John Anders’s Reviews > Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology > Status Update

“Following Jesus is the baptismal yes that succeeds the no. We have renounced initiative and taken up obedience. We have renounced clamoring assertions in favor of quiet listening. We watch Jesus work, we listen to Jesus speak, we accompany Jesus into new relationships, to odd places and odd people.”

“[The church’s] message has seldom (hardly ever, in fact) been embraced by the mighty and powerful. . . To suppose that if we can just "place" Christian men and women in prominent positions of leadership, we are going to improve the efficacy of the community in its worship, missions, or evangelism, has no warrant in Scripture or history.”

“Getting saved is easy; becoming a community is difficult —damnably difficult.”

“The gospel, while honoring our experience, doesn't begin with our experience. We don't begin a holy life by wanting a holy life, desiring to be good, fulfilled, complete, or wanting to be included in the grand scheme of things. We have been anticipated, and the way we have been anticipated is by resurrection, Jesus' resurrection. Living a holy life . . . begins with Jesus' resurrection.”

‘Our senses require healing and rehabilitation so that they are adequate for receiving and responding to visitations and appearances of Spirit, God's Holy Spirit, for, as Jean Sulivan says, "The fundamental insight of the Bible . . . is that the invisible can speak only by the perceptible."’

― Eugene H. Peterson, p. 197

"Sabbath keeping is a publicly enacted sign of our trust that God keeps the world, therefore we do not have to. God welcomes our labors, but our contributions to the world have their limits. If even God trusted creation enough to be confident that the world would continue while God rested, so should we."
—William Willimon

“Fear-of-the-Lord is not a technique for acquiring spiritual know-how but a willed not-knowing. It is not so much know-how we lack; we lack a simple being-there. Fear-of-the-Lord, nurtured in worship and prayer, silence and quiet, love and sacrifice, turns everything we do into a life of "breathing God."”

― Eugene H. Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, p. 44

“Under the image of the Trinity we discover that we do not know God by defining him but by being loved by him and loving in return. The consequences of this are personally revelatory: another does not know me, nor do I know another, by defining or explaining, by categorizing or by psychologizing, but only relationally, by accepting and loving, by giving and receiving.”