Top 180 Shane Claiborne Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Christianity is at its best when it is peculiar, marginalized, suffering, and it is at its worst when it is popular, credible, triumphal, and powerful.”

— Shane Claiborne

152. “The question becomes not just how to accumulate more, but how to covet less.”

— Shane Claiborne

153. “One of the great dangers in political engagement is misplaced hope.”

— Shane Claiborne

154. “It’s not that the law has no meaning; it’s just that grace has the last word.”

— Shane Claiborne

155. “There is real value in these local congregations. For me, a lot of it is the value of the sacraments we share. In neighborhoods like ours, the churches provide stability.”

— Shane Claiborne

156. “The death penalty did not flourish in America in spite of Christians but because of us. So.”

— Shane Claiborne

157. “I like how someone once said being a Christian is not about having new ideas but having new eyes. This is the ability to have our hearts broken with the things that break the heart of God. That is part of what it means to be a Christian.”

— Shane Claiborne

158. “We are setting ourselves up for disappointment if our hope is built on anything less than Jesus.”

— Shane Claiborne

159. “Look through the prayer books. You’ll see lots of dates. You’ll see names of Native Americans remembered. This was an open-sourcing project among so many people.”

— Shane Claiborne

160. “Frederick Buechner said, “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”

— Shane Claiborne

161. “But Jesus answered me with these words and said: Sin is necessary, but all will be well, and all will be well, and every kind of thing will be well.”

— Shane Claiborne

162. “The Christian life – and especially the contemplative life – is a continual discovery of Christ in new and unexpected places.”

— Shane Claiborne

163. “There is a certain power when old and young come together – we can do more together than we can on our own.”

— Shane Claiborne

164. “To all my nonbelieving, sort-of-believing, and used-to-be-believing friends: I feel like I should begin with a confession. I am sorry that so often the biggest obstacle to God has been Christians.”

— Shane Claiborne

165. “We’re remembering each other’s heroes, too. We are learning each other’s songs. We are reminding ourselves that we are a global family praying together. We’re all trying to live in the light of the history that shines through the biblical narrative.”

— Shane Claiborne

166. “Sometimes people call folks here at the Simple Way saints. Usually they either want to applaud our lives and live vicariously through us, or they want to write us off as superhuman and create a safe distance. One of my favorite quotes, written on my wall here in bold black marker, is from Dorothy Day: “Don’t call us saints; we don’t want to be dismissed that easily.”

— Shane Claiborne

167. “I have this certain reluctance when it comes to this idea that we are spiritual but not religious and we want Jesus but not the church. Why can’t we have both?”

— Shane Claiborne

168. “We have been mentored from the very beginning by Catholic folks who are invigorating the best of the monastic spirit.”

— Shane Claiborne

169. “The love that makes community is the willingness to do someone else’s dirty work.”

— Shane Claiborne

170. “With the early Christians you couldn’t have God as your father unless you have the church as your mother. This isn’t accepting the church as a perfect thing.”

— Shane Claiborne

171. “You may have lost hope in Christianity or Christendom or all the institutions, but you have not lost hope in the church. This is the church.” At that moment, we decided to stop complaining about the church we saw, and we set our hearts on becoming the church we dreamed of.”

— Shane Claiborne

172. “We’re not church planters. We are community planters and, as we work in our communities, we join local churches.”

— Shane Claiborne

173. “Tony Campolo and I both speak a lot, and we began to notice that there were some crowds of old folks that desperately needed some youthful energy, and there were other crowds of young folks that desperately needed some aged wisdom.”

— Shane Claiborne

174. “Jesus was Jewish. He went to synagogue “as was his tradition” and celebrated holy days such as Passover. But Jesus also healed on the Sabbath. Jesus points us to a God who is able to work within institutions and order, a God who is too big to be confined. God is constantly coloring outside the lines. Jesus challenges the structures that oppress and exclude, and busts through any traditions that put limitations on love. Love cannot be harnessed.”

— Shane Claiborne

175. “As Christians, we should be the best collaborators in the world. We should be quick to find unlikely allies and subversive friends, like Jesus did.”

— Shane Claiborne

176. “In fact, the Gospel shows us change comes from the bottom rather than the top, from an old rugged cross rather than a gold royal throne.”

— Shane Claiborne

177. “But we are not just called to be candles. We are called to be fire. Candles can be snuffed out by the slightest wind or by the smallest child on their birthday. But it’s harder to put out a fire. We are to be fire, to weave our lives together so that the Spirit’s inferno of love spreads across the earth.”

— Shane Claiborne

178. “We often miss the irony that the same Paul who writes “submit to the authorities” goes to jail and is condemned for subverting the authorities! He.”

— Shane Claiborne

179. “It doesn’t matter who you are. Everyone has something to offer the movement of justice.”

— Shane Claiborne

180. “I used to think you all were missionaries bringing the gospel to your neighborhood, but now I see that it is in your neighborhood that you have learned the gospel, and that you are actually missionaries to the church.”

— Shane Claiborne

181. “Jeanne de Chantal, seventeenth-century founder of the Order of the Visitation, said, “No matter what happens, be gentle with yourself.”

— Shane Claiborne

182. “As my friend said that when people say the church is full of hypocrites, he says we always have room for more.”

— Shane Claiborne

183. “The question for me is not are we political, but how are we political? We need to be politically engaged, but peculiar in how we engage.”

— Shane Claiborne

184. “Surround us with your subtle and hidden prophets, that we might have help to overcome self-deception and face the truth that sets us free. Amen.”

— Shane Claiborne

185. “Of all people, we Christians should be building friendships and protecting the dignity of human beings, even those of other faiths. I loved seeing Christians in Iraq stand guard as peacekeepers outside the mosques while Muslims gathered for prayer, and Muslims doing the same for Christians.”

— Shane Claiborne

186. “Christianity can be built around isolating ourselves from evildoers and sinners, creating a community of religious piety and moral purity. That’s the Christianity I grew up with. Christianity can also be built around joining with the broken sinners and evildoers of our world crying out to God, groaning for grace. That’s the Christianity I have fallen in love with. In.”

— Shane Claiborne

187. “This common prayer project has taken years of energy, but we see it not as a way to leave our individual churches, but as a movement we hope to see permeate the larger Church.”

— Shane Claiborne

188. “Jesus still has a really great reputation and the Spirit is still moving. I’ve got a lot of hope for a generation that takes Jesus seriously, once again.”

— Shane Claiborne

189. “The danger is that we can begin to read the Bible through the eyes of America rather than read America through the eyes of the Bible. We just want Jesus to be a good American.”

— Shane Claiborne

190. “We can also cling to the treasures of our faith and get rid of the things that are cluttering that. It is a time we are seeing some trending away from the things that were cluttering our faith.”

— Shane Claiborne

191. “Lord, remind us that it is not always agitated uprisings and nonstop activity which lead to justice, but that change often comes through the quietcommitment of a small group of people. Help us raise our small body of people to set about quietly becoming the change we want to see in the world. Amen.”

— Shane Claiborne

192. “Certainly the institutional church is ill. It’s hemorrhaging young people at an astronomical rate.”

— Shane Claiborne

193. “Little people with big dreams are reimagining the world.”

— Shane Claiborne

194. “But we live in a world that has lost its appreciation for small things. We live in a world that wants things bigger and bigger. We want to supersize our fries, sodas, and church buildings. But amid all the supersizing, many of us feel God doing something new, something small and subtle. This thing Jesus called the kingdom of God is emerging across the globe in the most unexpected places, a gentle whisper amid the chaos.”

— Shane Claiborne

195. “If we remove the cross, we are in danger of promoting a very cheap grace. Perhaps it should make us uncomfortable.”

— Shane Claiborne