing in the yard with our children, laughing at a movie we love. It will come as we use the shared resources of our experience and our talents and our numbers to ensure that our children inherit a world worth being here for. It will come as we transform our grief into goodness.”
― John Pavlovitz, A Bigger Table: Building Messy, Authentic, and Hopeful Spiritual Community

“This is often the primary difference between him and so many of those of us who follow him. When we encounter the many ills of the world, we find ourselves growing more and more callous toward people, more and more judgmental, less and less hopeful. Rather than seeing the hurting humanity we encounter every day as an opportunity to be the very loving presence of Jesus, we see them as reason to withdraw from it all. Faith becomes about retreating from the world when it should be about moving toward it. As we walk deeper into organized religion, we run the risk of eventually becoming fully blind to the tangible suffering around us, less concerned about mending wounds or changing systems, and more preoccupied with saving or condemning souls. In this way, the spiritual eyes through which we see the world change everything. If our default lens is sin, we tend to look ahead to the afterlife, but if we focus on suffering, we’ll lean toward presently transforming the planet in real time—and we’ll create community accordingly. The former seeks to help people escape the encroaching moral decay by getting them into heaven; the latter takes seriously the prayer Jesus teaches his disciples, that they would make the kingdom come—that through lives resembling Christ and work that perpetuates his work, we would actually bring heaven down. Practically speaking, sin management seems easier because essentially all that is required of us is to preach, to call out people’s errors and invite them to repentance, and to feel we’ve been faithful. But seeing suffering requires us to step into the broken, jagged chaos of people’s lives to be agents of healing and change. It’s far more time consuming and much more difficult to do as a faith community. It is a lot easier to train preachers to lead people in a Sinner’s Prayer than it is to equip them to address the systematic injustices around them.”
― John Pavlovitz, A Bigger Table: Building Messy, Authentic, and Hopeful Spiritual Community

“Christianity as modeled by Jesus was never meant to hold power.”
― John Pavlovitz, If God Is Love, Don't Be a Jerk: Finding a Faith That Makes Us Better Humans

“The distinction between seeing sin and seeing suffering is revelatory if we really let it seep into the deepest hollows of our hearts.”
― John Pavlovitz, A Bigger Table: Building Messy, Authentic, and Hopeful Spiritual Community

“The less dependent we are on a building for an hour on Sunday to replicate the transcendent encounter we have as we live through this life, the more we are able to understand the world as sacred, to embrace the truth that the place where we stand is always holy ground—that we are forever in the thin places if we pay attention. When you begin to unbox God, you may find yourself uncomfortable in church or religion because these places begin to feel restrictive to your soul. The prayers might no longer ring as true, the creeds may seem unwieldy, and the sermons start to sound alarms of hypocrisy.”
― John Pavlovitz, If God Is Love, Don't Be a Jerk: Finding a Faith That Makes Us Better Humans

“I’m tired of religious people being a loud, loveless noise in the world while supposedly claiming to speak for a God who is love.”
― John Pavlovitz, Stuff That Needs To Be Said: Essential Words on Life, Death, Faith, Politics, Love, and Giving a Damn

“loveless, Jesus-less Christianity is going to leave us fractured in ways we’ve never been before.”
― John Pavlovitz, If God Is Love, Don't Be a Jerk: Finding a Faith That Makes Us Better Humans

“For as long as human beings have been declaring devotion to a God of love, they have been gloriously screwing it up by being hateful in the process.”
― John Pavlovitz, If God Is Love, Don't Be a Jerk: Finding a Faith That Makes Us Better Humans

“I can’t fathom the transformation of a basket of food to accommodate a multitude (heck, I’m not even sure how our toaster works), but I can see the boundless compassion of the open table and endeavor to re-create that on whatever spot I stand at any given moment and with the people in my midst. Jesus feeds people. That’s what he does. And as striking as what he does is, equally revelatory is what he doesn’t do here. There’s no altar call, no spiritual gifts assessment, no membership class, no moral screening, no litmus test to verify everyone’s theology and to identify those worthy enough to earn a seat at the table. Their hunger and Jesus’ love for them alone, nothing else, make them worthy. This is a serious gut check for us.”
― John Pavlovitz, A Bigger Table: Building Messy, Authentic, and Hopeful Spiritual Community

“At the end of your time here, you will either have lived as a table maker or a wall builder.”
― John Pavlovitz

“People deserve a God who so loves the world, not a God who chooses America First;”
― John Pavlovitz, If God Is Love, Don't Be a Jerk: Finding a Faith That Makes Us Better Humans

“We all feel the pressure to live without sadness or doubt, but that doesn’t come from God. The scriptures remind us that the journey with Jesus is just as often spent in the shadow places, the rough and darkened stretches where light and hope seem in short supply. We tend to see these moments as defeats, to imagine that they are places we need to emerge from in order to be properly spiritual—when in reality the low places are where we meet our Maker.”
― John Pavlovitz, Low: An Honest Advent Devotional

“they worship a deity made in their own image: white, American, Republican, male—and perpetually terrified of Muslims, immigrants, science, gay children, special counsel reports, mandalas, Harry Potter, Starbucks holiday cups, yoga, wind turbines—everything.”
― John Pavlovitz, If God Is Love, Don't Be a Jerk: Finding a Faith That Makes Us Better Humans

“One of the most freeing lessons I ever learned as a pastor is that I cannot do spiritual things; I can only do physical things. I can only respond in flesh and blood to what I believe God is saying, and then rest in the results. God is the only One who can do soul stuff. My most pressing job as a pastor is often to get out of the way—and it ain’t easy.”
― John Pavlovitz, A Bigger Table: Building Messy, Authentic, and Hopeful Spiritual Community

“One thing that can be so easy to forget when we are struggling with our faith is that God is not struggling with us. God sees the cavernous depths of our hearts, the meandering curves of our road, and has a mercy for us that transcends what we are capable of understanding. Because of this we can be encouraged even when we waver, knowing we are fully loved even still.”
― John Pavlovitz, Low: An Honest Advent Devotional

“I’m perfectly comfortable hovering somewhere between orthodoxy and heresy.”
― John Pavlovitz, If God Is Love, Don't Be a Jerk: Finding a Faith That Makes Us Better Humans

“Today, think about the character traits of Jesus that resonate most deeply with you (especially those that seem lacking in the world), and realize that these are what you are invited to birth into the world: compassion, forgiveness, courage, honesty. Let goodness form within you today, and find a way to release it into the world.”
― John Pavlovitz, Low: An Honest Advent Devotional

“I still ask for people to pray and I still pray, but I try to reorient my prayers these days. I no longer believe in a supernatural Santa Claus who dispenses life and death based on the conduct or the heart of the recipients and their friends. I don’t believe in a God who withholds miraculous healing or compassionate care until sufficiently begged by us to do so. I believe prayer works by unlocking our empathy for others, that it knits us together in deeper relationship. I believe it to be a beautiful expression of love for and solidarity with people who are suffering; that it connects us personally to one another and to God in ways that cannot be quantified. I believe it is a sacred act of kindness we extend to other human beings to declare oneness with them. But I don’t believe prayer can change God’s mind about healing people we love—nor do I want it to.”
― John Pavlovitz, If God Is Love, Don't Be a Jerk: Finding a Faith That Makes Us Better Humans

“Jesus has a way of stretching us. Over and over again in the gospels, the message he has for those who would emulate him in the world, is, in essence, “I want to show you something new. Whatever standard you once used for how to live and treat people and find meaning, I’m asking you for more—(or rather, for less).” Regarding anger or motive or religion or revenge or comfort, he continually invites us to the low places: to a greater humility, to a deeper forgiveness, to a shrinking ego, to a bigger generosity. We almost always resist such things because initially they feel like loss, like we’re giving up too much, like we’re letting someone else get away with something. But we always find a better version of ourselves in the low places and that is why we need to keep going there.”
― John Pavlovitz, Low: An Honest Advent Devotional

“These days I don’t care much for having an ironclad theology or an airtight apologetic. I know many people who have such things. Now I simply want my presence on the planet to result in less pain, less inequality, less poverty, less suffering, and less damage for those sharing it with me. I want the sum total of my minutes and my efforts to yield more compassion, more decency, more laughter, more justice, and more goodness than before I showed up. In other words: I just want to do Love right.”
― John Pavlovitz, Low: An Honest Advent Devotional

“But what if we could make room for difference and space for disagreement in our spiritual communities? What if we could give permission for moral failure and freedom to not be certain, and the chance to gloriously fail without needing those things to become black marks against people or death-penalty offenses? What if we made space for people who are as screwed up as we are?”
― John Pavlovitz, A Bigger Table: Building Messy, Authentic, and Hopeful Spiritual Community

“There is a great deal of gray (or color) in this low-to-the-ground spiritual journey. The birth (and the life) of Jesus remind us that our daily existence is not a precise theological test, and the goal is not to avoid failing. It is an ever-unfolding trip through a day we’ve never been to, where we notice beauty, move with compassion, have grace revealed, and within a wide and expansive space—we get to choose.”
― John Pavlovitz, Low: An Honest Advent Devotional

“Yes, God loves us unquestionably and effusively (we are told), but there are caveats and conditions under which we earn and keep that love: prerequisites for belonging among God and God’s people, the moral scores that need to be settled in order to be fully welcomed. It may be helpful to leave behind those scary stories of our childhoods because they make for terrified adults, and terrified adults historically do not love very well.”
― John Pavlovitz, If God Is Love, Don't Be a Jerk: Finding a Faith That Makes Us Better Humans

“Over and over, when someone meets Jesus, transformation and restoration are waiting; there is something wondrous to be witnessed. The very birth narrative of Jesus is the image of the most profound of intersections: God and earth meeting, and the latter being completely altered.”
― John Pavlovitz, Low: An Honest Advent Devotional

“I knew that I was loved completely, as long as I didn’t screw it up in the infinite number of ways it seemed possible to do so: stealing, lying, masturbating, listening to Ozzy Osbourne, or one day voting Democrat.”
― John Pavlovitz, If God Is Love, Don't Be a Jerk: Finding a Faith That Makes Us Better Humans