Acceptance of Jesus and reading the Bible, having personal prayer times, and going to church are all good Christian things. Make no mistake about that. But Jesus did not frame things this way...Jesus wanted people to know the Bible...so they could follow him more closely and know him more deeply and live for him more completely. In other words, he wanted people to follow him, and the only way we can follow him is to take up his kingdom vision and let it shape everything we do.
He had theologically refined the Christian life as something active, not reactive. It had nothing to do with avoiding sin or with merely talking or teaching or believing theological notions or principles or rules or tenets. It had everything to do with living one's while life in obedience to God's call through action. It did not merely require a mind, but a body too. It was God's call to be fully human...
About Bonhoeffer from Mataxas biography on Bonhoeffer
Bonhoeffer knew that to live in fear of incurring " guilt" was itself sinful. God wanted his beloved children to operate out of freedom and joy to do what was right and good, not out of fear of making a mistake. To live in fear and guilt was to be "religious" in the pejorative sense that Bonhoeffer so often talked and preached about.He know that to act freely could mean inadvertently doing wrong and incurring guilt. In fact, he felt that living this way meant that it was impossible to avoid incurring guilt, but if one wished to live responsibly and fully, one would be willing to do so.
About Bonhoeffer from Mataxas biography on Bonhoeffer
In the secularizing times in which I am living, God is not taken seriously. God is peripheral. God is nice (or maybe not so nice) but not at the center. When people want help with their parents or children or emotions, they do not ordinarily see themselves as wanting help with God. But if I am going to stay true to my vocation as a pastor, I can’t let the “market” determine what I do. I will find ways to pray with and for people and teach them to pray, usually quietly and often subversively when they don’t know I am doing it. But I am not going to wait to be asked. I am a pastor.
from Eugene Peterson's memoir The Pastor
There is a great review of the book at the Internet Monk.
Many congregations are in significant decline. For a lot of people, the congregation is little more than a haven in a heartless world, a dispenser of religious goods and services to individuals. Nevertheless, it is still populated by the people of God.
God chooses to create new futures in the most inauspicious of places. Through the Incarnation, we discover that God's future is at work not where we tend to look but among the people we write off as dead or powerless to make things different.
If the Spirit has been poured out in the church - the church as it is, not some ideal type - then we are compelled to believe that the Spirit of God is at work and alive among the congregations of America. Congregations matter. But they need leaders with the skills to cultivate an environment in which the Spirit-given presence of God's future may emerge among the people of God.
The Missional Leader by Roxburgh and Romanuk
When theologians throw out anomalies that threaten their paradigms, they respect their interpretation of truth more than truth, or worse, believe their interpretation of truth is actually truth. They use terms like Biblical and heretic to convince themselves and others that their interpretation is the real truth and others are a threat to “the gospel” or to God Himself. This sort of language isn’t helpful or respectful of anomalies, not to mention it’s behavior indicates a genuine intellectual threat that should be taken seriously, not dismissed as heresy.