Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove Quotes

• “To climb ever closer to God is not to move away from our troubled and troubling neighbors, but closer to them.”

  Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

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• “As participants in a mobile culture, our default is to move. God embraces our broken world, and I have no doubt that God can use our movement for good. But I am convinced that we lose something essential to our existence as creatures if we do not recognize our fundamental need for stability. Trees can be transplanted, often with magnificent results. But their default is to stay.”

  Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

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• “We learn to dwell with God by learning the practices of hospitality, listening, forgiveness, and reconciliation—the daily tasks of life with other people. Stability in Christ is always stability in community”

  Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

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• “People who are starving and dressed in rags don’t want to hear someone read a list of propositional “good news.” They want to see the good news in action. The church doesn’t hold revival meetings and call it a day — we feed the hungry, clothe the naked, dig wells, and staff medical clinics. Social action isn’t an optional part of evangelism; it is evangelism. This is an important correction to the overspirituality that dominated evangelical Christianity just a generation ago. But the both/and of holistic mission still misses the heart of Jesus if we don’t see that the church needs the poor as much as the poor need the church. Jesus didn’t embrace the poor only because he pitied them or because he knew he had the resources to help them. Jesus embraced the poor because they were rushing into the kingdom ahead of the scribes and Pharisees — those who called themselves God’s people. Jesus welcomed people who knew poverty because they were ready to receive what he had to offer. Religious people, he said, could learn something from them. Our spiritual lives are linked to the material conditions of our life. When we feel like we don’t need much materially, we often have trouble remembering why we need God. We comfortable Americans can go through an entire day without thinking of God. But Jesus gave the poor more than food to eat and relief from their sickness. He restored them to God’s beloved community.”

  Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

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• “For the Christian tradition, the heart’s true home is a life rooted in the love of God. Like Lao-tzu and Dorothy both, Christian wisdom about stability points us toward the true peace that is possible when our spirits are stilled and our feet are planted in a place we know to be holy ground.”

  Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

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• “you don’t have to live in community long to realize that lives which are blessed and instructive are still flawed. The grace of the gospel isn’t only that the Word was made flesh in Jesus, but also that the eternal Word is made present in weak and wonderful people.”

  Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

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• “Staying, we all know, is not the norm in our mobile culture. A great deal of money is spent each day to create desires in each of us that can never be fulfilled. I suspect that much of our restlessness is a return on this investment.”

  Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

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• “Even though Jesus took on flesh for my sake, whiteness prevents me from knowing how to live in my own skin.”

  Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

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• “It is no coincidence that the word disciple shares the same root as the word discipline. No doubt many postmodern, post-Christian, post-evangelical, post-everything folks will cringe at the idea of discipline — but without it we end up with a pretty sloppy spirituality. I remember reading about an interview with one of the social psychologists who pioneered the movement of “hands-off” parenting, insisting that our children do not need discipline. These scientists insisted children needed freedom, space to make their own decisions and mistakes. At the end of his life, one of the psychologists was asked what he had learned from years of experimentation. His response was, “It all looked good on paper. But what we learned was that we were creating a generation of brats.”

  Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

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• “it would seem that these super-religious ascetics would be extremely so. But the witness of everyone who visited them for counsel was the opposite. They were some of the most gracious souls the world has ever known. The story is told of an Abba”

  Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

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• “Leave some room in your theology for God to be bigger than you can explain”

  Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

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• “But if we stop short of the personal work—if we deceive ourselves into thinking that we can reconstruct the gospel without addressing our divided souls, then we carry the germ of white supremacy with us into our most noble efforts to rid this world’s systems of racism. Nothing is uglier than the inevitable explosion when white people try to participate in antiracist work without addressing their own hidden wound. Each of us has to do our own soul work.”

  Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

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• “The black-led freedom movement has long insisted that there are two things white folks need to learn: when to shut up and when to speak up. One pitfall of whiteness is thinking you always have something important to say. Anyone who publishes a book about anything is subject to this temptation. But on the other side of the narrow way that leads to life is an equally perilous precipice—the danger of silence when you are the one who must speak up.”

  Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

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• “I feel that my own life is especially sealed with this great sign . . . because like Jonah himself I find myself traveling toward my destiny in the belly of a paradox.”

  Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

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• “Our most important work is love.”

  Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

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• “We share good news, then, neither to show our neighbors why Christianity is “right” nor to save people from the corrupting influence of other religions, but to name the story that helps us tell the truth about ourselves.”

  Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

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• “When white Christians refuse to hear cries for justice from black and brown sisters and brothers, it is one more symptom of the racism that has long divided our souls, our congregations, and our nation.”

  Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

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• “it would seem that these super-religious ascetics would be extremely so. But the witness of everyone who visited them for counsel was the opposite. They were some of the”

  Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

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