Emmanuel M. Katongole > Quotes

“How long, O God, will we go on with a mock Christianity that takes the tribalism of our world for granted?

How long, O God, will we be satisfied with the way things are?

How long, O God, will we try to "make some difference in the world" while leaving the basic patterns of the world unaffected?

How long, O God will we take consolation in numbers, buildings, and structures, when millions of your children are dying?

How long, O Sovereign Lord, will we remain blind to the lessons of history?”
― Emmanuel Katongole, Mirror to the Church: Resurrecting Faith After Genocide in Rwanda

“The church's primary purpose is not to make America more Christian, but to make American Christians less American and Rwandan Christians less Rwandan. We are no longer Rwandans or Americans, neither Hutu nor Tutsi. If we are in Christ, we have become part of a new creation.”
― Emmanuel Katongole, Mirror to the Church: Resurrecting Faith After Genocide in Rwanda

“We are called to be strange in the same way that the early Christian communities were strange to the world around them. The community in Antioch brought together Jews and Samaritans, Greeks and Romans, slaves and free, men and women in a way that was so confusing that people didn't know what to call them. So they called them "Christians." The only way they knew to describe their peculiar actions was to say that they were followers of an odd preacher from Galilee.

The world is longing for such new and odd communities in our time. . . . I pray the time is now and that the resurrection might begin in us.”
― Emmanuel Katongole, Mirror to the Church: Resurrecting Faith After Genocide in Rwanda

“The story that the church has been telling for two thousand years is an outrageous tale about a man who was executed by the state but rose up from the dead. The crux of the story isn't that Jesus figured out the right answer to all the questions facing Israel in his day. What makes all the difference is that Jesus defeated the ultimate enemy and got up from the dead.”
― Emmanuel Katongole, Mirror to the Church: Resurrecting Faith After Genocide in Rwanda

“Because we are invited to be part of God's new creation now, we seek to embody the identity we have been given in Christ. . . . We engage in mission to establish friendships that lead to the formation of a new people in the world.”
― Emmanuel Katongole, Mirror to the Church: Resurrecting Faith After Genocide in Rwanda

“God’s gift of a call to be Christ’s ambassadors of reconciliation intends to unseat other lords—power, nationalism, race or ethnic loyalty as an end in itself—and give birth to deeper allegiances, stories, spaces and communities that are a “demonstration plot” of the reality of God’s new creation in Christ. Put simply, reconciliation both names the church as and requires the church to be the sign and agent of God’s reconciliation.”
― Emmanuel Katongole, Reconciling All Things: A Christian Vision for Justice, Peace and Healing

“even in a deeply divided world, even in the most deeply divided relationship, the way things are is not the way things have to be.”
― Emmanuel M. Katongole, Reconciling All Things: A Christian Vision for Justice, Peace and Healing

“you are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world,”
― Emmanuel Katongole, The Sacrifice of Africa: A Political Theology for Africa

“To live as the body of Christ in such a time as this is to reimagine what it means to remember and embody that story of resurrection.”
― Emmanuel Katongole, Mirror to the Church: Resurrecting Faith After Genocide in Rwanda

“Only through its presence and ministries grounded in local places is the church able to proclaim the gospel message: "Today salvation has come to this house.”
― Emmanuel Katongole, The Sacrifice of Africa: A Political Theology for Africa

“What we need is not simply better gear and techniques but a story that helps us remember another world is possible. The good news is that God’s story offers us just that. In the midst of our world’s deep brokenness, God’s kingdom breaks in to create new possibilities.”
― Emmanuel M. Katongole, Reconciling All Things: A Christian Vision for Justice, Peace and Healing