Tony Campolo (1935-2024), author, evangelist, academic and leader of the Red Letter Christians, has departed for heaven but left behind many quotable quotes.
“I have three things I’d like to say today. First, while you were sleeping last night, 30,000 kids died of starvation or diseases related to malnutrition. Second, most of you don’t give a shit. What’s worse is that you’re more upset with the fact that I said shit than the fact that 30,000 kids died last night.”
“Perhaps because our culture and politics have gone so off course, with values so contrary to those of Jesus, more and more people intuitively recognize that His vision of God’s kingdom-a new world of compassion, justice, integrity and peace- is the Good News they’ve been searching and waiting for.”
― Red Letter Christians: A Citizen’s Guide to Faith and Politics
“If we were to set out to establish a religion in polar opposition to the Beatitudes Jesus taught, it would look strikingly similar to the pop Christianity that has taken over the airwaves of North America.”
“I sometimes wonder how people like Bart, who no longer believe in the grace of God, handle their guilt. Perhaps, as Sigmund Freud suggested, they repress it by burying the memories of past sins deep within themselves. But Freud went on to explain that such repression doesn’t really work in the long run, and that guilt always emerges from the subconscious, sometimes as phobias and sometimes as neurotic behavior.”
― Tony Campolo, Why I Left, Why I Stayed: Conversations on Christianity Between an Evangelical Father and His Humanist Son
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.
What we need to affirm is that Jesus is neither a Democrat nor a Republican. Whenever we marry Jesus to a political party, we are committing the sin of idolatry. We are making Jesus into the image of our political party.
The gospel is not about… pie-in-the-sky when they die. … It is imperative that the up and coming generation recognize that the biblical Jesus was committed to the realization of a new social order in this world…. Becoming a Christian, therefore, is a call to social action.
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.
There’s nothing wrong with making a lot of money, there’s something wrong with keeping it.
Prior to ROE V. WADE, abortions were common even though they were illegal. I don’t think making them illegal again is going to solve the problem.
The church’s mission is to go out and meet the needs of the world, not to wait for the world to come to us.