Top 180 Shane Claiborne Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “The more recent effort to encourage everyone to pray in common involves so many people.”

— Shane Claiborne

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

— Shane Claiborne

53. “But liturgy is meant to be an interruption. It disrupts our reality and refocuses it on God. It reshapes our perceptions and lives with new rhythms, new holy days, a whole new story.”

— Shane Claiborne

54. “Folks didn’t have an encounter with Jesus and walk away saying, ‘Man, He sure doesn’t like gay folks.”

— Shane Claiborne

55. “One by one, these disciples would infect the nations with grace. It wasn’t a call to take the sword or the throne and force the world to bow. Rather, they were to live the contagious love of God, to woo the nations into a new future.”

— Shane Claiborne

56. “And since we are people of expectation, we are so convinced that another world is coming that we start living as if it were already here.”

— Shane Claiborne

57. “What the Black lives matter movement is doing is they are making it personal. They are making it hash tagged, exposing the racial injustice that continues to haunt our country in a way that you can’t ignore. There is power in injustice becoming personal.”

— Shane Claiborne

58. “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

59. “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

60. “Patting mother Theresa on the back, someone said to her: ‘i wouldn’t do what you do for a million dollars.’ She said with a grin: ’me neither.”

— Shane Claiborne

61. “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

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

— Shane Claiborne

63. “And in a very special way, as Jesus says in Matthew 25:40, in the least of these, we find Jesus in disguise. Perhaps we are just as likely to encounter God over the dinner table or in the slums or in the streets as in a giant auditorium. Of course, suggesting that God doesn’t need these million-dollar megacathedrals is the sort of thing that gets you in big trouble.”

— Shane Claiborne

64. “Violence is for those who have lost their imagination.”

— Shane Claiborne

65. “I think of the Catholic worker movement and Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin and others.”

— Shane Claiborne

66. “Sometimes our tunnel vision is limited to what we see outside our window. Until racial injustice becomes personal then I don’t think it moves us in our gut.”

— Shane Claiborne

67. “We can admire and worship Jesus without doing what he did. We can applaud what he preached and stood for without caring about the same things. We can adore his cross without taking up ours. I had come to see that the great tragedy in the church is not that rich Christians do not care about the poor but that rich Christians do not know the poor.”

— Shane Claiborne

68. “Believe in miracles. And live in a way that might necessitate one.”

— Shane Claiborne

69. “As an American, and especially as a Christian, I am convinced that a love for our own people is not a bad thing, but love doesn’t stop at borders. Love is infinitely boundless and all about holy trespassing and offensive friendships.”

— Shane Claiborne

70. “There is a difference between feeding someone and eating dinner with them. If every Christian at home just made room for the stranger we would end homelessness overnight.”

— Shane Claiborne

71. “I learned more about God from the tears of homeless mothers than any systematic theology ever taught me.”

— Shane Claiborne

72. “No one has seen God, but as we love one another, God lives in us.”

— Shane Claiborne

73. “Every 70-year-old needs a young person in their lives to mentor, and every 20-year-old needs a senior.”

— Shane Claiborne

74. “Erasmus of Rotterdam, a sixteenth-century priest who was committed to reforming the church from within, said, “When faith came to be in writings rather than in hearts, contention grew hot and love grew cold. That which is forced cannot be sincere, and that which is not voluntary cannot please Christ.”

— Shane Claiborne

75. “When the church takes affairs of the state more seriously than they do Jesus, Pax Romana becomes its gospel and the president becomes the Son of God.”

— Shane Claiborne

76. “We know the Church wasn’t born 200 years ago. It’s encouraging to see some of the post-denominational churches actually wanting to reconnect with the story and the prayer life of the larger Church.”

— Shane Claiborne

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

— Shane Claiborne

78. “When I think of some of the great renewals in the church I think of folks like St. Francis and Clare of Assisi who, through their lifestyle, were challenging the patterns of materialism and militarism and it affected the Christianity of their age.”

— Shane Claiborne

79. “It’s hard to hear the gentle whisper of the Spirit amid the noise of Christendom.”

— Shane Claiborne

80. “Jesus did not send us into the world to make believers but to make disciples.”

— Shane Claiborne

81. “We might hope to change the world through better, bigger programs to stop global warming, but global warming will not end unless people become less greedy and less wasteful, gaining a fresh vision of what it means to love our global neighbor.”

— Shane Claiborne

82. “There is one big misunderstanding of the monastics leaving society.”

— Shane Claiborne

83. “Biological family is too small of a vision. Patriotism is far too myopic. A love for our own relatives and a love for the people of our own country are not bad things, but our love does not stop at the border.”

— Shane Claiborne

84. “Governments can do lots of things, but there are a lot of things they cannot do. A government can provide good housing, but folks can have a house without having a home. We can keep people breathing with good health care, but they still may not really be alive.”

— Shane Claiborne

85. “Christians pretty much live like everybody else, they just sprinkle a little Jesus in along the way.”

— Shane Claiborne

86. “Little movements of communities of ordinary radicals are committed to doing small things with great love.”

— Shane Claiborne

87. “Violence is for those who have lost their imagination. Has your country lost its imagination?”

— Shane Claiborne

88. “Teresa of Avila, a sixteenth-century Spanish mystic, wrote, “Christ has no body now on earth but yours, no hands but yours, no feet but yours. Yours are the eyes through which Christ’s compassion is to look out to the world; yours are the feet with which he is to go about doing good; yours are the hands with which God is to bless people now.”

— Shane Claiborne

89. “The more I travel, the more I see how important it is to each population to see that their history of the good and the bad is remembered by others.”

— Shane Claiborne

90. “Lord, show us that reconciling with those we imagine are different from us is not only for peace, but also to train us more deeply in the faith that honors everything created by your hand. Help us see that reconciliation leads to deeper knowledge of you. Amen.”

— Shane Claiborne

91. “It is a dangerous day when we can take the cross out of the church more easily than the flag. No wonder it is hard for seekers to find God nowadays.”

— Shane Claiborne

92. “I am convinced that if we lose kids to the culture of drugs and materialism, of violence and war, it’s because we don’t dare them, not because we don’t entertain them. It’s because we make the gospel too easy, not because we make it too difficult. Kids want to do something heroic with their lives, which is why they play video games and join the army. But what are they to do with a church that teaches them to tiptoe through life so they can arrive safely at death?”

— Shane Claiborne

93. “When we see the crucifixion as a legal transaction in which Jesus “paid the bill,” we run the risk of cheapening the work of restoration at the heart of the cross. After.”

— Shane Claiborne

94. “Somehow Jesus’s reputation has survived all the embarrassing things that Christians have done in his name.”

— Shane Claiborne

95. “Irish rock star Bono has said, “Grace defies reason and logic. Love interrupts, if you like, the consequences of your actions, which in my case is very good news indeed, because I’ve done a lot of stupid stuff.”

— Shane Claiborne

96. “There is extreme poverty in Appalachia, where I was, and increasingly poverty is not just an urban thing.”

— Shane Claiborne

97. “In the Bible, God uses brothel owners, pagan kings, murderers and mercenaries as instruments of good; at one point God even speaks to a guy named Balaam through his donkey.”

— Shane Claiborne

98. “We say it is idealistic to think we can continue to live the way we live – with 5% of the world using half the world’s resources, with $20,000 a second being spent on war.”

— Shane Claiborne

99. “The monastic folks have the spirit of being in the world but not of the world, sort of peculiar people who have gone to the desert to live on the margins of the empire.”

— Shane Claiborne

100. “The problem is that the Chicken-Soup-for-the-Soul stuff may feel good, but none of that typical stuff helps when somebody in your neighborhood is murdered.”

— Shane Claiborne