Top 180 Shane Claiborne Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “My goal is to speak the truth in love. There are a lot of people speaking the truth with no love, and there are a lot of people talking about love without much truth.”

— Shane Claiborne

2. “Only God is awesome.”

— Shane Claiborne

3. “Over and over, when I ask God why all of these injustices are allowed to exist in the world, I can feel the Spirit whisper to me, You tell me why we allow this to happen. You are my body, my hands, my feet.”

— Shane Claiborne

4. “How can we worship a homeless man on Sunday and ignore one on Monday?”

— Shane Claiborne

5. “God comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable.”

— Shane Claiborne

6. “Most good things have been said far too many times and just need to be lived.”

— Shane Claiborne

7. “The church is a place where broken people can fall in love with a beautiful God.”

— Shane Claiborne

8. “When we ask God to move a mountain, God may give us a shovel.”

— Shane Claiborne

9. “The work of community, love, reconciliation, restoration is the work we cannot leave up to politicians. This is the work we are all called to do.”

— Shane Claiborne

10. “The church is like Noah’s ark. It stinks, but if you get out of it, you’ll drown.”

— Shane Claiborne

11. “And I think that’s what our world is desperately in need of – lovers, people who are building deep, genuine relationships with fellow strugglers along the way, and who actually know the faces of the people behind the issues they are concerned about.”

— Shane Claiborne

12. “Prayer is not so much about convincing God to do what we want God to do as it is about convincing ourselves to do what God wants us to do.”

— Shane Claiborne

13. “Love has no limits. Compassion has no party. It is the responsibility of every human being and every institution to end poverty and to interrupt injustice.”

— Shane Claiborne

14. “Discontentment is a gift. It’s the stuff that changes the world.”

— Shane Claiborne

15. “All around you, people will be tiptoeing through life, just to arrive at death safely. But dear children, do not tiptoe. Run, hop, skip, or dance, just don’t tiptoe.”

— Shane Claiborne

16. “Faith is believing in the impossible because we have a God who is master of impossible.”

— Shane Claiborne

17. “We can tell the world that there is life after death, but the world really seems to be wondering if there is life before death.”

— Shane Claiborne

18. “May the peace of the Lord Christ go with you: wherever he may send you; may he guide you through the wilderness: protect you through the storm; may he bring you home rejoicing: at the wonders he has shown you; may he bring you home rejoicing: once again into our doors.”

— Shane Claiborne

19. “Perhaps there is no more dangerous place for a Christian to be than in safety and comfort, detached from the suffering of others.”

— Shane Claiborne

20. “It is a beautiful thing when folks in poverty are no longer just a missions project but become genuine friends and family with whom we laugh, cry, dream and struggle.”

— Shane Claiborne

21. “We give people fish. We teach them to fish. We tear down the walls that have been built up around the fish pond. And we figure out who polluted it.”

— Shane Claiborne

22. “If you have two coats you have stolen one. We have no right to have more than we need when someone else has less than they need.”

— Shane Claiborne

23. “The more I have read the Bible and studied the life of Jesus, the more I have become convinced that Christianity spreads best not through force but through fascination.”

— Shane Claiborne

24. “The Christian icon is not the Stars and Stripes but a cross-flag, and its emblem is not a donkey, an elephant, or an eagle, but a slaughtered lamb.”

— Shane Claiborne

25. “When we realize that we are both wretched and beautiful, we are freed up to see others the same way.”

— Shane Claiborne

26. “We need good laws, but no law can change a human heart – only God can do that.”

— Shane Claiborne

27. “When it comes to the big issues like immigration, everyone has a role. The government has a role. The church has a role. Every Christian has a role.”

— Shane Claiborne

28. “There are some Christians who totally disengage from politics and set their minds on heaven so much that their faith is so heavenly minded that it is no earthly good.”

— Shane Claiborne

29. “If every Christian family brought in a child who needed a family we would put the foster care system out of business.”

— Shane Claiborne

30. “We have to use our discontentment to engage rather than disengage – our hope has to be more powerful than our cynicism.”

— Shane Claiborne

31. “Someday war and poverty will be crazy and we will wonder how the world allowed such things to exist.”

— Shane Claiborne

32. “Recognizing that something is wrong is the first step toward changing the world.”

— Shane Claiborne

33. “One thing that’s clear in the Scriptures is that the nations do not lead people to peace; rather, people lead the nations to peace.”

— Shane Claiborne

34. “It is the church’s responsibility, the government’s responsibility, and the personal responsibility of every one of us to love.”

— Shane Claiborne

35. “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.”

— Shane Claiborne

36. “The true atheist is the one who refuses to see God’s image in the face of their neighbour.”

— Shane Claiborne

37. “Rather than finding the devil “out there,” we battle the devil within us. The revolution starts inside each of us.”

— Shane Claiborne

38. “That is the power of the Eucharist. At the communion table you have rich and poor together in the early church and they were being challenged.”

— Shane Claiborne

39. “To be nonpartisan doesn’t mean we’re nonpolitical.”

— Shane Claiborne

40. “The Eucharist is a symbol of that as you have bread, the staple food of the poor, and wine, a luxury of the rich, which are brought together at the table.”

— Shane Claiborne

41. “The best critique of what is wrong is the practice of something better. So let’s stop complaining about the church we’ve experienced and work on becoming the church we dream of.”

— Shane Claiborne

42. “I am sorry that so often the biggest obstacle to God has been Christians. Christians who have had so much to say with our mouths and so little to show with our lives. I am sorry that so often we have forgotten the Christ of our Christianity.”

— Shane Claiborne

43. “Dom Helder Camara, a twentieth-century bishop in Brazil, said, “When I feed the poor, they call me a saint, but when I ask why the poor are hungry, they call me a Communist.”

— Shane Claiborne

44. “Money has power. And so withholding money has power too, especially when a bunch of people do it together.”

— Shane Claiborne

45. “As brother Cornel West says, “Justice is what love looks like in public.” Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

— Shane Claiborne

46. “There is a movement bubbling up that goes beyond cynicism and celebrates a new way of living, a generation that stops complaining about the church it sees and becomes the church it dreams of.”

— Shane Claiborne

47. “We can ignore suffering no matter where we live. There are people who live a few miles from me who never see much poverty or the injustices that live on our doorstep.”

— Shane Claiborne

48. “The end of war begins with people who believe that another world is possible and that another empire has already interrupted time and space and is taking over this earth with the dreams of God.”

— Shane Claiborne

49. “The greatest sin of political imagination: Thinking there is no other way except the filthy rotten system we have today.”

— Shane Claiborne

50. “Charity is merely returning what we have stolen.”

— Shane Claiborne