ERWIN MCMANUS

Religion as a whole specializes in sin management. It's all about organizing humanity in such a way that we cause as little damage as possible.

I have so much confidence in the reality of Jesus that I feel no pressure to try to make people act or be a certain way. I'm banking everything on the fact that God actually changes people.

The system of Christian celebrity was not a good space for me, and it was brutal on my kids - my son in college was frequently confronted by people railing against me as a heretic.

I realize that I live on the bubble of insanity. I feel the weight of human suffering, loneliness and despair on me all the time. It's not getting easier; if anything, it's always right on the edge of my skin.

It is the creative and enterprising spirit of people that is indispensable. Everything else is supplemental.

I had someone a month ago tell me at a campaign lunch that you can't be a Christian and a Democrat. I think that that view is dissipating very, very fast.

God has given us an imagination, and our imagination is really the principle tool from which all creativity and artistry comes from.

How many people just get up on Monday and do the same thing they've done every single Monday - go to work and just turn on route automatic and no longer have any meaning in their life?

People outside of the faith really appreciate Mosaic and really love what we're doing.

My primary assessment would be because American Christians tend to be incredibly self-indulgent, so they see the church as a place there for them to meet their needs and to express faith in a way that is meaningful for them.

If you look at it from just a pure economic basis, technology is replacing all of the jobs robots can do, and machinery is replacing the jobs that humans once held. If we don't train our children to imagine, to create, they're going to be unemployable.

For Christians, they need to access the power of Jesus and not look at Christianity as a religion. It is our Lord Jesus that makes you change, and Christians need to actualize it and put it into practice.

I think that's a part of what motivates me in my teaching and writing. Once the Gospel feels mainstream and becomes a nicely organized, orchestrated belief system, frankly, I don't think there is even an attraction to the human spirit.

I think Christianity is the same as Buddhism and Hinduism - whenever a religion begins to say that these are the things you have to do to be loved by God, you have a religion.

I think we are all trying to figure out what it means to be the Church as opposed to just doing church.

Often we talk about God's ability to change lives without fully understanding how to access that power.

I love what Monet, Picasso, Van Gogh and Jesus all said - that love is really the driving principle of the creative act. In fact, they would say that great art is always inspired by love.

Wherever and whenever God is moving in a new and fresh way, there emerges a new song!

God has leveraged the human spirit to move in His direction, and all the material we need to bring a person to the realization that they were created by God actually already exists inside that person.

When we look at history, we see history is made up of the heroes of their times. Yet, somehow we miss this when we put on the lens of the Scriptures.

If we keep asking the wrong questions, we are just going to get better wrong answers. The solution to lack of community isn't to give up on the community.

I think the exploration and the search for who Jesus is, and that 2,000 years later we're still trying to figure out who He was, and did He really rise from the dead... And I think for me, the answer is 'yes,' and that's why we're talking about Him today.

I became a Christian because I met God.

The bulk of our community is probably between the ages of 20 and 34.

One trend I see is the rejection of growth for self-discovery and the pursuit of authentic community. So we keep whittling our spiritual community to a smaller and smaller and more exclusive inner circle. The problem is if the diagnoses are wrong, so will be the cure.