“In your life, the people become like a patchwork quilt. Some leave with you a piece that is bigger than you wanted and others smaller than you thought you needed. Some are that annoying itchy squar...”

“I remember my father, who had served in Vietnam, once talking to me about how real courage is when you're scared out of your mind but you do what you have to do anyway. I didn't feel very courageou...”

“We lied to ourselves thinking in our minds we knew everything. We were deceived in believing that youthful enthusiasm could replace wizened maturity.”

“I feel as if I've gone past the lukewarm stage that Jesus talked about in the book of Revelations and am slowly dwindling on cold. Deep down I want to change, but I don't know how. I'm the pastor. ...”

“The couch and I were what I would describe as frenemies. I loved to hate it. It was too small for my frame. I had tried to tell my wife that fact when we bought it off of Craigslist, but she assure...”

“They weren't people that liked change. They were the kind of people that would have tied change to a chair with dental floss if they could in order to avoid it. They were the type of people who des...”

“Stop being fake and start being real. Start being real with the people around you, and start being real with God. Churches are not Broadway musicals where we can play the role of a Christian. You m...”

“We've become very good in our churches today at faking our concern when really we couldn't care less about the people around us.”

“There is a lost and dying world out there. They need to see that the Church is different from their socially-segregated high schools. They need to see a 'family' operating as a team, not a bunch of...”

“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not de...”

“My interpretation can only be as inerrant as I am, and that's good to keep in mind.”

“When you translate the Bible with excessive literalism, you demythologize it. The possibility of a convincing reference to the individual's own spiritual experience is lost. (111)”

“Our lack of community is intensely painful. A TV talk show is not community. A couple of hours in a church pew each Sabbath is not community. A multinational corporation is neither a human nor a co...”

“Holiness is as much about what you do on a Monday morning on the factory floor as it is about what you do on a Sunday morning in a church gathering. Holiness is as much about the kind of neighbour ...”

“Liturgy gathers the holy community as it reads the Holy Scriptures into the sweeping tidal rhythms of the church year in which the story of Jesus and the Christian makes its rounds century after ce...”