“Most problems in contemporary churches can be explained by the fact that members have never decided to follow Christ.”

You can live opposite of what you profess, but you cannot live opposite of what you believe.

Two ways of thinking: Human kingdom and human cleverness or God’s kingdom and God’s cleverness.

We’re not here to prove we’re right; we’re here to help people.

“Spirituality” wrongly understood or pursued is a major source of human misery and rebellion against God.

Spiritual formation in Christ moves us toward a total interchange of our ideas and images for his.

We have churches full of people who profess all kinds of stuff that they don’t believe. They think that by professing it they’re doing something good. Really, they’re just deluding themselves.

Disciples are those who have been so ravished with Christ that others want to be like them.

When we pass through what we call death, we do not loose the world. Indeed, we see it for the first time as it really is.

Your mind will really talk to you when you begin to deny fulfillment to your desires, and you will find how subtle and shameless it is.

As Augustine say clearly, God being God offends human pride. If God is running the universe and has first claim on our lives, guess who isn’t running the universe and does not get to have things as they please.

It’s very difficult to be right about something without hurting someone with it.

Everyone gets a spiritual formation. It’s like education. Everyone gets an education; it’s just a matter of which one you get.

Find a person who has embraced anger, and you will find a person with a wounded ego.

We cannot handle injustice by finding more ways to impose what is in fact “right” on people. It has to come from the inside. And that’s where the church should be working.

The transformation of the social world is at its heart the transformation of personal relations. That’s the key to transforming society in the larger arena.

As we reach out to God, we get another source of strength.

I would suggest the taxation of all property equally, whether church or corporation, exempting only the last resting place of the dead and possibly, with proper restrictions, church edifices.

To be alive in America is to hear all kinds of music constantly: radio, records, churches, cats on the street, everywhere music. And with records, the whole history of music is open to everyone who wants to hear it.

Leave the matter of religion to the family altar, the church, and the private school, supported entirely by private contributions. Keep the church and state forever separate.

Declare Church and State forever separate and distinct, but each free within their proper spheres, and that all church property shall bear its own proportion of taxation.

Whether I’m running on the beach without my shirt or whether I’m going out with my kids or going to church or going out to dinner.

I never weary of great churches. It is my favorite kind of mountain scenery.

Preachers at black churches are the last people left in the English-speaking world who know the schemes and tropes of classical rhetoric: parallelism, antithesis, epistrophe, synecdoche, metonymy, periphrasis, litotes – the whole bag of tricks.

That is why prayer is so exhausting and so vital. If we believed it, the prayer meeting would be as full as the church.