Craig Groeschel Quotes

American Pastor

Craig Groeschel (born December 2, 1967) is an American author, speaker, and the founding and senior pastor of Life.Church, a multi-campus church with over 80 weekly worship experiences in 13 locations. He, his wife, Amy, and their six children live in the Edmond, Oklahoma area where Life Church began in 1996. He is author of It – How Churches and Leaders Can Get It and Keep It, Chazown, Going All the Way, Confessions of a Pastor, and The Christian Atheist: Believing in God but Living as if He Doesn't Exist (released on March 30, 2010).

From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)

When you increase your focus, you decrease your options. Good things are not necessarily God things.

Doing the wrong new things, things that usurp what God calls us to do, is dangerous. Focus tends to let it breathe. Lack of focus generally suffocates it.

Ministries that have it tend to be focused on a limited set of targets. They do a few things as if all eternity hinged on their results, and they do these things with godly excellence. Their vision is characterized by specificity. Selectivity. Exclusivity.

Seek God. Hear from God. Receive his vision. Let it overwhelm you. Consume you. Burden you. Tell the vision. Cast the vision. Communicate the vision. And watch it spread.

Here are a few questions to stir your vision: Why does your organization exist? What can your organization be the best in the world at? If you could do only one thing, what would it be? If you left your organization tomorrow, what would you hope would continue forever? What breaks your heart, keeps you awake at night, wrecks you?

There's a huge difference between a good idea and a God-inspired idea.

Have you ever tasted stale popcorn? The only thing worse is stale vision. If a ministry loses the vision, it's only a matter of time before they lose what made them special in the first place. Without vision, the people will quickly lose it.

The best explanation I can give of what it is, is this: it is what God does through a rare combination of these qualities found in his people: Passion for his presence; A deep craving to reach the lost; Sincere integrity; Spirit-filled faith; Down-to-earth humility; Brokenness.

The first-century church in Jerusalem clearly had it. And they didn't have any fancy accoutrements. So it can't possibly be stained-glass windows, hand-carved cherubs, custom silk tapestries, gold-inlaid hymnals, thousand-pipe organs, marble floors, mile-high steeples, hand-painted ceilings, mahogany pews, giant cast-iron bells, and a three-piece, thousand dollar suit. It doesn't stick any better to a young, hip, shaved-headed pastor with rimmed glasses, a goatee, and tattoos than it does to an older, stately gentleman in a robe. Nor is it spotlights and lasers, video production, satellite dishes, fog machines, shiny gauze backdrops, four-color glossy brochures, sexy billboards, loud "contemporary" music, free donuts, coffee shops, hip bookstores, break dancing or acrobatics, sermon series named after television shows, a retro-modern matching chair and table onstage, or blue jeans and Heelys. It is not being on television, being on the Internet, or being on book and magazine covers. It is real. It is genuine.

I believe that God makes it available to anyone who wants it. I believe he wants to give it to you and your ministry.

If you've ever been part of a ministry that had it, you knew you were part of something special. In other words, you knew it when you saw it. And it was an awesome work of God that couldn't be contained, couldn't be harnessed, and couldn't be explained.