The church grew, and I gained a reputation for preaching, and people came, and it was a wonderful community. But we had a building that seated 82 people, and with a congregation then approaching 400 we were up to four services on Sunday, and everyone was tired.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLORI decided I got to say whether I was Christian or not, and so I’ve relaxed enormously since then. I’m the one who gets to say that, and not someone else.
More Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes
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The abundance of our lives is not determined by how long we live, but how well we live. Christ makes abundant life possible if we choose to live it now.
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I miss the hot spots. I miss the hospital calls. I miss the nursing homes. I miss the really intimate human contact with other people, which I did nothing to earn.
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I live by the simplest, perhaps facile command that Jesus ever gave, which is to love God with the whole self and the neighbor as the self, and I find that’s entirely consuming. To do those two things leaves me very little time to do much else.
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To be in the mainline is to have a history and not simply to be an amalgam, a community church of who knows what that came from who knows where.
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We’re children of God through our blood kinship with Christ. We’re also sons and daughters of Adam and Eve, with a hereditary craving for forbidden fruit salad.
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With so much effort being poured into church growth, so much press being given to the benefits of faith, and so much flexing of religious muscle in the public square, the poor in spirit have no one but Jesus to call them blessed anymore.
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I think a toxic message in a lot of Christianity has been that the self has to be annihilated in order for God to be found. I think that has been a toxic message.
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God does some of God’s best work with people who are seriously lost.
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As a general rule, I would say that human beings never behave more badly toward one another than when they believe they are protecting God.
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The only real difference between Anxiety and Excitement was my willingness to let go of Fear.
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The value for me being in a mainline tradition is history and memory, which is not just Christian tradition but denominational tradition, and characters, you know, with real distinct flavors of ways to be Christian.
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It does seem to me that at least some of us have made an idol of exhaustion. The only time we know we have done enough is when we are running on empty and when the ones we love most are the ones we see the least.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR -
I decided I got to say whether I was Christian or not, and so I’ve relaxed enormously since then. I’m the one who gets to say that, and not someone else.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR -
Science is not metaphorical. Science is scientific.
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I can’t help but note that God is being useful to a lot of people trying to do harm to one another.
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The real problem has far less to do with what is really out there than it does with our resistance to finding out what is really out there.
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I don’t have time for a job that doesn’t leave me time to be quiet or still or to pray.
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We are born seekers, calling strange names into the darkness from our earliest days because we know we are not meant to be alone, and because we know that we await someone whom we cannot always see.
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Church can be extremely boring. It can be very meaningful, it can be character forming, but can be have very little fizz in it.
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Kindness is not a bad religion, no matter what name you use for God.
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When I say I trust Jesus, that is what I mean: I trust that the way of life leads through perishability, not around it.
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I’m a follower of the Christ path, and that opens a huge discussion about what we even mean by words like “Christian.”
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I found myself in a maze where I’d taken the wrong turn. In my wish to do well for that congregation I wasn’t doing particularly well for myself or my friends or my family, and I even found that the work for God was taking me away from God.
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Divine reality is not way up in the sky somewhere; it is readily available in the encounters of everyday life, which make hash of my illusions that I can control the ways God comes to me.
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Beliefs have become unimportant to me. Faith as radical trust became even more important to me.
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Humanity can be pretty stinky.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR