Top 180 Shane Claiborne Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Jesus did not send us into the world to make believers but to make disciples.”

— Shane Claiborne

52. “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

53. “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

54. “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

55. “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

56. “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

57. “When we truly discover how to love our neighbor as our self, Capitalism will not be possible and Marxism will not be necessary.”

— Shane Claiborne

58. “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

59. “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

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

— Shane Claiborne

61. “That is part of our critique of some of the charity and service work is that we can still keep relationships at a distance by creating programs that offer services but we don’t really create a reconciled community.”

— Shane Claiborne

62. “The more recent effort to encourage everyone to pray in common involves so many people.”

— Shane Claiborne

63. “I’m not ready to walk on water, but I’m also not ready to let the televangelists and prosperity preachers hijack the supernatural stuff from the rest of us. Imagine what would happen if the prayer movement and social justice movement converged, and we had Christians who prayed like they depend on God and lived like God depended on them?”

— Shane Claiborne

64. “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

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

— Shane Claiborne

66. “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

67. “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

68. “When our theology gets in the way of loving our neighbors, it’s time to rethink our theology.”

— Shane Claiborne

69. “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

70. “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

71. “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

72. “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

73. “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

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

— Shane Claiborne

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

— Shane Claiborne

76. “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

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

— Shane Claiborne

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

— Shane Claiborne

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

— Shane Claiborne

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

— Shane Claiborne

81. “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

82. “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

83. “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

84. “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

85. “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

86. “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

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

— Shane Claiborne

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

— Shane Claiborne

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

— Shane Claiborne

90. “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

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

— Shane Claiborne

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

— Shane Claiborne

93. “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

94. “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

95. “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

96. “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

97. “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

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

— Shane Claiborne

99. “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

100. “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