Mark Sayers > Quotes

“At its heart, biblical faith is a creed of the antihero. It is the story of men and women who come to the end of themselves and must discover God.”
― Mark Sayers, Facing Leviathan: Leadership, Influence, and Creating in a Cultural Storm

“In the absence of a story or foundation that gives hope or meaning, life has become a never-ending quest for pleasure and experience. Instead of being good, people want to feel good.”
― Mark Sayers, The Vertical Self

“When leaders die to pushing their own agendas and realize that leadership is the act of dying to self, those around them are profoundly transformed. Selfless leadership opens a space for God to flow into.”
― Mark Sayers, Facing Leviathan: Leadership, Influence, and Creating in a Cultural Storm

“As a network is swamped by chronic anxiety, it is marked by reactivity. Those within the system no longer act rationally, but rather, high emotion becomes the dominant form of interaction. The system’s focus is directed toward the most emotionally immature and reactive members. Those who are more mature and healthy begin to adapt their behavior to appease the most irrational and unhealthy. This creates a scenario where the most emotionally unhealthy and immature members in the system become de facto leaders, shaping the emotional landscape with the focus on their negative behavior and what they see as the negative behavior of others.”
― Mark Sayers, A Non-Anxious Presence: How a Changing and Complex World will Create a Remnant of Renewed Christian Leaders

“continuing the same things that are not bringing renewal is not going to bring renewal. Lack of commitment is not going to bring renewal. Business as usual will not bring renewal. Accumulating knowledge without putting it into practice will not bring renewal. We need our autopilot patterns interrupted.”
― Mark Sayers, Reappearing Church: The Hope for Renewal in the Rise of Our Post-Christian Culture

“The explorer heads into the wilderness to find glory. The shepherd of God is humbled by the wilderness to be shaped by God and thus elevates Him through worship.”
― Mark Sayers, A Non-Anxious Presence: How a Changing and Complex World will Create a Remnant of Renewed Christian Leaders

“In the post-Christian vision, progress replaces God’s presence as the engine of history.”
― Mark Sayers, Reappearing Church: The Hope for Renewal in the Rise of Our Post-Christian Culture

“Before we can influence our culture, our visions must die.”
― Mark Sayers, Facing Leviathan: Leadership, Influence, and Creating in a Cultural Storm

“The average Westerner processes religion through a crude, street-level model of secularism that is assumed but rarely analyzed.”
― Mark Sayers, Reappearing Church: The Hope for Renewal in the Rise of Our Post-Christian Culture

“We are drowning in freedoms but thirsting for meaning.”
― Mark Sayers, Reappearing Church: The Hope for Renewal in the Rise of Our Post-Christian Culture

“Leaders do not choose, rather they respond to God choosing them. Thus, the first responsive step of leadership is of utmost importance. It is an act of rebellion against the society of the spectacle - It is to relinquish a life of many options so that you can receive God's one option.”
― Mark Sayers, Facing Leviathan: Leadership, Influence, and Creating in a Cultural Storm

“Most churches that have fallen into dead orthodoxy are filled with nice, pleasant, and loyal people. Some even grow in size. Yet, eventually the degenerating dynamic of dead orthodoxy diminishes the power and message of the gospel, mutating into what Dallas Willard has called the gospel of sin management. Willard noted that in some churches, this meant behavior modification, avoiding obvious sins through a kind of religious willpower. In other more left-leaning churches, Willard observed another kind of behavior modification at play—the public affirming of the right social justice causes of the day. Yet these shallow and public forms of Christianized behavior”
― Mark Sayers, Reappearing Church: The Hope for Renewal in the Rise of Our Post-Christian Culture

“In the democratic, egalitarian spirit of our day, we hold in suspicion positions of social authority, yet we submit to the power of peers. Social anxiety, peer group pressure, and competition all dictate our lives. Many are more afraid of offending their friends than they are of offending figures of authority. We have moved from a culture based upon hierarchy to a peerarchy. Ironically we flee from relational distinctions and boundaries, yet without these traditions and boundaries we become mired in codependency.”
― Mark Sayers, Facing Leviathan: Leadership, Influence, and Creating in a Cultural Storm

“Those who desire reform will find themselves being resisted.”
― Mark Sayers, Reappearing Church: The Hope for Renewal in the Rise of Our Post-Christian Culture

“It becomes nearly impossible for the healthier members of a system or its leadership to see the bigger issue and tackle systemic issues because the focus is brought back to the latest crisis and the feverish emotional responses that are swamping the network.”
― Mark Sayers, A Non-Anxious Presence: How a Changing and Complex World will Create a Remnant of Renewed Christian Leaders

“The reality of Christian mission in today’s churches is a story of thousands of quiet kindnesses. In many of our most disadvantaged communities it is the churches that provide warmth, food, friendship, and support for individuals who have fallen on the worst of times.”1”
― Mark Sayers, Disappearing Church: From Cultural Relevance to Gospel Resilience

“We have been taught by the great strongholds of our day, whether formed with a structure of secularism or cultural Christianity (or a hybrid of both), that pressure is a bad thing. That it is possible to live life and walk through the raindrops without getting wet. So as the cultural pressure increases against the church in our gray zone moment and we find ourselves in a wilderness, those who turn to God, who choose not to run from the wilderness, who seek His presence in the wilderness, will be transformed with spiritual authority.”
― Mark Sayers, A Non-Anxious Presence: How a Changing and Complex World will Create a Remnant of Renewed Christian Leaders

“In the same way, our own Christian versions of bohemia—our self-constructed religious spaces of critique—cannot save. Mumford notes that while the bohemian position wanted to retain the “Christian impulse of love … they failed to retain the co-ordinate doctrine of sacrifice.”2”
― Mark Sayers, Facing Leviathan: Leadership, Influence, and Creating in a Cultural Storm

“freedom. In our disconnection from God, we rebel against responsibility, relationships, and life-giving rules. Thus, anxiety and independency live in a codependent relationship.”
― Mark Sayers, A Non-Anxious Presence: How a Changing and Complex World will Create a Remnant of Renewed Christian Leaders

“Philosophers Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly explain, “To say that we live in a secular age in the modern West is to say that even religious believers face existential questions about how to live a life.”
― Mark Sayers, The Road Trip that Changed the World: The Unlikely Theory that will Change How You View Culture, the Church, and, Most Importantly, Yourself

“Any goals or programs of an institution that becomes overtaken by chronic anxiety will be replaced by the task of keeping the most dysfunctional members happy.”
― Mark Sayers, A Non-Anxious Presence: How a Changing and Complex World will Create a Remnant of Renewed Christian Leaders

“This temptation presents itself today. We can sit and watch the Twitter feed, critiquing the methods, models, and ministries of others; from the comfort of our couches we can speculate on how it could be done better. We can devise all kinds of theories, read all the right books, engage in online debate, blog our opinions, yet the whole time be disconnected from actually having skin in the game. Even when our heart is for God’s kingdom, if we are not careful we can find ourselves critiquing from the sidelines of God’s activity within history. There is a world of difference between pundits and prophets.”
― Mark Sayers, Facing Leviathan: Leadership, Influence, and Creating in a Cultural Storm

“Throughout history various religious traditions have used the imagery of pilgrimage or journey to describe spiritual development. These journeys were focused on an eternal destination, a spiritual transformation of the individual. Today, however, the “pilgrimage” is all about the individual’s own life journey.”
― Mark Sayers, The Road Trip that Changed the World: The Unlikely Theory that will Change How You View Culture, the Church, and, Most Importantly, Yourself

“We will not fully understand our problems in human relationships until we see them as the expression of the active rebellion and independency which has afflicted human nature. A vast arsenal of weapons against human fellowship grows out of this route. Fear, anger, jealousy, envy, bitterness, revenge, flattery, accusation, and many other injurious conditions develop from the sickness of a human nature estranged from God and trying unsuccessfully to defend its own “god-status” against all comers.”
― Mark Sayers, A Non-Anxious Presence: How a Changing and Complex World will Create a Remnant of Renewed Christian Leaders

“Jesus takes the chaos of the world upon Himself.”
― Mark Sayers, Facing Leviathan: Leadership, Influence, and Creating in a Cultural Storm

“The structures of the modern world implicitly promise that we can operate as leaders, even as Christian leaders, without thought or need for God. Instead of our foundation being in Christ and His kingdom’s way of influence, we rest on the cultural foundation set by the modern world of what it is to lead. We measure leadership with earthly definitions of success and power. A secular autopilot version of Christian leadership takes hold, where we lead like practical atheists, with God as an afterthought.”
― Mark Sayers, A Non-Anxious Presence: How a Changing and Complex World will Create a Remnant of Renewed Christian Leaders

“It is only when you stand at a distance, or leave your own culture, that you are able to recognize your own values for what they are.”
― Mark Sayers, The Road Trip that Changed the World: The Unlikely Theory that will Change How You View Culture, the Church, and, Most Importantly, Yourself

“Grace is covenantal. It creates a unique kind of authority structure in which the receiver of grace is indebted to the giver of grace. That is why often people who receive an unmerited gift protest, “I simply can’t take this gift,” because we intuitively understand that we are indebted.”
― Mark Sayers, Disappearing Church: From Cultural Relevance to Gospel Resilience

“The pandemic didn’t change the world. It was a signal of the change already happening in the world.”
― Mark Sayers, A Non-Anxious Presence: How a Changing and Complex World will Create a Remnant of Renewed Christian Leaders

“Gray zones are filled with pressure and chaos, yet they are where God does something exceptional inside His people, calling leaders to Himself in a new and more profound way.”
― Mark Sayers, A Non-Anxious Presence: How a Changing and Complex World will Create a Remnant of Renewed Christian Leaders