18 Quotes by Kaitlyn Schiess

Proximity to power is its own kind of education. It shapes who you are and what you desire in life. A thirst for political power — and sometimes, obtaining that power — begets more than corruption: It often involves sexual immorality, degraded moral judgment and financial malpractice. Power never affects just one area of people’s lives; it leads them to believe they can determine right and wrong for themselves. And it never affects just those individuals.

We need need to unlearn our bent toward a private religion and a public politics - and see our participation in political life as a reflection of our very public faith.

In one way or another, almost any political or moral issue is about the honor and protection of human beings.  In reality, every piece of legislation is trying to legislate morality.  Every policy issue is based on moral principles and has moral implications.

We have missed a central implication of our own depravity and put far too much stick in our own ability to understand and apply Scriptures by ourselves.

When the church becomes accidental to Christianity, the weekly gathering becomes merely a social opportunity to confirm our prior personal experience with God.  We've lost the sense of the church as the center of our corporate identity because we've lost a sense of any corporate identity at all.

Political participation has a unique agility to inspire idolatry in people precisely because it so often involves promises of protection and provision, require sacrifices, legitimizes authority, and inspires submission and worship.

It (the church) is a political institution eschatologically oriented toward the redemption of all things and a social witness to that reality (Matthew 11:5; Romans 8:22).  It is commissioned by God as the mediation of his mission and blessings on earth.

Low-church evangelicals like myself may be accustomed to treating what we do on Sunday morning with a certain level of inattentiveness: the important thing is the preaching, and everything else we do is more about personal preference.  We can become largely unaware of just how important everything else is for our spiritual formation.

The problem with theories that harshly distinguish between political and ecclesial spheres is that in separating theology from politics, they create a political ethic untethered to theological considerations.