Alan J. Roxburgh > Quotes

“the most important currency a congregation has to spend is hope.”
― Alan Roxburgh, The Missional Leader: Equipping Your Church to Reach a Changing World

“I am aware of how often over the past year I have listened to sermons and religious leaders turn the biblical narratives into a useful handbook for making one’s life work more successful. I’m aware of how this Oprahization of the Christian narrative has turned us ever more quickly into anxiety-laden, functional atheists needing ways to use God to make our lives work.”
― Alan J. Roxburgh, Missional (Allelon Missional Series): Joining God in the Neighborhood

“Just as one will not get far on the road to happiness by predefining the characteristics of happiness and then going to look for them, we will not grasp what it means to be the church in our time by beginning with church questions, even if they are questions about the church’s health, effectiveness, or its natural development!”
― Alan J. Roxburgh, Missional (Allelon Missional Series): Joining God in the Neighborhood

“Over the past twenty-five years much has been written about the need for the church to change; however, if we are to hear what God might be doing in the massively shifting contexts in which we live, we must move beyond conversations about the church, about how to make it work, and about patterns for success. I find most of these conversations are really seeking to restore the church to some imagined place in culture.”
― Alan J. Roxburgh, Missional (Allelon Missional Series): Joining God in the Neighborhood

“What is God up to in our neighborhoods and communities? How do we join with what God is doing in these places? Church questions are a subset of these far more important questions.”
― Alan J. Roxburgh, Missional (Allelon Missional Series): Joining God in the Neighborhood

“Language is the realm of the poet, of desire and hope, of the search for and expression of infinity.”
― Alan J. Roxburgh, Missional (Allelon Missional Series): Joining God in the Neighborhood

“Unless, as leaders, we are willing to enter this in-between space that disrupts our settled assumptions and threatens our formulas and expectations, we will remain locked into a monologue of church questions and strategies.”
― Alan J. Roxburgh, Missional (Allelon Missional Series): Joining God in the Neighborhood

“Nostalgia, however, is not about being formed as a people; it is about borrowing experiences and moments from the past in order to experience something for ourselves in the present. Nostalgic individuals link themselves to a historically specific time or event in order to serve their personal desires for an experience in the moment. It is all about resourcing the self by consuming the past.”
― Alan J. Roxburgh, Introducing the Missional Church (Allelon Missional Series): What It Is, Why It Matters, How to Become One