Quotes from Dan Kimball

The old paradigm taught that if you had the right teaching, you will experience God. The new paradigm says that if you experience God, you will have the right teaching.

For church planters, the motivation is not about the romantic or heroic venture ... it is because you realize you can't not plant one.

Time and again I hear how important the darker environment is to those at our vintage-faith worship gathering. Attenders feel they can freely pray in a corner by themselves without feeling that everyone is staring at them.

We can organize the church for acts of goodness such as caring for the poor and helping those in need. We know that this type of organized religion actually pleases Jesus.

When organized religion organizes around the things Jesus would be pleased with, amazing things can happen.

This might sound odd, but I believe that one of the biggest reasons there are so many negative perceptions of Christianity and the church is that Christians hang out with each other too much.

If we don't look at the context, we can easily come to all sorts of conclusions that don't align with what the Bible is actually saying. The Bible is an ancient book written across centuries, and we must use the minds God gave us to examine these claims against the Bible to see if they are true and accurate in the way they are presented.

We need to step back and look at the more fundamental question: What was the author originally saying? We cannot simply read our own understandings into the meaning of a word or statement someone else wrote or said. And when we look at some often bizarre-sounding parts of the Bible, we have to try to discover who the original audience was and view the text through their lens, not ours. If we don't, the possibilities for confusion are endless.

Just because it is recorded in the Bible does not mean God agrees with it, nor did he create it. Instead, we see God working within the culture with the institutions and social patterns humans established, transforming them, but not approving of them.

Christianity teaches that the world is broken, and this brokenness is out fault. And the only way it can be fixed is through God's work. It's a work that only God can do and there are no other options. The biblical teaching is consistent on this point. This is not about the Bible being intolerant or sounding crazy. It's simply an ancient story stemming back to the creation, a story of one God who sent one Savior, Jesus, to be the way to relate to him and be in relationship with him.

God's house is now in the people of God wherever they are, whether it's in the parking lot, in a bowling alley, or in an office cubicle.

But when we understand that we are called to be the church, not just go to church, it changes our identity. No longer do we go to a building where religious activities happen and that is "church." We now are the church all week long.