Erwin McManus

So much of what comes out of the faith community seems so dour and somber, and we want to say, 'Hey, we're real people. You can be a person of faith and really enjoy life and laugh.'

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.

The word 'entertain' means to hold someone's attention, and what we want is a faith that is vibrant and alive and beautiful and real.

I know it sounds crazy, but as soon as Christians start telling non-Christians how to live their lives, we've lost the Christian faith.

I have an incredible confidence in the resilience of the human spirit and the creative ability of the Holy Spirit. So, if you can get people asking the right questions, it really will start moving in the right direction.

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.

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.

The reality is that every human being is placed on this planet, and one of the things that drives humans is their need for meaning, and if you can make every job meaningful, then you will guarantee that every job will be done to its highest level of excellence.

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.

We're a part of the insurrection, trying to turn Christianity upside down. We're an experimental church: God's research and development arm.

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.