3 Quotes by Kenda Creasy Dean

In other words, Jesus not only sends the church where he was sent; he sends us in the same way that he was sent, as human translations of divine love, people whose words and actions do not grasp for God as much as they reveal a God who grasps for us.

Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, say Smith and Denton, seems to be “colonizing many historical religious traditions and, almost without anyone noticing, converting believers in the old faiths to its alternative religious vision of divinely underwritten personal happiness and interpersonal niceness.”23.

The church’s first witness, as the theologian John Howard Yoder reminds us, is the way we live before the eyes of the watching world.4 You may recall that, two nights before the Passover, Jesus was having supper at the house of Simon the leper, when in walked a woman with an alabaster jar. She smashed it and poured its precious contents of nard – worth about $35,000 in today’s dollars – over Jesus.