C. Andrew Doyle > Quotes

“Jesus was definitely not inviting these fishermen into a church job or an engaging hobby, which is how many of us understand vocation in the Church today. If we are not careful, our ingrained expectation of a professional class of clergy will quickly sabotage our ability to understand the ministry of Jesus and the disciples. Our bias builds churchy furniture into this story where there is none. We put our church goggles on and read the idea that the disciples called on that seashore were the first priests of the church back into the scripture. They used to make money as fishermen, then they made their money as ministers. (Luke 10:4-11) This was not the case.”
― C. Andrew Doyle, Vocatio: Imaging a Visible Church

“Quantum physics teaches us that the observer shapes the reality of that which is being observed. In the church we call that the power of the Living Word. In the same way that God creates by speaking God’s word, we too co-create (although on a much smaller scale) our church and the world around us by how we perceive it and the kinds of stories we tell about it.”
― Andrew Doyle, Church: A Generous Community Amplified for the Future

“In the church we call that the power of the Living Word. In the same way that God creates by speaking God’s word, we too co-create (although on a much smaller scale) our church and the world around us by how we perceive it and the kinds of stories we tell about it.”
― Andrew Doyle, Church: A Generous Community Amplified for the Future

“To journey as Abraham and Sarah did is to reject our inclination to protect ourselves by force. In their going--in our going--we embrace our vulnerability and forsake our tribe in order to journey with God and God’s tribe, pronouncing God’s blessing upon the world.”
― C. Andrew Doyle, Vocatio: Imaging a Visible Church

“My friend David Zahl, a theologian, often says, “Christianity is not about good people getting better. It is about real people coping with their failure to be good.”
― C Andrew Doyle, The Jesus Heist: Recovering the Gospel from the Church

“God had a social imaginary that ensured that all people were cared for even if they could not care for themselves. They were all kin. This was not social welfare; it was an expectation that the prosperity of society in general benefited every-one specifically. From the king to the pauper, from the land owner to the widow and the orphan, from the tribal member who inhabited the land to the stranger making their way in a foreign land, the Sinai tradition ensured people were cared and provided for at every level of the social structure. Moreover, when they were not, the prophets reminded those who govern to be mindful of the poor, the widow, the orphan, and the migrant.”
― C. Andrew Doyle, Citizen: Faithful Discipleship in a Partisan World

“A renewed gathering of the followers of Jesus must break into the world, and break up the world. The gathering where bread is broken, stories shared, and prayers are offered reminds the local community that they are implicated in a narrative of peace. Such a renewed gathering also breaks up the constant work expected by chrematistic institutions. The gathering in God’s name to proclaim the message of grace, reminding each other that all are invited into partnership with God, and giving thanks for a creation that has enough for all is an act of defiance in the face of chrematistic institutions promoting works righteousness, limited success for only the most devoted apostles, and a philosophy of private ownership and scarcity.”
― C. Andrew Doyle, Vocatio: Imaging a Visible Church

“Our sense of our own calling must begin with curiosity about how God has called God's people from the very beginning, because the vocations held within the Church are not simply vocations of a "New Testament" kind, but are rooted in the authority of the patriarchs and matriarchs of Israel.”
― C. Andrew Doyle, Vocatio: Imaging a Visible Church

“All societies are free to turn their backs on the needy, but such societies can never be worthy of the name of God. All societies are free to ignore the prophets’ invitations, but such societies bear no resemblance to the realm that Christians call their first home. God holds nations responsible for those who must rely upon the grace, mercy, justice, and hospitality of others. God judges nations based on how well they treat the most vulnerable within their borders, and how they treat the nations who are their neighbors.”
― C. Andrew Doyle, Citizen: Faithful Discipleship in a Partisan World

“The whole society from individual to the government is responsible for the poor.”
― C. Andrew Doyle, Citizen: Faithful Discipleship in a Partisan World

“Laws that dehumanize and lift up some at the expense of others are out of step with the scripture.”
― C. Andrew Doyle, Citizen: Faithful Discipleship in a Partisan World

“However, “individualism” is not a strong enough shared value to help this country manage the challenges that face us in our next age. In fact, it may undermine our future if it remains the sole arbiter of truth.”
― C. Andrew Doyle, Citizen: Faithful Discipleship in a Partisan World

“Manichaean politics have now taken root internally as part of our civil religion in the midst of our own internal political debate. We are in a political season of extreme hivishness, where political powers and principalities use Manichaean philosophy to cast the world in threatening terms of good and evil. One political party is good, the other evil. Both parties and everyone in between now operate out of a hivish Manichaean political framework.”
― C. Andrew Doyle, Citizen: Faithful Discipleship in a Partisan World

“God calls God’s people to create a new community of shalom. We must take care not to simply make God's mission into a social ethic or universal morality. God’s call is not merely a means for achieving better wages and working conditions for the enslaved. It cannot be narrowly defined as a socio-political intervention or strategy...God did not give Moses a theory of justice. God wanted to foster real, transformed, and renewed relationships among the people of Israel and the people of Egypt. Remember, the story of Israel in the land of Egypt began with friendship between a lost son and a ruler, Pharaoh and Joseph. What is broken by Israel’s slide into slavery is that original relationship. A time had come when people did not remember the blessings they have been for one another. Shalom, peace, is not a political "symbol" or "myth," but a real action of relationship that has a communal/social function in building a different kind of kingdom than the reign of humanity”
― C. Andrew Doyle, Vocatio: Imaging a Visible Church

“Jesus is inviting his followers to define their secular politics by their citizenship in the reign of God. The powers of this world cannot tell us what the Christian story is and we needn’t accept the secularist maxim that we have no story until we choose theirs. Jesus invites us to transcend the narrative of this world with a different narrative. We are to engage the world by rising above passive submission or violence. We are invited to find a third way.”
― C. Andrew Doyle, Citizen: Faithful Discipleship in a Partisan World

“King James was adamant that no matter how the rest was translated he didn’t want his people to get the idea that there was a godly admonition towards kings or an empowerment of the people to take corrective action when monarchs misbehaved. In James’s eyes, previous versions were fraught with “seditious . . . dangerous, and trayterous” translation. I imagine you were not even allowed to bring up the Geneva Bible in his presence because it was so radical. It included the suggestion that it was okay to overthrow a despotic ruler if they were unjust. King James wanted to make sure that the people knew they were to “resist not” their king and ruler.”
― C. Andrew Doyle, Citizen: Faithful Discipleship in a Partisan World

“A Manichaean view of our parable would take the side of the political and religious leaders who have nothing to do with the half-dead man and leave the Christ figure to die by the side of the road. Manichaeism rejected interdependence. Their worldview was dualistic; there were good and evil forces and you don’t mix the two. A number of years ago Glenn Greenwald, a journalist and author, coined the term “Manichean politics,” which, he said, pervades our political discourse.23 Greenwald argued that this dualism took root some time ago in American politics as it made the case for the defeat of foreign powers: they are evil; we are good.”
― C. Andrew Doyle, Citizen: Faithful Discipleship in a Partisan World

“Suffice it to say, the ecclesia, the community of peace, imagined on the Galilean seashore had changed. Like a pebble tossed in a pond with ever expanding ripples, the emergence of Christianity in the urban centers of the Roman Empire forced the Church to adopt new forms and structures for mission and ministry. Jesus’s movement became a thriving principality. At the close of the third century, an organized Church had replaced a disorganized but single-minded community on a mission of peace.”
― C. Andrew Doyle, Vocatio: Imaging a Visible Church

“Hauerwas challenges us, and calls Americans out on their blatant misuse of Romans 12 and 13. He says we read Romans 13 as an unchallenged support of the government while we read Romans 12 as a private rule of life. Americans forget that they are Christians before they are American citizens. Recovering our own place in God’s narrative means that we can no longer sacralize our own American democratic presuppositions about government. Romans 12 does not only apply to the Christian citizen, it is the measure by which we understand the kind of just government we can support. We cannot read Romans 13 without first applying the criteria we find in Romans 12 to the empire.16”
― C. Andrew Doyle, Citizen: Faithful Discipleship in a Partisan World

“Christian citizenship has an agenda and it is not the same as the agenda of the state, even though our dual citizenship requires that we be a part of the wider community. Jesus reminded his disciples that their loyalty should not be to the empire or to the rebels. They were to be loyal to God’s garden social imaginary of compassion and expansive familial faithfulness.”
― C. Andrew Doyle, Citizen: Faithful Discipleship in a Partisan World

“Political pundits have long been in the habit of declaring that citizens are not patriotic if they do not believe that America was chosen by God to be a great country. This propaganda is often rooted in the Exodus story. The suggestion is that America is the new Israel. However, nothing could be further from the truth when one reviews our founding fathers’ debate and language. The God that is present in our American origin documents is not a god who shows favor to one nation and curses another. Thomas Jefferson simply wanted the founding Declaration to “assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them.”
― C. Andrew Doyle, Citizen: Faithful Discipleship in a Partisan World

“It was not individuals who withstood tyranny at America’s founding, but a new community who worked together and saw that their futures were intertwined. They each had to give a little to work together. In the end, their shared responsibility for each other—their cultivated interdependence—gave life to a new and unique republic.”
― C. Andrew Doyle, Citizen: Faithful Discipleship in a Partisan World

“Politics is not a sacramental vessel that reveals God, nor is the god of America’s civil religion the God of the Bible. The various systems of modern political philosophy have saved no one, but made a lot of people’s lives worse, including women and people who are part of various minority populations. Modern politics is fundamentally intolerant, and reliably produces all kinds of indefensible discriminations and biases. Modern politics demands total acquiescence to the empire’s grand narrative, lived out as ideological lockstep with the micro narrative of one political party or the other.2”
― C. Andrew Doyle, Citizen: Faithful Discipleship in a Partisan World

“Faced with inadequate health care, a weakening birth rate, the dying off of the boomer generation, the increased need for skilled and unskilled labor, and failing systems of infrastructure and education, we will not be able to adapt if we cannot concede that we are intimately connected to each other, and are a part of each other’s narrative. The narrative of Christian citizenship turns on sacrifice for the other. It is rooted in the idea that we are at our best when we are willing to enter into another person’s loss and suffering and become sacrificially responsible.”
― C. Andrew Doyle, Citizen: Faithful Discipleship in a Partisan World

“God invites and God sends all of God's people. This is not a professional or clerical invitation. God's call to ordinary people undergirds all other work done in God's name. The core of everything else the Church does is peaceful human interconnectivity. Decisions about who will do what are marginal. The most important thing the Church does is hear God's voice of shalom. This calling finds its first home in ordinary people living ordinary lives.”
― C. Andrew Doyle, Vocatio: Imaging a Visible Church

“The community of shalom is, by definition, a diversity of people living together. The community of shalom establishes an ethic of peace that incarnates the Body of Christ by going out into the world as the voice of God and rejecting the violence of the world. The polity of the community of shalom differs from the structures and powers of the world and stands as a sign of Christ’s judgment against those structures and powers by virtue of how different it is. The community of shalom embraces the sacrificial giving of self for the other.”
― C. Andrew Doyle, Vocatio: Imaging a Visible Church

“Much of religion is about forcing others to become something they are not. God’s desire in sending us out into the world to serve, on the other hand, is about enabling us to become something we are: members of the Body of Christ, a community that knows and extends God’s shalom to the world.”
― C. Andrew Doyle, Vocatio: Imaging a Visible Church

“Those who wish to rewrite history and make America’s narrative Christian in its telling make wild accusations, dismiss historical evidence, and jump through all kinds of rhetorical hoops so they can say, “They didn’t really mean that.”
― C. Andrew Doyle, Citizen: Faithful Discipleship in a Partisan World

“In God’s social imaginary, we have described community in terms of relationship and responsibility. The stories of Jesus point us towards the virtue of interconnectedness.”
― C. Andrew Doyle, Citizen: Faithful Discipleship in a Partisan World

“There is a growing disconnect between those who lead and the grass roots movements of lay mission and service. The Church remains mired in culture wars, wringing its hands over shrinking attendance, and trying to save itself by better budgeting in the wake of shrinking resources. The institutional Church of today struggles to sustain aging structures, repeatedly tries to force uniformity over unity, and desperately attempts to create diversity by legislation at conventions. The world has changed, and we are at a loss for how to respond.”
― C. Andrew Doyle, Vocatio: Imaging a Visible Church