JoAnn Bastien > JoAnn's Quotes

“We would rather be ruined than changed
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.”
― W H Auden, The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue

“the minute you decide to get back in the business the church was commissioned for in the first place, you will pray for boldness.”
― Andy Stanley, Deep and Wide: Creating Churches Unchurched People Love to Attend

“Suppose you had seven credit cards in your purse or wallet and you lost one. Wouldn’t you leave the six and go search for the missing one until you found it? I lost a credit card recently and never once pulled out the one I hadn’t lost to obsess over it. I felt no urgency about my un-lost credit card. I didn’t call a single person to say that I still had my American Express Card. But I did start calling around to see if anyone had seen my lost MasterCard. When you lose something important, you obsess over it; you get preoccupied with it. It’s pretty much all you think about. Remember the last time you couldn’t find your phone?”
― Andy Stanley, Deep and Wide: Creating Churches Unchurched People Love to Attend

“Churches for churched people obsess over the most frivolous, inconsequential things. It’s why you dread your board meetings, your elder meetings, and your committee meetings. You rarely talk about anything important. You’re managing found people. I know you care about un-found people in your heart. But do you care in your schedule, your programming, your preaching style, or your budget?”
― Andy Stanley, Deep and Wide: Creating Churches Unchurched People Love to Attend

“We cannot learn patience by reading a book or hearing a lecture. The only way we can learn patience is by going through the trials that God assigns to us. The trials of life are the tools God uses to mature us, to build our faith, and to get us to trust the Spirit and not the flesh.”
― Warren W. Wiersbe, The Strategy of Satan: How to Detect & Defeat Him

“Too many believers have an intellectual religion that satisfies the mind but never changes the life. They can discuss the Bible and even argue about it; but when it comes to living it, they fail.”
― Warren W. Wiersbe, The Strategy of Satan: How to Detect & Defeat Him

“Moderns believed that things would only get better and better. This worldview took many surrogate forms, but in general is what we know as the modern world. It formed all of us deeply, especially in the West. It told us that education, reason and science would make the world a better place. But then the Holocaust happened in the very country that was perhaps the most educated, logical and reason-loving in the world.”
― John Feister, Hope Against Darkness: The Transforming Vision of Saint Francis in an Age of Anxiety

“Jesus neither played the victim nor created victims.”
― John Feister, Hope Against Darkness: The Transforming Vision of Saint Francis in an Age of Anxiety

“Instead of our spilling blood to get to God we have God spilling blood to get to us! Pray on that for a week. It’s enough to transform you.”
― John Feister, Hope Against Darkness: The Transforming Vision of Saint Francis in an Age of Anxiety

“when they look to God for their fulfillment, it takes the pressure off of their spouses, children, and friends to fulfill them.”
― Gary Smalley, The DNA of Relationships

“Choice equals change. Making a choice is often difficult because it requires change. And that change can be threatening.”
― Gary Smalley, The DNA of Relationships

“Do you see the common thread in all this thinking? Two words: misplaced expectations. When you expect people, places, and things to fulfill your wants, you will be disappointed. And anytime you put your expectations for help in the wrong place, the result is fear.”
― Gary Smalley, The DNA of Relationships

“For recreation, Lincoln took up bowling with his fellow boarders. Though a clumsy bowler, according to Dr. Busey, Lincoln “played the game with great zest and spirit” and “accepted success and defeat with like good nature and humor.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln

“It is not the rights of women to occupy “official” ministerial roles, nor their equality to men in those roles, that set the terms of their service to God and their neighbors. It is their obligations that do so—obligations that derive from their human abilities empowered by divine gifting.”
― Alan F. Johnson, How I Changed My Mind about Women in Leadership: Compelling Stories from Prominent Evangelicals

“The evangelical position, represented by the personal stories in this book, including my own, understands that a fully authoritative Bible supports the freedom of women under Christ without male supervision to follow their God-given callings and special gifts of the Spirit, including full leadership ministries. This view can be called the “inclusive” view of ministry”
― Alan F. Johnson, How I Changed My Mind about Women in Leadership: Compelling Stories from Prominent Evangelicals

“she was given a dying Sunday evening women’s class in a megachurch. The class began to grow rapidly. The women then began to bring their husbands, who gladly listened to Mom teach until the pastor stepped in to stop it!”
― Alan F. Johnson, How I Changed My Mind about Women in Leadership: Compelling Stories from Prominent Evangelicals

“Was Eve’s sin so much greater and more unforgivable than Adam’s that the entire female gender must forever be treated with suspicion and controlling measures?”
― Alan F. Johnson, How I Changed My Mind about Women in Leadership: Compelling Stories from Prominent Evangelicals

“Instead of worrying about hypothetical slippages awaiting egalitarian believers, like sliding into secular feminism, theological liberalism, or homosexuality, they would do better to deal with brutal violations of their “family values” that are actually happening today within their hierarchy-driven allegedly Christian homes.”
― Alan F. Johnson, How I Changed My Mind about Women in Leadership: Compelling Stories from Prominent Evangelicals

“In the history of the United States, we find that women were regularly preachers on the American frontier. Ironically, Baptists, who in some fundamentalist churches now bar women ministers, had more female preachers than any other denomination. Women pastored almost half of all Baptist churches in the state of Maine in the mid-nineteenth century. This was also the case in almost half of the Baptist churches in Michigan and Wisconsin.”
― Alan F. Johnson, How I Changed My Mind about Women in Leadership: Compelling Stories from Prominent Evangelicals

“men have never seemed to object to women going off to difficult missionary assignments in the far corners of the earth. The matter of women preachers became a problem only when women wanted to be pastors back home, in the sometimes affluent neighborhoods that typically had churches pastored by men.”
― Alan F. Johnson, How I Changed My Mind about Women in Leadership: Compelling Stories from Prominent Evangelicals

“The believer who harbors bitterness and malice in his heart is giving Satan one of his most effective beachheads! These”
― Warren W. Wiersbe, The Strategy of Satan: How to Detect & Defeat Him

“Satan is a destroyer and a divider when it comes to the church; but in his own kingdom, he is very well organized.”
― Warren W. Wiersbe, The Strategy of Satan: How to Detect & Defeat Him

“As full and equal partners Adam and Eve were responsible to tend the garden, to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth, to subdue the earth, and to rule over the creatures. In other words, together they were given stewardship of the earth because they were equals.”
― Alan F. Johnson, How I Changed My Mind about Women in Leadership: Compelling Stories from Prominent Evangelicals

“In a relationship I can influence—but not control—the thoughts, beliefs, feelings, and behavior of another.”
― Gary Smalley, The DNA of Relationships

“his “religious convictions were superior in depth and purity to those, not only of political leaders of his day, but of religious leaders of the era.”
― Thomas Freiling, Walking with Lincoln: Spiritual Strength from America's Favorite President

“To these warnings Lincoln replied: “I see no other safeguard against these murderers, but to be always ready to die, as Christ advises it. As we must all die sooner or later, it makes very little difference to me whether I die from a dagger plunged through the heart or from an inflammation of the lungs.”
― Thomas Freiling, Walking with Lincoln: Spiritual Strength from America's Favorite President

“I have been driven many times to my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go. Abraham Lincoln”
― Thomas Freiling, Walking with Lincoln: Spiritual Strength from America's Favorite President

“post-war redomestication of women was the watchword in the wider culture. As a result, the 1950s historically reflect the period when a growing middle class enabled the most widespread imposition of the nineteenth-century Doctrine of Separate Spheres.24”
― Alan F. Johnson, How I Changed My Mind about Women in Leadership: Compelling Stories from Prominent Evangelicals

“How I changed my mind about women in leadership came through the gradual piling up of anomalies against a powerful but unsustainable paradigm.”
― Alan F. Johnson, How I Changed My Mind about Women in Leadership: Compelling Stories from Prominent Evangelicals

“I felt responsible to use my gifts, but in future churches, that pointed in the direction of children’s or music ministry. But, like many women in the church whom I knew, I felt neither a call nor a predisposition to children or song.”
― Alan F. Johnson, How I Changed My Mind about Women in Leadership: Compelling Stories from Prominent Evangelicals