Adam Hamilton

You are not indispensable to your church, but you are indispensable to your family.

Effective preaching starts with loving the people we're preaching to.

Our society is divided by the culture wars into the Left and Right, and the United Methodist Church has always stood historically in the center and has been willing to listen to and to bring together those things that often are found in opposite camps.

Many Christians do not believe God sends tornadoes. But they do believe that God walks with His children through the storms, that He sends His people to help after the storms, and that with and through God, there is always hope.

God seldom suspends the laws of nature, just as God does not remove free will to keep evil people from doing evil things.

We don't need mandatory, non-sectarian prayers read over the loudspeaker to 'put God back in schools.' God never left the schools. God is still at work through the hundreds of thousands of gifted teachers and administrators, committed parents, and passionate volunteers who seek to help give our children 'a future with hope.'

We live on a planet that is amazing, beautiful, and full of wonder but not protected from powerful destructive forces of nature. We are capable of doing wonderful and selfless things but also self-absorbed and harmful things. This is the world we live in.

We live in bodies that are fearfully and wonderfully made, yet they are not immune to illness and pain. We have hearts that are capable of experiencing great love, but sometimes they get broken.

I love the Bible. I read it every day. I spend 10 hours a week studying it. It has affected my life in profound ways. I am inspired when I read it.

If 'everything happens for a reason,' then every act of evil is ultimately God's doing.

Christians believe that God is everywhere and is involved in our lives at every moment, whether we publicly acknowledge God or not.

As a pastor, I have a deep desire to lead people to God and encourage people to pray, read the Bible, and carry their faith into every part of their lives.

I am a pastor, and I teach and preach the Bible to my congregation every week. But the Bible is not a manufacturer's handbook. Neither is it a science textbook nor a guidebook for public policy.

The Bible calls us to love our neighbors, and to do justice and love kindness, not to indiscriminately kill one another.

I think that what happens for many Christians is, they accept their particular faith, they accept it to be true, and they stop examining it. Consequently, because it's already accepted to be true, they don't examine other people's faiths... That, I think, is not healthy for a person of any faith.

Learning to read the Bible in the light of the times in which it was written is critical.

God's role in superintending our world and our lives is neither absentee landlord nor micromanager.

While some misuse their freedom to perpetrate evil, millions respond by feeling compelled to use their freedom to do good.

People are drawn to preaching that is passionate and offered with conviction. Passion comes when the preacher has spent significant time with the text, and when God has spoken through the text in a way that addresses the preacher's life first.

When people ask me if I'm liberal or conservative, I say, 'Yeah.' I'm both of them. To be a liberal means to be open-minded and generous and open to new ideas. And to be conservative means to hold onto things that are important, things that shouldn't be cast aside.