Todd Hiestand

“Poor people die not only because of the world’s indifference to their poverty, but also because of ineffective efforts by those who do care…”
William Easterly, in the book The White Man’s Burden

“The stickler is that Christianity doesn’t make a very good religion in this sense. Christianity is not a faith of conservation and preservation. It is a faith of creation, participation, movement, and change. For conservation to happen, something needs to be stopped. Something needs to be limited. Something needs to be ignored. And too often [...]

“So many people think preaching the Resurrection means doing a little bit of apologetics in the pulpit to prove it really is true. Others simply say, “Jesus is raised, therefore there is a life after death.” This isn’t the point! Those types of sermons may be necessary, but there’s more to it than that. To [...]

“It is not simply to be taken for granted that the Christian has the privilege of living among other Christians.”
Dietrich Bonhoffer in Life Together

“The community that confesses that Jesus is Lord has been, from the very beginning, a movement launched into the public life of mankind. The Greco-Roman world in which the New Testament was written was full of societies offering to those who wished to join a way of personal salvation through religious teaching and practice. There [...]

“Rescue me from the person who tells me about life and omits Christ, who is wise in the ways of the world and ignores the movement of the Spirit.”
- Eugene Peterson in

“We read [scripture], naturally, as part of our real history, secular history, the history of which we are a part. What other history is there? There are not different histories, but there are different ways of understanding history…it is clearly an illusion to imagine that there are two kinds of history - sacred and [...]

“It should not bother us that [during different epochs] the Christian faith was perceived and experienced in new and different ways. The Christian faith is intrinsically incarnational; therefore unless the church chooses to remain a foreign entity, it will always enter into the context in which it happens to find itself.”
David Bosch in Transforming [...]

“In confession the break-through to community takes place. Sin demands to have a man by himself. It withdraws him from the community. The more isolated a person is, the more destructive will be the power of sin over him, and the more deeply he becomes involved in it, the more disastrous is [...]

“The gospel is the work of God to restore humans to union with God and communion with others, in the context of a community for the good of others and the world.”
- Scot McKnight in Jesus Creed