Arthur Boers > Quotes

“Philo of Alexandria: “Be compassionate, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.”
― Arthur Boers, Living Into Focus: Choosing What Matters in an Age of Distractions

“increased Internet usage resulted in some loss of close friendships.”
― Arthur Boers, Living Into Focus: Choosing What Matters in an Age of Distractions

“putting focal practices and focal things at the center of our lives—making them focal priorities”
― Arthur Boers, Living Into Focus: Choosing What Matters in an Age of Distractions

“Professing a desire to live differently while denying the ability to do so is troubling.”
― Arthur Boers, Living Into Focus: Choosing What Matters in an Age of Distractions

“There is no place I would rather be. There is nothing I would rather do. There is no one I would rather be with. This I will remember well.”
― Arthur Boers, Living Into Focus: Choosing What Matters in an Age of Distractions

“based on shared responsibilities, shared difficulties, and shared experience . . . are superficial and unsatisfactory.”
― Arthur Boers, Living Into Focus: Choosing What Matters in an Age of Distractions

“Focal has to do with being focused and centered on what is meaningful.”
― Arthur Boers, Living Into Focus: Choosing What Matters in an Age of Distractions

“Avoid technology. Connect with loved ones. Nurture your health. Get outside. Avoid commerce. Light candles. Drink wine. Eat bread. Find silence. Give back.”
― Arthur Boers, Living Into Focus: Choosing What Matters in an Age of Distractions

“Given the conditions prevailing in our culture, it’s the best and most effective way that has ever been devised for gathering large and prosperous congregations. Americans lead the world in showing how to do it. There is only one thing wrong: this is not the way in which God brings us into conformity with the life of Jesus; this is not the way in which we become less and Jesus becomes more; this is not the way in which our sacrificed lives become available to others in justice and service and resurrection. The consumer mentality is the antithesis of a sacrificial, “deny-yourself” congregation. A consumer church is an antichrist church.”
― Arthur Boers, Servants and Fools: A Biblical Theology of Leadership

“This is the concern right at the core of the work of giving leadership to the church: to focus attention on the way we live the Christian life, the means that we employ to embody the reality and carry out the commands of Jesus who became flesh among us. In other words, nothing impersonal, nothing nonrelational, nothing “unfleshed.”
― Arthur Boers, Servants and Fools: A Biblical Theology of Leadership

“Focal practices root us widely.”
― Arthur Boers, Living Into Focus: Choosing What Matters in an Age of Distractions

“We cannot participate in God’s work but then insist on doing it our own way. We cannot participate in building God’s kingdom but then use the devil’s methods and tools. Christ is the way as well as the truth and the life. When we don’t do it his way, we mess up the truth and we miss out on the life.”
― Arthur Boers, Servants and Fools: A Biblical Theology of Leadership

“to pay attention to the deepest thing [I]”
― Arthur Boers, Living Into Focus: Choosing What Matters in an Age of Distractions

“Focal practices do not predictably produce foreseeable results. Yet unforeseen and unanticipated developments are crucial.”
― Arthur Boers, Living Into Focus: Choosing What Matters in an Age of Distractions

“We need . . . church leadership that risks a robust correlation of its scripture and theology with the very best that secular leadership studies can offer. What we get is church leadership that congratulates itself for dabbling in secular leadership studies twice borrowed, church leadership with a preference for simplistic formulas, catchy buzz words, and inane parables.” Such “Church Leadership Lite” is both “short on biblical and theological integrity and oblivious to serious leadership study.”
― Arthur Boers, Servants and Fools: A Biblical Theology of Leadership

“technology and how it affects awareness, there are three areas of concern. First, it often decreases capacity to pay attention, to dwell. Second, the quantity of information and stimulation it delivers can overwhelm and thus interfere with our ability to respond. And, third, it teaches us to expect to be in control of what we think is worth noticing or heeding.”
― Arthur Boers, Living Into Focus: Choosing What Matters in an Age of Distractions

“While history focuses on victors and the powerful, people at the top and in charge, the Bible pays an astonishing amount of attention to regular, normal folks who are nevertheless the unexpected means of God’s dramatic work.”
― Arthur Boers, Servants and Fools: A Biblical Theology of Leadership

“Parker Palmer notes that the next stage of social movements happens when like-minded people rely on one another.”
― Arthur Boers, Living Into Focus: Choosing What Matters in an Age of Distractions

“live differently and deliberately need circles of like-minded folks who reinforce in us the priorities we want to honor.”
― Arthur Boers, Living Into Focus: Choosing What Matters in an Age of Distractions

“Some “leaders” are enveloped in hagiographical mystique: their laudably commendable achievements are the only lens through which we view them, while we disregard other facts about them.”
― Arthur Boers, Servants and Fools: A Biblical Theology of Leadership

“we can learn more from failure: There is a strong sentiment among many organizational scholars that copying the success of others . . . cannot work. They argue that so many factors have to come together for a program to work that it is all but impossible for an outside observer (or even for an insider) to determine which of the factors contributed most to the success of the program. These scholars believe, by contrast, that less-than-successful endeavors are more educational because we . . . point to the moment when things started to go wrong. Their point is that eliminating known mistakes is often a far more effective way to improve than emulating perceived successes.3”
― Arthur Boers, Servants and Fools: A Biblical Theology of Leadership

“Fourth, while we may have visions (see Acts 2), those require weighing and discernment. Christians do not have their own visions—or “cast” visions, a popular cliché—they are invited to be channels of someone else’s vision and purposes, namely God’s.”
― Arthur Boers, Servants and Fools: A Biblical Theology of Leadership

“We end up serving our gadgets instead of using them as tools to support our priorities.”
― Arthur Boers, Living Into Focus: Choosing What Matters in an Age of Distractions

“Control is not a biblical virtue.”
― Arthur Boers, Servants and Fools: A Biblical Theology of Leadership

“But technology “imperceptibly moved to colonize the center of life.”[245]”
― Arthur Boers, Living Into Focus: Choosing What Matters in an Age of Distractions

“describes technology as “modification of the natural world.”
― Arthur Boers, Living Into Focus: Choosing What Matters in an Age of Distractions

“First, the Christian way is not about us; it is about God.”
― Arthur Boers, Servants and Fools: A Biblical Theology of Leadership

“I do not recall anyone commended for being a “disciple” or “faithful follower of Jesus.”
― Arthur Boers, Servants and Fools: A Biblical Theology of Leadership

“Jacques Ellul wrote, “Once you have acquired a certain knowledge and experience, you must walk alone.”[254] Parker Palmer argues”
― Arthur Boers, Living Into Focus: Choosing What Matters in an Age of Distractions

“commitment to focal practices, focal things, focal places.”
― Arthur Boers, Living Into Focus: Choosing What Matters in an Age of Distractions