Mark Labberton > Quotes

“Waking up is the dangerous act of worship. It's dangerous because worship is meant to produce lives fully attentive to reality as God sees it, and that's more than most of us want to deal with.”
― Mark Labberton

“Each of us is a child of parents, perhaps a sibling to someone, a friend to friends, a colleague to coworkers. Following Jesus starts here. It starts with learning to see these people again for the first time, now visible to us anew as we learn to see them as made and loved by God, see their lives whole and seek their flourishing. This typically brings us face-to-face with the challenges of our vocation. We don’t see people this way when they’re annoying to us or clearly self-interested or rejecting us and our faith or failing to do their share of the work. Right there, in the midst of ordinary life, we face the gritty task of following Jesus by learning to love and serve those at our doorstep. This will be true throughout our lives as disciples. We will never be called to do less than this. And sometimes this is the hardest part of all.”
― Mark Labberton, Called: The Crisis and Promise of Following Jesus Today

“When preaching plays to the culture without substantially critiquing and engaging it, it becomes part of the problem. Sermons that only apply to the individual and to the inner life of the disciple without raising biblical questions about our public lives are also a factor. So, too, are worship services that offer little more than comfort food: the baked potatoes of love, the melting butter of grace, with just enough bacon and chives of outreach to ease the conscience. All this becomes a churchly anesthetic.”
― Mark Labberton, The Dangerous Act of Worship: Living God's Call to Justice

“When worship is our response to the One who alone is worthy of it-Jesus Christ-then our lives are on their way to being turned inside out.”
― Mark Labberton, The Dangerous Act of Worship: Living God's Call to Justice

“The Word made flesh in Jesus Christ should show through us. We are meant to be primary evidence of the flourishing love, grace and truth in Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit.”
― Mark Labberton, Called: The Crisis and Promise of Following Jesus Today

“The vocation of every Christian is to live as a follower of Jesus today. In every aspect of life, in small and large acts, with family, neighbors and enemies, we are to seek to live out the grace and truth of Jesus. This is our vocation, our calling. Today.”
― Mark Labberton, Called: The Crisis and Promise of Following Jesus Today

“We aren’t disciples in midair without bodies, histories, personalities, relationships and much more. We begin to follow by responding to Jesus’ invitation where we are.”
― Mark Labberton, Called: The Crisis and Promise of Following Jesus Today

“Local churches are often microcosms of the same sociology as any other part of life and bear little evidence of the new humanity Jesus seeks.”
― Mark Labberton, Called: The Crisis and Promise of Following Jesus Today

“Waking up is the dangerous act of worship. It's dangerous because worship is meant to produce lives fully attentive to reality as God sees it, and that's more
than most of us want to deal with.”
― Mark Labberton, The Dangerous Act of Worship: Living God's Call to Justice

“Amid an array of moral convictions, the indistinguishable character of the church undermines its claims of a superior—indeed ontologically true—moral vision. On the broad public level, the spectacular failures of the church’s leaders discredit its claims of “goodness.” When the Christian next door demonstrates the same self-interested, consumer life as anyone else, goodness seems like a faint sentimentality.”
― Mark Labberton, Called: The Crisis and Promise of Following Jesus Today

“Worship turns out to be the dangerous act of waking up to God and to the purposes of God in the world, and then living lives that actually show it.”
― Mark Labberton, The Dangerous Act of Worship: Living God's Call to Justice

“When God’s people fail to live our call, the church buries the gospel.”
― Mark Labberton, Called: The Crisis and Promise of Following Jesus Today

“Waking up is the dangerous act of worship. It's dangerous because worship is meant to produce lives fully attentive to reality as God sees it, and that's more
than most of us want to deal with. Yes, true worship always questions the dominant paradigms, even those within the church.”
― Mark Labberton, The Dangerous Act of Worship: Living God's Call to Justice

“With grace and hope, the church is to inherently and commonly seek and love the forgotten, the unseen, the undesirable, the uncool. We need to do so with unexpected, tangible love, displaying counterintuitive compassion (including enemy-love) and demonstrating a capacity for magnanimous forgiveness, mercy and justice.”
― Mark Labberton, Called: The Crisis and Promise of Following Jesus Today

“For the evangelical witness in the United States to flourish, it doesn't need better branding, but genuine revival.”
― Mark Labberton, Still Evangelical? Ten Insiders Reconsider Political, Social, and Theological Meaning

“Today, in a staggeringly complex and diverse world, the overarching biblical narrative that includes creation, fall, redemption and fulfillment has frequently been rejected and denied. The issues seem too many and the evidence too little for them. The secular, street-level view seems the most reliable: humanity is here on its own. Are we alone in the universe? No god, just us? Do we simply face an empty universe, live a mere biochemical existence, experience what we call pain or joy, and then die? Do we see a world with exquisite natural beauty and think of it as mere materiality with no greater meaning? Do we look upon billions of people who suffer daily at the hands of bullies and tyrants and weigh it only in terms of social consequence or utility? Do we find in apparent acts of self-sacrificing love only the evidence of instinctive, evolutionary social welfare? And we also ask, “Is there hope?” Is there any reason to think that the trajectory of human suffering and injustice or social entropy can actually be stopped or reversed? Is there hope that the world of poverty, violence and injustice will change? Is there hope that our own personal life issues might actually give way to new life, that our downward spiral can be reversed?”
― Mark Labberton, Called: The Crisis and Promise of Following Jesus Today

“How the church communicates its message, how it tells and lives “the old, old story,” and why and how that story matters today is all part of the work the church needs to do. How churches organize themselves and whether they snap, crackle and pop in the way some think they should is not primarily about money, size or technology. The issues are more basic: will the church embody and articulate its only legitimate identity? Will God’s people live as followers of Jesus?”
― Mark Labberton, Called: The Crisis and Promise of Following Jesus Today