Erwin McManus: MY TOP 25 QUOTES

Before leaving on a recent month-long trip to Bali, I downloaded all 7 books written by Erwin McManus to my Kindle:

• An Unstoppable Force: Daring to Become the Church God Had in Mind (2001)
• The Barbarian Way: Unleash the Untamed Faith Within (2005)
• Stand Against the Wind: Awaken the Hero Within (2006)
• Uprising: A Revolution of the Soul (2006)
• Chasing Daylight: Seize the Power of Every Moment (2006)
• Seizing Your Divine Moment: Dare to Live a Life of Adventure (2006)
• Wide Awake: The Future Is Waiting Within You (2008)
• Soul Cravings (2008)

Out of the hundreds of quotes I underlined while reading, here are my top 25 quotes which I organized into four categories:

The Church

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.

If your church is full of members, you get an occasional missionary. If your church is full of missionaries, the rest is just about geography. Most churches don’t send missionaries because they don’t have any.

You cannot advance the kingdom of God with people who are in retreat.

The purpose of the church cannot be to survive or even to thrive but to serve. And sometimes servants die in the serving.

We only truly come to know ourselves in the context of others. The more isolated and disconnected we are, the more shattered and distorted our self-identity. We are not healthy when we are alone. We find ourselves as we connect to others. Without community we don’t know who we are.

A member of Mosaic is a declaration that you are moving from being a consumer to being an investor; that you are joining not simply the community of Christ, but the cause of Christ. The motivation behind becoming a member is not what can be received but what can be given.

Leaders

If those who prepare for leadership are looking for the safe place, who will lead the church into the dangerous places?

If you’re not willing to lose your job over a key issue, then your core value is your security. If you’re not willing to lose your job, you’re not a leader; you’re a hireling.

In an organization, leaders must be brought from the outside. In a movement, leaders emerge from within.

Leadership is not about how much education a person has attained but how much they have actually accomplished in a ministry context.

Just as some churches are unwilling to follow genuine spiritual leadership, some pastors find it difficult to entrust and empower God’s people.

If you neglect the importance of building healthy relationships, you will find yourself alone in the midst of crisis. When you invest in others, they will leverage even your failures to be the material for your future success.

Knowing God

I don’t know how to prove God to you. I can only hope to guide you to a place where you and God might meet.

Whatever else Jesus came to do, one thing is clear—He came to set you free. God is not a warden; He is a deliverer.

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.

At Mosaic you will rarely hear the word evangelism, but you’ll always hear the word relationships. When evangelism is not reserved for the elite, kingdom relationships become everyone’s responsibility.

Following God’s Call

You cannot follow God in neutral.

The God of light insists on traveling into dark places; the God of peace continuously involves Himself in the wars of men; the God who is good engages the depth of human evil. To follow Jesus is to enter the unknown, to relinquish security, and to exchange certainty for confidence in Him.

We are all chasing daylight. Our lives are but a brief moment in time. Blink and it’s gone. As soon as we are fully aware of life, we become fully aware of death.

Once you have lift, once you have takeoff, it just might hit you-on its worst day, a butterfly flies better than a caterpillar on its best day.

The skills and competencies and experiences you’ve had in the past will not be enough for every challenge you will face in the future. They are enough to prepare you, but not enough to sustain you. You must build on the past but live for the future.

When it comes to the future, our lives are more discovered than determined.

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. And for many of us, our dreams will be buried under the epitaph, “I refused to let go of what I had.”

I love the motto of Caribou Coffee, which I found up in St. Paul, Minnesota: “Life is short. Stay awake for it.”

What a tragedy to breathe your last breath and to discover that your life was not only unfinished, but also perhaps never really even began.