Erwin McManus Quotes

It is amazing where God will take you when you are willing to follow. Life is full of surprises when we choose mystery over security.

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.

The church does not exist for us. We are the church, and we exist for the world.

Would you be willing to give your life to save the world if no one ever knew your name? If anonymity was the price you would have to pay for significance, would it be too great a price? To live a life of courage is not a guarantee of prestige or adulation. It only matters if you live and die fulfilling the mission you were born for.

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.

God gives God-sized dreams to people with God-shaped hearts.

God allows and at times causes us to go through the kinds of circumstances that strip away all falsehood and leave us with our real selves. God's ultimate intent is not to leave us faithless, but to leave us faith-full. There are few things as exhilarating as going through the fire and finding that you had the resilience to make it through. All of us wonder at times whether we have what it takes. God wants to bring us to a place where we have no doubt of the work He has done within us.

The history of God's people is not a record of God searching for courageous men and women who could handle the task, but God transforming the hearts of cowards and calling them to live courageous lives.

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.

It is insanity to run from God and search for love.

If our children are going to walk away from Christ, we need to raise them in such a way that they understand that to walk away from Jesus is to walk away from a life of faith, risk and adventure and to choose a life that boring, mundane and ordinary

The person who loves the process has a much greater chance of success than the person who loves the outcome.

The limitations you are willing to accept establish the boundaries of your existence.

Home is ultimately not about a place to live but about the people with whom you are most fully alive. Home is about love, relationship, community, and belonging, and we are all searching for home.

Your dreams are the product of your longings, a portrait of your potential, and a promise of your future.

You need to remember who God is, forget the painful wounds and let Him renew you.

When you live your life knowing the mission and calling and voice of God in your soul and you know where that compass is driving you forward, you will become a rare commodity in a world searching for direction.

If God imagined you at birth, what makes you think He's stopped imagining you now.

If you were meant to fly, not even running really fast is that impressive.

A person God himself deems as wise is one who not only hears His voice, but immediately begins to act upon His instruction.

Within a moment there is monumental potential. That is the mystery of a moment. It is small enough to ignore and big enough to change your life forever

It is amazing how much we can endure when we are convinced there is a purpose to our struggle.

God clarifies in the midst of obedience, not beforehand.

The church is not here to meet our needs. We are the church here to meet the needs of the world.

How is it, that for many of us, being a good Christian is nothing more than being a good person? The entire focus of our faith has been the elimination of sin, which is important but inadequate; rather than the unleashing of a unique, original, extraordinary, wonderfully untamed, faith.

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 when we connect to others. Without community we don't know who we are... When we live outside of healthy community, we not only lose others. We lose ourselves...Who we understand ourselves to be is dramatically affected for better or worse by those we hold closest to us.

Deeper than our instinct to live is our longing to be alive.

How in the world could you ever imagine a life of faith that does not require risk? Faith and risk are inseparable.

You cannot wash the feet of a dirty world if you refuse to touch it

The world doesn't need more great leaders, it needs more great people who lead.

True religion always moves us to serve others and to give our lives to see those oppressed find freedom.

A world without God cannot wait for us to choose the safe path. If we wait for someone else to take the risk, we risk that no one will ever act and that nothing will ever be accomplished.

Gratitude changes your perspective about life. You see the future, experience the present, and remember the past in a dramatically different way.

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.

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

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

You're not supposed to die with your potential. A life well lived squeezes all the potential placed within and does something with it.

The real measure of our power is the freedom and opportunity we create for others.

The most important moments rarely come at a convenient time

We can’t change history, but we can create the future.

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.

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

For years I have made it my mission to destroy the influence of the Christian clich, 'the safest place to be is in the center of the will of God.' God would never choose for us safety at the cost of significance. God created you so that your life would count, not so that you could count the days of your life.

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

Faith is the determination to create with our lives what only our hearts can conceive.

Churches all over the country have decided they love their traditions more than their children.

Racists are not born, they are raised. Isolation is the breeding ground for racism. The more you come to know the world around you and people different than you the less likely you will become an extremist. The Church needs to bring the world together.

The first and most important step in the process of becoming genuinely is to be once again authenticated by the original designer.

You are both a work of art and an artist at work.

The Barbarian Way was, in some sense, trying to create a volatile fuel to get people to step out and act. It's pretty hard to get a whole group of people moving together as individuals who are stepping into a more mystical, faith-oriented, dynamic kind of experience with Christ. So, I think Barbarian Way was my attempt to say, "Look, underneath what looks like invention, innovation and creativity is really a core mysticism that hears from God, and what is fueling this is something really ancient." That's what was really the core of The Barbarian Way.