Discipleship Quotes

That is the Proctor. He is our Cerberus; he has to keep all undergraduates in good order. What a task! He ought to have three heads.

~ Thomas Hughes

If spiritual formation is the purpose of the church, then personal transformation should intentionally be the purpose of the small group ministry. Bible study is great. Fellowship is wonderful. Evangelism is essential. But changing and growing to be more like Christ should be the purpose of the small group ministry.

~ James Macdonald

We can’t really explain what the goal of mentoring is, until we understand what the church is for.

~ Rhys Bezzant

Many pastors would rather preach God's Word and keep their distance than invest in a personal one-on-one counseling ministry. Most pastors counsel because they have to, not because they want to.

~ James Macdonald

Word-centered people who enter counseling will be more likely follow the guidance set out in Scripture. Because they know more of the depth of their sin, they are more willing to allow other church members to help them stay on that right path.

~ James Macdonald

If teachers are uncomfortable at their own school, they will pass on their uncertainties or negative attitude to students.

~ Alexandra Robbins

Every good man resists others in those points in which he resists himself.

~ Augustine Of Hippo

Some Christians believe the harder that one thinks, the colder faith will grow. Augustine grew more brilliant as he grew more pious, more creative as he became more orthodox. His period of heresy was imitative, but his traditional Christianity took mental risks.

~ John Mark Reynolds

Paul was terribly personal. The books I like are the ones that make you feel like you are with a person who is being quite vulnerable, telling you all sorts of stuff that is personal, and that's the thing Paul did that makes me like him.

~ Donald Miller

If the Gospel of Jesus is relational, that is, if our brokenness will be fixed not by our understanding of theology but by God telling us who we are, then this would require a kind of intimacy of which only Heaven knows.

~ Donald Miller

Counseling is ultimately not about the counselee or the counselor, but about the Divine Counselor.

~ James Macdonald

A healthy Christian life cannot be stitched together from a series of disjointed mountain-top experiences. We need a Christian spirituality that endures the shadowy, low-lying valleys and the rocky slopes in between all those glorious summits.

~ Andrew Byers

A colleague like Barnabas could comfort him (Paul) in illness and keep him from overstrain when fit.

~ John Charles Pollock

Boethius moved from considering history from the actor's point of view to a timeless eternal view. From the divine perspective, nothing is ever utterly lost, because all of life is possessed by God in the eternal now. Though time was gnawing away at Boethius and stealing all he valued, God was beyond time and loss. Gaining this philosophical vantage allowed the last Roman to become one of the first men of the Middle Ages.

~ John Mark Reynolds

each year, she finds her friendships less volatile and easier, because she increasingly succeeds at looking past their flaws and disappointments and homing in on their pleasures and on what set them in motion to begin with. And she wonders why she didn’t do that sooner, why she gave in to so much fury and sorrow when she could have just let those emotions go.

~ Frank Bruno

How do you teach a classroom of Sybils who are breaking apart and reforming right in front of you?

~ David Brooks

Paraphrasing Plato's Republic: Only people who have allowed themselves to be reformed by reality have it in themselves to reform their polis for the better.

~ Rebecca Goldstein

The Roman Church has grown and grown, fueled by immigration but also renewed by two pontiffs who have seemed to understand what Tocqueville knew: People want guidance for their souls once they are convinced they have them.

~ Hugh Hewitt

We are less interested in the number of disciples and more interested in the quality of discipleship.

~ James Macdonald

Human sin is stubborn, but not as stubborn as the grace of God and not half as persistent, not half so ready to suffer to win its way

~ James Macdonald

Life has a peculiar feel when you look back on it that it doesn't have when you're actually living it. It's as though the whole thing were designed to be understood in hindsight, as though you'll never know the meaning of your experiences until you've had enough of them to provide reference.

~ Donald Miller

If we are to have real faith, we must study the Word of God and discover what is promised. Then, we must simply believe the promises of God. Trying to believe something that you want to believe is not faith. Believing what God says in His Word is faith.

~ R.a. Torrey

Friends usually bring out better versions of each other. People feel unguarded and fluid with their close friends.

~ David Brooks

Mentoring is the cultivation of young adults, the tender caring for and nurturing of them so that they will grow, flourish, and be fruitful.

~ Jeff Myers

Despite the huge crowd, He speaks to His disciples as though no one else is there.

~ Roma Downey

If I am to have faith when I pray, I must find some promise in the Word of God to rest my faith on

~ R.a. Torrey

Friendship allows you to see your own life but with a second sympathetic self.

~ David Brooks

(William) Deresiewicz offers a vision of what it takes to move from adolescence to adulthood. Everyone is born with a mind, he writes, but it is only through introspection, observation, connecting the head and the heart, making meaning of experience and finding an organizing purpose that you build a unique individual self.

~ David Brooks

Make use of every friend— and every foe.

~ Alexander Pope

You get a feeling when you look back on life that all God really wants from us is to live inside a body He made, and enjoy the story, and to bond with Him through the experience.

~ Donald Miller

Tasks don't have to be high-impact to be worthy of high effort. Most things we do in any given day are relatively low impact. The cumulative impact of thousands of low-impact test is huge. These tasks can be transposed into worship.

~ John Piper

Ehimlite universities are strong at delivering their commercial mission. They are pretty strong in developing their cognitive mission. But when it comes to the sort of growth Deresiewicz is talking about, everyone is on their own. An admissions officer might bias her criteria slightly away from the Résumé God and toward the quirky kid. A student may privately wrestle with taking a summer camp job instead of an emotionally vacuous but résumé-padding internship. But these struggles are informal, isolated and semi-articulate.

~ David Brooks

In his late forties, an age when men settle to comforts and seek a firm base, Paul began his roughest travels.

~ John Charles Pollock

Older people make this mistake all the time with younger people, treating them as a finished product when in fact they are in process.

~ Andre Agassi

Treat this crisis as practice for the next crisis.

~ John Parenti

Our awareness of God starts where self-sufficiency ends.

~ Harold S. Kushner

After death something new begins, over which all powers of the world of death have no more might.

~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The more spiritual successes that Edwards experienced, the more he seemed to intentionally infuse his sermons with language deemed to move a person’s emotional center—their souls—to spiritually and physically respond.

~ Matthew Paul Turner

What God did for Jesus in standing up for Him, standing behind Him in life and in death, and in standing in communion and solidarity with Him, the Father also does for us, here and now, in our lives.

~ Megan Mckenna

Conversions were easy, but making full-time disciples was hard.

~ Larry Eskridge