Jesus never says to the poor: ‘come find the church’, but he says to those of us in the church: ‘go into the world and find the poor, hungry, homeless, imprisoned.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of actively seeking to help those in need rather than waiting for them to approach us.
Tony Campolo's quote reflects a fundamental teaching of compassion and outreach in Christianity. It suggests that rather than maintaining a passive stance within the confines of the church, believers are called to go out into the world and engage with marginalized individuals—specifically the poor, hungry, and imprisoned. This call to action highlights the importance of service and social justice in the practice of faith, encouraging people to take initiative in addressing the needs of those less fortunate.
In practice
This quote would be perfect for a sermon focusing on community service and outreach programs.
When in fact we live in a society that makes life hell for gays and lesbians, this community has got to stand up and say, ‘We’re on your side as you struggle for dignity,’ and, ‘Yes, we will defy anybody who says otherwise, even if we have to go to Disneyland to prove it.’
Your past is important but it is not nearly as important to your present as the way you see your future.
There are 2,000 verses of Scripture that tell us we must be committed to protecting the poor and the oppressed... There is no concern of Scripture that is addressed so often and so powerfully as reaching out to the poor.
Sadly, we do a much better job of making people feel guilty than we do of delivering them from the guilt we create. We need to confess this and change our ways.
Those issues are biblical issues: to care for the sick, to feed the hungry, to stand up for the oppressed. I contend that if the evangelical community became more biblical, everything would change.
I don't know how your theology works, but if Jesus has a choice between stained glass windows and feeding starving kids in Haiti, I have a feeling he'd choose the starving kids in Haiti.
Nearly all institutions, it might be said, are based on signs, but these signs do not directly evoke things.
When we gaze at a star in the Milky Way which is 50,000 light-years away from our sun, we are looking back 50,000 years in time." "The idea is much too big for my little head." "The only way we can look out into space, then, is to look back in time. We can never know what the universe is like now. We only know what it was like then. When we look up at a star that is thousands of light-years away, we are really traveling thousands of years back in the history of space.
If a man is happy in America, it is considered he is doing something wrong.
All of our actions have in their doing the seed of their undoing. ... That in her creation of her children there should be the unspeakable promise of their death, for by their birth she had created mortal beings.
Instead of saying that man is the creature of circumstance, it would be nearer the mark to say that man is the architect of circumstance.
Countless religious innovators over the years have played the game of establishing an identity for themselves by accentuating their otherness.
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