“I suppose she only wanted what she couldn t have. Well, people were that way. To hell with people. The Catholic Church had an awfully good way of handling all that. Good advice, anyways. Not to think about it. Oh, it was swell advice. Try and take it sometime. Try and take it.”
“Closing one’s eyes when praying doesn’t increase the odds of the prayer being answered. It merely decreases the odds of being distracted.”
“They like to use those fancy words. They don t like to say “raped, ” he said. “They say “misdeed, “inappropriate touching, “mistake. That s insulting. I m not a mistake.”
“Your religion is not what you do on Sunday. It is how you live Monday through Saturday.”
“A materialistic world will not be won to Christ by a materialistic church.”
“Church always seemed the same. Jess could tune it out the same way he tuned out school, with his body standing up and sitting down in unison with the rest of the congregation but his mind numb and floating, not really thinking or dreaming but at least free.”
“It is very difficult sometimes to keep awake, especially at church, but there is no difficulty at all about sleeping.”
“As I look around on Sunday morning at the people populating the pews, I see the risk that God has assumed. For whatever reason, God now reveals himself in the world not through a pillar of smoke and fire, not even through the physical body of his Son in Galilee, but through the mongrel collection that comprises my local church and every other such gathering in God’s name. (p. 68, Church: Why Bother?)”
“Family is the one human institution we have no choice over. We get in simply by being born, and as a result we are involuntarily thrown together with a menagerie of strange and unlike people. Church calls for another step: to voluntarily choose to band together with a strange menagerie because of a common bond in Jesus Christ. I have found that such a community more resembles a family than any other human institution. Henri Nouwen once defined a community as “a place where the person you least want to live with always lives.” His definition applies equally to the group that gathers each Thanksgiving and the group that congregates each Sunday morning. (p. 64-65, Church: Why Bother?)”
“Let God Himself be the main attraction at church again, and let us be tireless in our insistence that church is for God, about God, through God, and to the glory of His great Son.”
“I had come to see that the great tragedy in the church is not that rich Christians do not care about the poor but that rich Christians do not know the poor...I truly believe that when the rich meet the poor, riches will have no meaning. And when the rich meet the poor, we will see poverty come to an end.”
“One example is the familiar parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32), which in some ways might be better called the parable of the elder brother. For the point of the parable as a whole - a point frequently overlooked by Christian interpreters, in their eagerness to stress the uniqueness and particularity of the church as the prodigal younger son who has been restored to the father s favor - is in the closing words of the father to the elder brother, who stands for the people of Israel: Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. It was fitting to make merry and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found. The historic covenant between God and Israel was permanent, and it was into this covenant that other peoples too, were now being introduced. This parable of Jesus affirmed both the tradition of God s continuing relation with Israel and the innovation of God s new relation with the church - a twofold covenant.”
“Dear Church, everyone is broken, stop pretending like you re not.”
“When we consider that so few generations had passed since the church left off disemboweling innocent men before the eyes of their families, burning old women alive in public squares, and torturing scholars to the point of madness for merely speculating about the nature of the stars, it is perhaps little wonder that it failed to think anything had gone terribly amiss in Germany during the war years.”
“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.”
“Whenever a group of people who are designed to primarily unite around one thing try to unite around something else, the result is devastating for all.”
“If our church is not marked by caring for the poor, the oppressed, the hungry, we are guilty of heresy.”