Top 60 Brian D. McLaren Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “It’s not about the church meeting your needs; it’s about joining the mission of God’s people to meet the world’s needs.”

— Brian D. McLaren

2. “Jesus was short on sermons, long on conversations; short on answers, long on questions; short on abstraction and propositions, long on stories and parables; short on telling you what to think, long on challenging you to think for yourself.”

— Brian D. McLaren

3. “In other words, when the community of faith gathers, its purpose is to equip its members for a life of love and good deeds when the community scatters.”

— Brian D. McLaren

4. “Jesus doesn’t dominate the other, avoid the other, colonize the other, intimidate the other, demonize the other, or marginalize the other. He incarnates into the other, joins the other in solidarity, protects the other, listens to the other, serves the other, even lays down his life for the other.”

— Brian D. McLaren

5. “Our message and methodology have changed, do change, and must change if we are faithful to the ongoing and unchanging mission of Jesus Christ.”

— Brian D. McLaren

6. “I’m sure I am wrong about many things, although I’m not sure exactly which things I’m wrong about. I’m even sure I’m wrong about what I think I’m right about in at least some cases.”

— Brian D. McLaren

7. “Jesus faithfully and courageously represented the nonviolent and loving heart of God. Jesus and his way of nonviolent, self-giving love, the text suggests, will earn the trust of all humanity. We will ultimately migrate, in other words, toward the way of Jesus.”

— Brian D. McLaren

8. “But before Christianity was a rich and powerful religion, before it was associated with buildings, budgets, crusades, colonialism, or televangelism, it began as a revolutionary nonviolent movement promoting a new kind of aliveness on the margins of society.”

— Brian D. McLaren

9. “We need not a new set of beliefs, but a new way of believing, not simply new answers to the same old questions, but a new set of questions.”

— Brian D. McLaren

10. “Jesus called disciples so He could send them out as apostles. They were called together to learn so they could be sent out to teach and serve.”

— Brian D. McLaren

11. “If your goal is to produce firefighters and rescue workers, you have to produce people willing to enter burning buildings.”

— Brian D. McLaren

12. “Too often we see the Bible through whatever lens we get from our culture.”

— Brian D. McLaren

13. “Can you imagine Jesus saying, “Believe that I am the only way. Why? Because I said so, that’s why! And if you don’t believe, then you’re going straight to hell!” But isn’t that how we present him through our slogans?”

— Brian D. McLaren

14. “God is not the tribal deity of one group of “chosen” people. God is not for us and against all others. God is for us and for them, too. God loves everyone everywhere, no exceptions.”

— Brian D. McLaren

15. “When would-be reformers arise, they are rejected as heretics, turncoats, troublemakers, disturbers of the peace, traitors, and enemies.”

— Brian D. McLaren

16. “I have no doubt that Jesus would actually practice the neighborliness he preached rather than following our example of religious supremacy, hostility, fear, isolation, misinformation, exclusion, or demonization.”

— Brian D. McLaren

17. “Ultimately, I hope Jesus will save Buddhism, Islam and every other religion, including the Christian religion, which often seems to need saving about as much as any other religion does.”

— Brian D. McLaren

18. “In religion as in parenthood, uncritical loyalty to our ancestors may implicate us in an injustice against our descendants: imprisoning them in the errors of our ancestors.”

— Brian D. McLaren

19. “To be a Christian in a generously orthodox way is not to claim to have the truth captured, stuffed, and mounted on the wall.”

— Brian D. McLaren

20. “If a spiritual community only points back to where it has been or if it only digs in its heels where it is now, it is a dead end or a parking lot, not a way.”

— Brian D. McLaren

21. “But in the end you cannot serve two masters, Theos and Elohim, the god of the Greco-Roman philosophers and Caesars and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the violent god of profit proclaimed by the empire and the compassionate God of justice proclaimed by the prophets. You can try to hybridize them and compromise them for centuries, but like oil and water they eventually separate and prove incompatible. They refuse to alloy. They produce irreconcilable narratives and create different worlds.”

— Brian D. McLaren

22. “In case after case in the past, there is a kind of Bible-quoting intoxication under the influence of which we religious people lose the ability to distinguish between what God says and what we say God says.”

— Brian D. McLaren

23. “Our interpretations reveal less about God or the Bible than they do about ourselves. They reveal what we want to defend, what we want to attack, what we want to ignore, what we’re unwilling to question.”

— Brian D. McLaren

24. “I had to face the possibility that the art of living in the way of Jesus was no longer carried on in a holistic way by any single tradition.”

— Brian D. McLaren

25. “Our choice, it seems, is whether we will let our past and present sufferings be sufficient to soften and break us, or whether we will resist and harden ourselves so even more suffering is required.”

— Brian D. McLaren

26. “Because if anything is clear in the aftermath of the Reformation, it has to be this: we human beings can interpret the Bible to say and mean an awful lot of different things. We can very easily confuse “The Bible says” with “I say the Bible says,” which we can then equate with “God says.”

— Brian D. McLaren

27. “The cross is almost a distraction and false advertisement for God.”

— Brian D. McLaren

28. “Joyfully celebrating the killing of a killer who joyfully celebrated killing carries an irony that I hope will not be lost on us. Are we learning anything, or simply spinning harder in the cycle of violence?”

— Brian D. McLaren

29. “Who do we think we are – we small creatures with three-pound brains, a few limited senses, and life spans barely long enough to get to know our neighborhood, much less the planet, and much less the galaxy, and much less the universe, and much less still its creator! Who do we think we are to be able to define or even describe the creator of DNA, galaxies, dust mites, blue whales, the carbon cycle, light, and a billion other realities we have no notion about whatsoever, no awareness of at all?”

— Brian D. McLaren

30. “In Christ, God is supreme, but not in the old discredited paradigm of supremacy: God is the supreme healer, the supreme friend, the supreme lover, the supreme life-giver who self-empties in gracious love for all. The king of kings and lord of lords is the servant of all and the friend of sinners. The so-called weakness and foolishness of God are greater than the so-called power and wisdom of human regimes.”

— Brian D. McLaren

31. “Spiritual practices are ways of becoming awake and staying awake to God.”

— Brian D. McLaren

32. “The life-and-death question for each of our churches and denominations may boil down to this: are we a club for the elite who pretend to have arrived or a school for disciples who are still on the way?”

— Brian D. McLaren

33. “If I could seriously ponder ending my life, then I can do anything. I can change anything in my life. So instead of ending my life altogether, I’ll end my life as I’ve been living it and start a new kind of life. I can now see a third alternative to the status quo and suicide.”

— Brian D. McLaren

34. “Something deep in our conscience tells us that hostility is part of the problem to be overcome in the world, not the means by which problems will be overcome. Hostility is a symptom of the disease, not part of the cure.”

— Brian D. McLaren

35. “The Church has little idea how unorthodox it is at any given moment. If a church can’t yet be perfectly orthodox, it can, with the Holy Spirit’s help and by the grace of God, be perpetually reformable.”

— Brian D. McLaren

36. “It turns out that the famous dictum, associated with Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov, can run both ways: yes, without God everything is theoretically permissible... but believers can find ways to use God to justify just about anything as well.”

— Brian D. McLaren

37. “You know what, the thing that breaks my heart is that there’s no way I can answer it without hurting someone on either side.”

— Brian D. McLaren

38. “When any sector of the Church stops learning, God simply overflows the structures that are in the way and works outside them with those willing to learn.”

— Brian D. McLaren

39. “Through its appropriation of “texts of terror” and especially through the application of those texts to the Jews, the Christian religion created the conditions for the oppression of Palestinians.”

— Brian D. McLaren

40. “We’re seeking – imperfectly at every turn, no doubt – an incarnational theology, a theology that brings radical good news of great joy for all the people, good news that God loves the world and didn’t send Jesus to condemn it but to save it, good news that God’s wrath is not merely punitive but restorative, good news that the fire of God’s holiness is not bent on eternal torment but always works to purify and refine, good news that where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more.”

— Brian D. McLaren

41. “What is the most significant conversation you have every day?” People would respond piously, “Your conversation with God, of course.” “No,” Lewis would reply. “It’s the conversation you have with yourself before you speak to God, because in that conversation with yourself, you decide whether you are going to be honest and authentic with God, or whether you are going to meet God with a false face, a mask, an act, a pretense.”

— Brian D. McLaren

42. “In the previous few minutes, I had seen the most beautiful thing that eyes can see: the glory of God shining in the radiance of creation. I had heard the most beautiful thing that ears can hear: friends telling friends that they love one another. And I had felt the most beautiful thing that any heart can ever feel: the love of God and the love of others.”

— Brian D. McLaren

43. “That in itself is an act of peacemaking, because we’re seeking to align our wills with God’s will, our dreams with God’s dream.”

— Brian D. McLaren

44. “The romance of Creator and creation is far more wonderful and profound than anyone can ever capture in words.”

— Brian D. McLaren

45. “I love writers who are insightful enough to be cynical but choose not to be.”

— Brian D. McLaren

46. “We must not define Jesus and his kingdom by fitting them within conventional understandings of kings and kingdoms. Rather, we must judge and deconstruct those conventional definitions in light of Jesus and his example.”

— Brian D. McLaren

47. “To everyone, Jesus issues an invitation to abandon the story they will lose themselves in, and instead, to enter the story they will find themselves in.”

— Brian D. McLaren

48. “These special holidays give rise to various liturgical calendars that suggest we should mark our days not only with the cycles of the moon and seasons, but also with occasions to tell our children the stories of our faith community’s past so that this past will have a future, and so that our ancient way and its practices will be rediscovered and renewed every year.”

— Brian D. McLaren

49. “That is what mature faith requires – not pride over how much one sees and understands, but humility, the feeling that one is still a child, certain of so little, still so dependent on God and others, with so much still to learn – including so much more to learn about humility.”

— Brian D. McLaren

50. “As a committed Christian, I have always struggled with locked doors – doors by which we on the inside lock out “the others” – Jews, Muslims, Mormons, liberals, doubters, agnostics, gay folks, whomever. The more we insiders succeed in shutting others out, the more I tend to feel locked in, caged, trapped.”

— Brian D. McLaren