I am not going to have much time to write this week, so I thought that I would post a few of my favorite quotes from Ain’t Too Proud to Beg. The first quote is from a section of the book discussing various approaches to life and mission.
“Truly rare is the church or denomination that forgoes traditional priorities and makes mission its cultural, political, or even financial ordering principle.”
This reminds me of statements by others that church is very rarely formed around missional purposes. I wrote about this previously in When Is A Church A Missional Community?
The thought is similar, although perhaps not quite as radical, to this quote from Shane Claiborne’s book, Jesus for President.
Church father Ignatius said that if our church is not marked by caring for the poor, the oppressed, and the hungry, then we are guilty of heresy- and a new reformation is long overdue. Some of us who were pretty discontent with how the church was embezzling money belonging to the poor to build buildings and pay staff began to dream again what it would look like to reimagine tithes and offerings, which God intended to be instruments of a redistributive economy… and we came up with the something beautiful and small- the relational tithe.
(ht Out of Ur)
