598 quotes found
“The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool. If t...”
“I therefore used the last ten minutes of our classes to recite with them words from the Bible and verses from hymns, so that they would know them and the words would stay with them throughout their...”
“Competition in spiritual matters brings confusion.”
“Keep at it! Remember marketing is building a relationship! If you use marketing for a year and stop, you cut off your relationship with the larger community. Then you will have to re-start the rela...”
“Many of the gay Christians I was in conversation with were not demanding wholesale movement to a fully affirming and inclusive stance. There were those who were uncertain of such a stance even for ...”
“You're right, Ruth. You did screw up my career. You screwed it up good. Best thing you ever did, matter of fact. But you know something? It's okay. Because if it was between the church and you, the...”
“The real church is comprised of a long list of "formers" who collectively work together for world reform.”
“Why does it seem that the church is more interested in people involvement rather than people engagement.”
“Before I was ordained, when I was working for the council, I thought of the first three months of the year as January, February, March. Now I think of them as Epiphany, Candlemas and Ash Wednesday.”
“The most carefully crafted language in our culture tends to be poetry. And poetry at its finest moments subverts our best attempts at hiding from reality...The poetry of liturgy has just this power...”
“My double drags his coffin, humble slave,I, at least, am real, though changed to flesh.Far-off, I build me a church no hand can shape("Winter Sonnets: III")”
“The purpose of the local church is not primarily to be one's church home or extended family, though it can be at times. And it is not to survive by obtaining more people for its support base. Its p...”
“Like the hub of a wheel, the churchs corporate life is an extension of the good news that God was in Christ reconciling the whole world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them.”
“The way we saw things, it didnt matter that God had created the heavens and the earthhe did not want us excited about living here. A good fundamentalist worth his weight in guilt was quick to remin...”
“Are we letting the world influence the church more than the church is affecting those in the world?”
“There's not enough wrong with it to leave and there's just enough wrong with it to stay," Matthew later told me. "Fight to change it.”
“Somehow we American pastors, without really noticing what was happening, got our vocations redefined in the terms of American careerism. We quit thinking of the parish as a location for pastoral sp...”
“There is a long and well-documented tradition of wisdom in the Christian faith that any venture into leadership, whether by laity or clergy, is hazardous. it is necessary that there be leaders, but...”
“Deception is nowhere more common than in religion. And the persons most easily and damningly deceived are the leaders. Those who deceive others are first themselves deceived, for not many, I think,...”
“The mission of the church is to make the world a holy place.”
