Top 180 Shane Claiborne Quotes (2024 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. “Most good things have been said far too many times and just need to be lived.”

— Shane Claiborne

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

— Shane Claiborne

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

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

— Shane Claiborne

11. “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

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

— Shane Claiborne

13. “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

14. “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

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

— Shane Claiborne

16. “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

17. “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

18. “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

19. “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

20. “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

21. “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

22. “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

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

— Shane Claiborne

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

— Shane Claiborne

25. “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

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

— Shane Claiborne

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

— Shane Claiborne

28. “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

29. “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

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

— Shane Claiborne

31. “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

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

— Shane Claiborne

33. “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

34. “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

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

— Shane Claiborne

36. “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

37. “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

38. “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

39. “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

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

— Shane Claiborne

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

— Shane Claiborne

42. “But what had lasting significance were not the miracles themselves but Jesus’ love. Jesus raised his friend Lazarus from the dead, and a few years later, Lazarus died again. Jesus healed the sick, but eventually caught some other disease. He fed the ten thousands, and the next day they were hungry again. But we remember his love. It wasn’t that Jesus healed a leper but that he touched a leper, because no one touched lepers.”

— Shane Claiborne

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

— Shane Claiborne

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

— Shane Claiborne

45. “The great paradox and humor of God’s audacious power: a stuttering prophet will be the voice of God, a barren old lady will become the mother of a nation, a shepherd boy will become their king, and a homeless baby will lead them home.:.”

— Shane Claiborne

46. “An older charismatic woman told me, “If the devil can’t steal your soul, he’ll just keep you busy doing meaningless church work.” There.”

— Shane Claiborne

47. “Faith is not accepting the world as it is but insisting on building the world God wants.”

— Shane Claiborne

48. “There is an innocence or purity that we see in renewals and in the Mennonite church and a new an invigorated civil rights movement.”

— Shane Claiborne

49. “Lord, we know that you will come again in glory to raise the living and the dead. Resurrect us now from the death of comfort, complacency, sloth, and shallowness that we might witness to your love in life and death. Amen.”

— Shane Claiborne

50. “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