Quotes by Erwin McManus

You cannot wash the feet of a dirty world if you refuse to touch it.

The fuel of ambition is not the problem; it is the focus of ambition that frees or betrays us.

We need both to aspire and accomplish. Without a vision for your life, without a sense of purpose, you will begin to die a slow death.

The greatest enemy to the movement of Jesus Christ is Christianity.

The limitations you are willing to accept establish the boundaries of your existence.

The person who loves the process has a much greater chance of success than the person who loves the outcome.

Our citizenship is in eternity; history is our temporary residence.

Whoever tells the best story shapes the culture.

Love never comes without wounds; faith never comes without failure.

When we stop believing the world can become a better place, when we stop caring about the lives and conditions of others, we lose a part of ourselves.

It is not balance you need but adaptability.

To be apathetic is literally to be without passion.

There are few things more powerful than a life lived with passionate clarity.

Within a moment there is monumental potential. That is the mystery of a moment. It is small enough to ignore and big enough to change your life forever.

The history of God's people is not a record of God searching for courageous men and women who could handle the task, but God transforming the hearts of cowards and calling them to live courageous lives.

You cannot wash the feet of a dirty world if you refuse to touch it.

When we dwell on the past, we tend to want to live there. When we dream of the future, we want to go there. Our dreams are where God paints a picture of a life waiting to be created.

We have to ask ourselves, 'Am I really trying to discern God's will, or determine whether I want to do it?'

To live outside of God's will puts us in danger; to live in his will makes us dangerous.

Courage is not the absence of fear; it is the absence of self.

Sin creates the illusion of freedom. In the end it fools us into seeking freedom from God rather than finding freedom in God.

The epicenter of creativity and imagination should be the Church, reflecting the character and glory of God.

Jesus' death wasn't to free us from dying, but to free us from the fear of death. Jesus came to liberate us so that we could die up front and then live. Jesus Christ wants to take us to places where only dead men and women can go.

The needs of the world are too big for us to be living such small lives.

You're not supposed to die with your potential. A life well lived squeezes all the potential placed within and does something with it.

A life well lived is the most exquisite work of art.

It is amazing where God will take you when you are willing to follow. Life is full of surprises when we choose mystery over security.

If God imagined you at birth, what makes you think He's stopped imagining you now.

Home is ultimately not about a place to live but about the people with whom you are most fully alive. Home is about love, relationship, community, and belonging, and we are all searching for home.

The Christian faith grew through story -- not text. Only later did the stories become Scripture. While the Scripture must be held in the highest regard, we must not neglect the power of story.

Attitude is an accurate monitor of where we fall on the spectrum of pride and humility.

Gratitude changes your perspective about life. You see the future, experience the present, and remember the past in a dramatically different way.

It is insanity to run from God and search for love.

Talent doesn't win. Hard work, determination, and character wins. If you root your talent and ability in those things, then you have a powerful combination.

When the church becomes an institution, people are nothing more than volunteers to be recruited. When the church is a movement, our stewardship becomes the unleashing of our God-given gifts, talents, and passions.

Jesus beckons his followers to a path that's far from the easy road. It's a path filled with adventure, uncertainty, and unlimited possibilities -- the only path that can fulfill the deepest longings and desires of your heart.

A world without God cannot wait for us to choose the safe path. If we wait for someone else to take the risk, we risk that no one will ever act and that nothing will ever be accomplished.

You need to remember who God is, forget the painful wounds and let Him renew you.

Your soul craves truth, beauty, wonder, love. Your soul craves to dream, to imagine, and even simply to understand. Your soul craves to connect, to commune, to create.

My goal is to destroy Christianity as a world religion and be a recatalyst for the movement of Jesus Christ ... Some people are upset with me because it sounds like I'm anti-Christian. I think they might be right.

The reality is that every human being is placed on this planet, and one of the things that drives humans is their need for meaning, and if you can make every job meaningful, then you will guarantee that every job will be done to its highest level of excellence.

The most important moments rarely come at a convenient time.

Two thousand years ago, God started a revolt against the religion He started. So don't ever put it past God to cause a groundswell movement against churches and Christian institutions that bear His name.

We are all time voyagers leaving history in our wake, pioneering into the future.

Behind real freedom, there lies discipline.

Problems, obstacles, and challenges can either become the markers of our limits and limitations, or they can become the springboard into a whole new world.

True religion always moves us to serve others and to give our lives to see those oppressed find freedom.

We were created to be expressions of the goodness and wholeness of God.

It's not your freedom to choose that makes you free. It's what you choose in that freedom that makes you free.

We are all hypocrites in transition. I am not who I want to be, but I am on the journey there, and thankfully I am not whom I used to be.

I think a lot of us are not on a path; we're in a rut. We have confused comfort with peace, belief with faith, safety with wisdom, wealth with blessing, and existence with life.

In some sense we are all hypocrites in transition.

Racists are not born, they are raised. Isolation is the breeding ground for racism. The more you come to know the world around you and people different than you the less likely you will become an extremist. The Church needs to bring the world together.

When you live your life knowing the mission and calling and voice of God in your soul and you know where that compass is driving you forward, you will become a rare commodity in a world searching for direction.

We want to help everyone find meaning in their life and help translate the story that each person actually matters in the world.

We're a part of the insurrection, trying to turn Christianity upside down. We're an experimental church: God's research and development arm.

For Christians, they need to access the power of Jesus and not look at Christianity as a religion. It is our Lord Jesus that makes you change, and Christians need to actualize it and put it into practice.

Often we talk about God's ability to change lives without fully understanding how to access that power.

People outside of the faith really appreciate Mosaic and really love what we're doing.

We focus, in some ways, on how to disengage Jesus and the Bible from everything people know about Christianity as a religion.

I had someone a month ago tell me at a campaign lunch that you can't be a Christian and a Democrat. I think that that view is dissipating very, very fast.

I hope my greatest contribution will be to try to extract principles of truth that will cause us to live our lives in a more effective way and to advance Jesus' purpose in the world.

I think many times Christians don't really take the opportunity to hear what people are saying and seeing in the world around them.

I think the opportunity to bring together the people in the world of politics, business and entertainment and have an opportunity to listen to their best learning and thinking is a great opportunity.

The bulk of our community is probably between the ages of 20 and 34.

You have a generation that is saying we are tapping out of religion in many ways. But what they are not saying is that we are tapping out of a serious search for meaning in life.

Our job is not to change people; our job is to connect people to Jesus, and it's Jesus' job to change people.

The word 'entertain' means to hold someone's attention, and what we want is a faith that is vibrant and alive and beautiful and real.

I became a Christian because I met God.

I know it sounds crazy, but as soon as Christians start telling non-Christians how to live their lives, we've lost the Christian faith.

I think that's a part of what motivates me in my teaching and writing. Once the Gospel feels mainstream and becomes a nicely organized, orchestrated belief system, frankly, I don't think there is even an attraction to the human spirit.

God has leveraged the human spirit to move in His direction, and all the material we need to bring a person to the realization that they were created by God actually already exists inside that person.

When researchers try to break down what is happening at Mosaic, far too often they see the skin and miss the heart.

I think the exploration and the search for who Jesus is, and that 2,000 years later we're still trying to figure out who He was, and did He really rise from the dead... And I think for me, the answer is 'yes,' and that's why we're talking about Him today.

If we keep asking the wrong questions, we are just going to get better wrong answers. The solution to lack of community isn't to give up on the community.

I think we are all trying to figure out what it means to be the Church as opposed to just doing church.

There is something powerful about singing to God as an act of worship, but it is time to reframe our perspective and our language to genuinely encompass all of life as worship.

The Bible has been trapped in modernity. Everything has to work perfectly. And if everything doesn't fit in a Lego-oriented functionality, then we don't deal with it as Christians.

If you come at the Bible as if it's a document of encyclopedic information, you've pretty much killed any kind of life change in a seeker and unbeliever.

The Bible is not an antiquated text. The scriptures are the text that will lead us into the future.

The system of Christian celebrity was not a good space for me, and it was brutal on my kids -- my son in college was frequently confronted by people railing against me as a heretic.

I've worked in the business world and, as a futurist, the whole 20 years that I've led at Mosaic.

From the beginning, our community has been focused on people outside of Christianity. But that emphasis means that a lot of hard work is represented in every person who is baptized.

Los Angeles has been known as the center of creativity but has often been equally known for the absence of spirituality.

It is the creative and enterprising spirit of people that is indispensable. Everything else is supplemental.

When we look at history, we see history is made up of the heroes of their times. Yet, somehow we miss this when we put on the lens of the Scriptures.

Religion as a whole specializes in sin management. It's all about organizing humanity in such a way that we cause as little damage as possible.

I have so much confidence in the reality of Jesus that I feel no pressure to try to make people act or be a certain way. I'm banking everything on the fact that God actually changes people.

You can plant a church and grow a church. That's not that hard to do, but it's harder to be a viable source of transformation in a city or your time or space.

While we would love to have no criticism, probably if we had no critique, we wouldn't be doing anything meaningful.

Wherever and whenever God is moving in a new and fresh way, there emerges a new song!

I think Christianity is the same as Buddhism and Hinduism -- whenever a religion begins to say that these are the things you have to do to be loved by God, you have a religion.

My primary assessment would be because American Christians tend to be incredibly self-indulgent, so they see the church as a place there for them to meet their needs and to express faith in a way that is meaningful for them.

God has given us an imagination, and our imagination is really the principle tool from which all creativity and artistry comes from.