Quotes from Andy Crouch

The poor are poor," Jayakumar said to me, "because someone else is trying to play God in their lives.

Our individual loneliness, our anxiety, our depression, our broken and disappointed families, our fractured communities, are not what they are because of some choice we could easily unmake or remake.

Human creativity, then, images God's creativity when it emerges from a lively, loving community of persons and, perhaps more important, when it participates in unlocking the full potential of what has gone before and creating possibilities for what will come later.

For almost all of human history, tools were quite limited. They weren't everywhere; they were in specific places. Tools were in the field (agricultural tools) or in the kitchen (cooking tools) or in the toolshed (work tools). And while tools helped us do our work, they didn't work on their own. The dream of a tool that would work by itself was strictly the stuff of magic or fantasy—the sorcerer's apprentice's dream of a broom that would clean up by itself.

God hates injustice and idolatry because they are the same thing:

But it is certainly true that in the long run that choice is up to us: what we ask our technology to do, what we ask its designers to optimize, what we believe is the good life that we are pursuing together.

Instead, we are our own jailers. We are prisoners of our own insecurity (Will I still have a job if I take two solid weeks of vacation?), pride (How can people get along without me?), fantasies (What if I miss an email telling me I've won the lottery?), and cultural capitulation (This is just how the world works now, isn't it?). For us, the door to a better life is only locked from the inside.

The right question is whether, when we undertake the work we believe to be our vocation, we experience the joy and humility that come only when God multiplies our work so that it bears thirty, sixty and a hundredfold beyond what we could expect from our feeble inputs.

Creativity is the only viable source of change.

The pursuit of a mature life, a life that can bear the weight of image bearing, is in many ways the continual accumulating of more and more secret disciplines, until we are fully formed in the image of the one who confronted every temptation, every opportunity for the misuse of power, and always and only bore the true image in the midst of it all.

If you want to be wise, then, the most important thing you can learn to do is worship.

We love the way screens can, almost magically, absorb our children's attention and give us a few moments of quiet in the car or before dinner.

power is creation, and that when power takes the form of coercion and violence, that is actually a diminishment and distortion of what it was meant to be.

At its worst, privilege is blindness, allowing us to blithely go on in our god playing, not even aware of the insults to image bearers that happen under our noses every day.

Why is power a gift? Because power is for flourishing. When power is used well, people and the whole cosmos come more alive to what they were meant to be. And flourishing is the test of power.

Status is about counting, numbering, ranking and ultimately about excluding.

the whole reason for John's Revelation is to encourage the churches strewn around the rim of the Mediterranean to lift up their eyes from the imperial power of Rome and every earthly Babylon. John is commissioned to bring these churches a vision of ultimate reality, in all its glory and justice, so that they can live faithfully, candles set in lampstands in a dimly lit world.

It's not hard to figure out who has the power in any large gathering in our mediated culture: they are the ones with a microphone, their image projected larger than life above the crowd.

The best way I know to define privilege is the ongoing benefits of past successful exercises of power.

And so Jesus' power leads to overflow, abundance and excellence, that is, to flourishing.

The deeper and more debilitating form of powerlessness is to be cut off from making meaning.

What we do with our power is ultimately a sure guide to what we will do with the God who claims the power to raise the dead. Either we will grip ever more tightly to our own power in fear of its disappearance, or we will become bolder and bolder in our use of our power to prepare for its ultimate end: the restoration of the world's shalom by the world's power-yielding, powerful Creator.

One of power's invisible perquisites is that others grant you deference without your having to ask for it.

I want to suggest a pretty radical idea about what family is for. Family is about the forming of persons. Being a person is a gift, like life itself—we are born as human beings made in the image of God. But while in one sense a person is simply what we are as human beings, we are also able to become—to grow in capacities that are only potentially present within us at first. Family shapes us in countless ways. But I want to