Quotes from Ed Stetzer

Belief followed by strategy and culture moves people to community.

In his work The Book of Church Growth, Thom Rainer explained, "Prayer is the power behind the principles. There simply is no more important principle in church growth than prayer. The prayers of the early church unleashed the power of God to add thousands to the church. It happened then. It is happening in some churches today. And it can happen in your church."

Philip Nation is right when he says the foundational truth of discipleship is this: "Love is the central discipline of the Christian life. Everything else will flow from that as the centerpiece of spiritual formation.

We don't own mission, and it is not ours to define.

God is not the source of any form of worship that does not exalt and lift up the name of Jesus!

When we live out a gospel-driven Christian worldview, the gospel is not just something we grasp at conversion; it is something that influences how we see and respond to the world in all areas of our lives. When Christians participate in an unhelpful way in this age of outrage, this transformation has not happened; instead, they have allowed their worldview to become infected.

The answer for Christians in the age of outrage is not some silver-bullet study that will give a new piece of knowledge. Rather, it begins with looking at our habits, the things that we love every day through our choices and actions.

Jesus did not send us to declare the gospel only where people are responsive or where our witness is welcome. He did not expect us to be on mission to disciple peoples only where there is no danger or risk involved. He was unequivocal in His mandate to disciple the nations (peoples)—all of them!

If we are to begin to push back against this, we have to understand how meditating on God's Word is central to worldview formation.

have heard plenty of sermons that address the problem of pornography, but I can count on one hand the number of times a pastor or Sunday school teacher discussed a more comprehensive online discipleship.

Actually, reading the Bible was the factor that had the highest correlation with every other factor of discipleship. Now when people ask me, "How do we get people to witness?" "How do we get people to serve others?" or "How do we get people to pray?" I give them the same answer: Get people to read the Bible.

Scripture: inputting spiritual/gospel truth.