Erwin McManus Quotations

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

I realize that I live on the bubble of insanity. I feel the weight of human suffering, loneliness and despair on me all the time. It's not getting easier; if anything, it's always right on the edge of my skin.

I think we've overstated that God is the God who wants us to obey. Obedience is not the end game. Obedience is only our calling so that we can step into our freedom.

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

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.

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

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

I have an incredible confidence in the resilience of the human spirit and the creative ability of the Holy Spirit. So, if you can get people asking the right questions, it really will start moving in the right direction.

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

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.

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.

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

How many people just get up on Monday and do the same thing they've done every single Monday - go to work and just turn on route automatic and no longer have any meaning in their life?

We are constantly learning and growing and changing. We are really an experiment. We are endeavoring to discover if a community of faith can exist purely for the good of others.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Promise Keepers was looking for a movement that can actualize the hope of Jesus, the hope that we see. And 'Uprising' was what they were looking for.

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

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

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.

One of the things you'll discover... as you listen to your own soul is that you spend a great amount of your life trying to bring meaning to your own life. And, by the way, most people are not going to church, so the place they're actually trying to find meaning in their life is at work.

One trend I see is the rejection of growth for self-discovery and the pursuit of authentic community. So we keep whittling our spiritual community to a smaller and smaller and more exclusive inner circle. The problem is if the diagnoses are wrong, so will be the cure.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

We need to understand that Christianity is about changing; it is not about a religion.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

So much of what comes out of the faith community seems so dour and somber, and we want to say, 'Hey, we're real people. You can be a person of faith and really enjoy life and laugh.'

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.

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.

I love what Monet, Picasso, Van Gogh and Jesus all said - that love is really the driving principle of the creative act. In fact, they would say that great art is always inspired by love.

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.

If you look at it from just a pure economic basis, technology is replacing all of the jobs robots can do, and machinery is replacing the jobs that humans once held. If we don't train our children to imagine, to create, they're going to be unemployable.

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.

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.

This thing that haunts you, that never seems satisfied, the cravings in your soul that you are unable to satiate through all the success that the world can bring this is your soul screaming for God.

What is the future you're creating right now?

The future awaits those with the courage to create it.

All the evidence you need to prove God is waiting within you to be discovered.

I guess when I really think about it, God's voice sounds a lot like my voice.

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.

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.

It is not balance you need but adaptability.

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

Truth should never travel faster than love.

Behind real freedom, there lies discipline.

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.

Far too often, when we think we are frightened by mystery, the fact is that we are haunted by history.

When you're passionate about God, you can trust your passions.

So many of us have abdicated our passions for obligations, as if passion is a luxury for the young, and we must all grow up one day. We, even if reluctantly, fall into place to live a life of conformity that we describe as ‘maturity.’ We’ve made acting like an adult synonymous with living apathetic lives.

Humility is not about having a low self-image or poor self-esteem. Humility is about self-awareness.

It’s a wonderful thing when you look inside your own heart and like what you see.

To be apathetic is literally to be without passion.

Whoever tells the best story shapes the culture.

Love, no matter how you come at it, is a huge risk. It makes it easier for me to remember that God will never reject me because I am not good enough and that any community that has His heart will embrace me as I am. Jesus invites us into a community where imperfect people can find acceptance, love, forgiveness, and a new beginning.

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.

I"m often accused of being irreligious, and I suppose it's for this very reason. Whether it's Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Catholicism, Hinduism, Judaism, or any other ism, when a religioin is created on the subtle premise that God withholds his love and you must submit to the system to earn that love, I consider it the worst of corruptions... For centuries, the church has been telling us that if we want God to love us, we need to follow the rules. It's been far more important to focus on the sin problem than the love problem.

My goal is to destroy Christianity.

People who are fully alive look out of their minds to those who simply exist.

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.

We may not be able to accomplish everything we can dream, but we will not accomplish anything without our dreams

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

When you begin to create the life of your dreams - or maybe better stated, when you begin to live the life that God dreams for you - you take responsibility to prepare for the future.

Greatness comes with discipline.

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

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

Is it possible that the creative act is simply the materialization of the future- making the invisible, visible?

You are an artist. What work of art will you leave behind?

Courage frees us from the fears that would rob us of life itself.

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

In some sense we are all hypocrites in transition.

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.

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.

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

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

Jesus did not have a value for prayer for prayer's sake. He had a value for the intimate communion between God and man.

When we lack integrity, we use power to control. When we lead with integrity, we use power to bless.

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

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

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

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.