Top 40 Scot McKnight Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “What the church most needs is not heroes of faith, but faithful followers of Jesus.”

— Scot McKnight

2. “God’s dream is the kingdom, that’s already clear. But what is not always clear is that God’s kingdom happens when human beings are empowered by God’s Spirit to do God’s kingdom work in the shape of a new community.”

— Scot McKnight

3. “Those who aren’t following Jesus aren’t his followers. Its that simple. Followers follow, and those who don’t follow aren’t followers. To follow Jesus means to follow Jesus into a society where justice rules, where love shapes everything. To follow Jesus means to take up his dream and work for it.”

— Scot McKnight

4. “Prayer is the way to die to our own wishes and surrender everything to God.”

— Scot McKnight

5. “God did not give the Bible so we could master him or it; God gave the Bible so we could live it, so we could be mastered by it.”

— Scot McKnight

6. “It is far too easy to be critical. It is far harder to have a better idea.”

— Scot McKnight

7. “We don’t ask what the Bible says, we ask what God says to us in that Bible. The difference is a difference between paper and person.”

— Scot McKnight

8. “I hope you agree with me that the hope for the world is the local church, and that the heart of God’s plan is found in creating a whole new society in a local church. If.”

— Scot McKnight

9. “A Christian is someone who follows Jesus by devoting his or her One. Life to the kingdom vision of Jesus.”

— Scot McKnight

10. “The Jesus Creed teaches us that a disciple’s responsibility is to love God by following Jesus. You only follow someone else when your own lights or sense of direction are not good enough.”

— Scot McKnight

11. “Community is like peace in that it is a result instead of an action. Peace results from acts of justice and behaviors of love. Community also emerges out of loving behaviors – like compassion and an embrace and forgiveness – and out of acts of justice.”

— Scot McKnight

12. “One reason why so many Christians today don’t know the Old Testament is because their ‘gospel’ doesn’t even need it.”

— Scot McKnight

13. “For Mother Teresa, love is only of use if it is seen in action. Her famous words are: “Do ordinary things with extraordinary love: little things like caring for the sick and the homeless, the lonely and the unwanted, washing and cleaning for them.” And, “You must give what will cost you something.” Her creed – call it her Shema – is simple: The fruit of silence is prayer. The fruit of prayer is faith. The fruit of faith is love. The fruit of love is service. The fruit of service is peace.”

— Scot McKnight

14. “We live in a world of evaluations, assessments, and measurements, but Jesus turns his gaze deeper because he knows that what is measurable can be faked.”

— Scot McKnight

15. “To walk into the Jefferson memorial is to be in a temple of the pure idolatry of reason.”

— Scot McKnight

16. “Many think Jesus came to earth so you and I can have a special kind of spiritual experience and then go merrily along, as long as we pray and read our Bibles and develop intimacy with the unseen God but ignore the others-oriented life of justice and love and peace that Jesus embodied.”

— Scot McKnight

17. “Our biggest problem is that we have an entire culture shaped by a misunderstanding of the gospel. That so-called gospel is deconstructing the church.”

— Scot McKnight

18. “The church becomes a community called atonement every time it reads the story of Jesus and every time it identifies itself with that story and every time it invites others to listen in to hear that story. Reading Scripture and listening to Scripture and letting Scripture incorporate us into its story is atoning.”

— Scot McKnight

19. “Too many people think repenting means feeling terrible about something someone has done. Feeling bad is fine, and it often accompanies repentance, but repentance is not so much about what we feel but the twofold prong of owning up to our own injustices and failures to love, and starting all over by living justly and lovingly.”

— Scot McKnight

20. “Love one another strenuously because it’s hard.”

— Scot McKnight

21. “God’s idea of redemption is community-shaped.”

— Scot McKnight

22. “We need to shed our unearthly and nonsocial and idealistic and romantic and uber-spiritual visions of kingdom and get back to what Jesus meant. By kingdom, Jesus means: God’s Dream Society on earth, spreading out from the land of Israel to encompass the whole world.”

— Scot McKnight

23. “As seminary students Jim and friends examined the Bible to find every reference to the poor – and they found more than two thousand. In fact, they concluded one of every sixteen verses was about the poor. Then a zealous friend decided to cut out every Bible verse about the poor to see what the Bible would look like. As he tells the story, “that old Bible literally was in shreds. It wouldn’t hold together. It was a Bible full of holes.”

— Scot McKnight

24. “Put differently, we’ve made the church into the American dream for our own ethnic group with the same set of convictions about next to everything. No one else feels welcome. What Jesus and the apostles taught was that you were welcomed because the church welcomed all to the table.”

— Scot McKnight

25. “Jesus wanted far more than to be accepted into one’s life. He wanted to take over, and his essential call was to trust him enough to surrender one’s entire being to him.”

— Scot McKnight

26. “What must be emphasized in all of this is the difference between trusting Christ, the real person Jesus, with all that that naturally involves, versus trusting some arrangement for sin-remission set up through him – trusting only his role as guilt remover.”

— Scot McKnight

27. “Jesus thought he was anointed by God to proclaim the gospel to the poor and to proclaim freedom for prisoners and recovered sight for the blind and to set the oppressed free. This is why he came.”

— Scot McKnight

28. “First we are to seek peace in our local fellowship, to end strife and to seek reconciliation with God and with one another, and out of this peace-shaped, kingdom-shaped church we spill over peace into the world.”

— Scot McKnight

29. “On the basis of what the New Testament does say, the final home should not be called “heaven” but instead the “new heavens and the new earth,” and this makes a significant difference for understanding that what we do now really does matter – for we will continue doing it on the other side of life after death.”

— Scot McKnight

30. “Give generously of what you have, and if you don’t have much, give little generously.”

— Scot McKnight

31. “Any method of Bible study that doesn’t lead to transformation abandons the missional path of God and leaves us stranded.”

— Scot McKnight

32. “Peter’s Jesus of Nazareth, the one who lived and died and who was raised and ascended and enthroned, is both Messiah of Israel and Lord of the whole world. Those are the terms of the early gospeling in the book of Acts, and if we want to be faithful to the Bible, those should be our terms as well. Those titles for Jesus tell the gospel Story of Jesus.”

— Scot McKnight

33. “And I always do this aloud, or at least at a mumble level, making sure I am doing more than just glancing at the psalms or prayers. Glancing at prayers is the fastest path toward vain repetitions I know of. For that reason, the church has always advocated reading our prayers aloud so we will go more slowly and concentrate more on what we are saying. Prayer books are designed to be read aloud.”

— Scot McKnight

34. “A person is a person through other persons.”

— Scot McKnight

35. “The assumption that the gospel can be reduced to a note card is already off on the wrong track.”

— Scot McKnight

36. “In one simple sentence: what Christians want for the nation should first be a witnessed reality in their local church.”

— Scot McKnight

37. “There is no kingdom that is not about a just society, as there is no kingdom without redemption under Christ. Yet I’m convinced that both of these approaches to kingdom fall substantially short of what kingdom meant to Jesus, so we need once again to be patient enough to ponder what the Bible teaches.”

— Scot McKnight

38. “What we are looking for in reading the Bible is the ability to turn the two-dimensional words on paper into a three-dimensional encounter with God, so that the text takes on life and meaning and depth and perspective and gives us direction for what to do today.”

— Scot McKnight

39. “Let the Church remember this: that every maker and worker is called to serve God in his profession or trade – not outside it. Whatever we are called to “do” is not a “job” but a sacred vocation.”

— Scot McKnight

40. “God gave the Bible not so we can know it but so we can know and love God through it.”

— Scot McKnight

41. “Yes, the church is part of the good news of Jesus. And the church proclaims the good news of Jesus. But when men and women have only seen churches formed by unhealthy power, celebrity, competitiveness, secrecy, and self-protection, our corporate ecclesial life belies the truth of the gospel. The church can only witness to the truth of Jesus by seeking justice, serving with humility, operating transparently, and confessing and lamenting failures.”

— Scot McKnight

42. “Hauerwas said it, “The sermon, therefore, is not a list of requirements, but rather a description of the life of a people gathered by and around Jesus.”39 Church, then, forms the context for the ethic of Jesus.”

— Scot McKnight

43. “Culture socializes us into what is considered proper behavior. For Christians, this is true in our churches as well as in society at large.”

— Scot McKnight