Erwin McManus

“You can plant a church and grow a church. That's not that hard to do, but it's harder to be a viable source of transformation in a city or your time or space.”

“You have a generation that is saying we are tapping out of religion in many ways. But what they are not saying is that we are tapping out of a serious search for meaning in life.”

“I think the exploration and the search for who Jesus is, and that 2,000 years later we're still trying to figure out who He was, and did He really rise from the dead... And I think for me, the answer is 'yes,' and that's why we're talking about Him today.”

“We want to help everyone find meaning in their life and help translate the story that each person actually matters in the world.”

“One trend I see is the rejection of growth for self-discovery and the pursuit of authentic community. So we keep whittling our spiritual community to a smaller and smaller and more exclusive inner circle. The problem is if the diagnoses are wrong, so will be the cure.”

“If you come at the Bible as if it's a document of encyclopedic information, you've pretty much killed any kind of life change in a seeker and unbeliever.”

“One of the things you'll discover... as you listen to your own soul is that you spend a great amount of your life trying to bring meaning to your own life. And, by the way, most people are not going to church, so the place they're actually trying to find meaning in their life is at work.”

“We focus, in some ways, on how to disengage Jesus and the Bible from everything people know about Christianity as a religion.”

“My primary assessment would be because American Christians tend to be incredibly self-indulgent, so they see the church as a place there for them to meet their needs and to express faith in a way that is meaningful for them.”

“I realize that I live on the bubble of insanity. I feel the weight of human suffering, loneliness and despair on me all the time. It's not getting easier; if anything, it's always right on the edge of my skin.”

“I think we are all trying to figure out what it means to be the Church as opposed to just doing church.”

“The system of Christian celebrity was not a good space for me, and it was brutal on my kids - my son in college was frequently confronted by people railing against me as a heretic.”

“If we keep asking the wrong questions, we are just going to get better wrong answers. The solution to lack of community isn't to give up on the community.”

“God has given us an imagination, and our imagination is really the principle tool from which all creativity and artistry comes from.”

“For Christians, they need to access the power of Jesus and not look at Christianity as a religion. It is our Lord Jesus that makes you change, and Christians need to actualize it and put it into practice.”

“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.”

“The reality is that every human being is placed on this planet, and one of the things that drives humans is their need for meaning, and if you can make every job meaningful, then you will guarantee that every job will be done to its highest level of excellence.”

“Our job is not to change people; our job is to connect people to Jesus, and it's Jesus' job to change people.”

“Promise Keepers was looking for a movement that can actualize the hope of Jesus, the hope that we see. And 'Uprising' was what they were looking for.”

“I hope my greatest contribution will be to try to extract principles of truth that will cause us to live our lives in a more effective way and to advance Jesus' purpose in the world.”