Daily Inspiration Quote by Francis Schaeffer

Schaeffer’s line takes a familiar evangelical obsession - being “right” - and deliberately demotes it. He grants doctrine and ecclesiastical alignment their due (“important”), then pivots with a surgeon’s precision: they matter only “as a starting point.” The real target isn’t theology so much as the spiritual bureaucrat: the person who collects correct positions the way others collect credentials, mistaking membership, vocabulary, and factional loyalty for faith itself.

The subtext is pastoral but also polemical. Schaeffer is warning that orthodoxy can become a substitute for encounter, a way to manage God at arm’s length. “Living relationship” signals a faith that is experiential, ethical, and ongoing - not merely propositional. It’s also a critique of churches that treat boundary-marking as the main event. When “rightness” becomes an end, it tends to produce a certain personality type: vigilant, anxious, easily scandalized, more fluent in heresy-hunting than in love of neighbor.

Context matters: Schaeffer came of age in mid-century American fundamentalism and later became influential among evangelicals wrestling with modernity and internal fragmentation. His L’Abri ministry in Switzerland drew seekers disillusioned by both secular cynicism and religious rigidity. In that setting, the quote reads less like a downgrade of doctrine than a refusal to let doctrine function as a moral alibi.

The intent is to re-order priorities: truth should lead somewhere. If it doesn’t generate a lived, relational faith, “doctrinal rightness” isn’t false - it’s merely sterile.