Most of us like thinking we are God’s only children…At least one of the purposes of church is to remind us that God has other children, easily as precious as we. Baptism and narcissism cancel each other out.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR
Barbara Brown Taylor on baptism
Barbara Brown Taylor78 quotes“Most of us like thinking we are God’s only children…At least one of the purposes of church is to remind us that God has other children, easily as precious as we. Baptism and narcissism cancel each other out.”
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More from Barbara Brown Taylor
Wisdom is not gained by knowing what is right. Wisdom is gained by practicing what is right, and noticing what happens when that practice succeeds and when it fails.
Barbara Brown TaylorBarbara Brown Taylor I am always surprised by people who speak of faith as if it happens in the air somewhere. Our bodies are God’s best way of getting to us. Revelation begins in the flesh.
Barbara Brown TaylorBarbara Brown Taylor 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.
Barbara Brown TaylorBarbara Brown Taylor 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.
Barbara Brown TaylorBarbara Brown Taylor You only need to lose track of who you are, or who you thought you were supposed to be, so that you end up lying flat on the dirt floor basement of your heart. Do this, Jesus says, and you will live.
Barbara Brown TaylorBarbara Brown Taylor 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.
Barbara Brown TaylorBarbara Brown Taylor Earth is so thick with divine possibility that it is a wonder we can walk anywhere without cracking our shins on altars.
Barbara Brown TaylorBarbara Brown Taylor I don’t have time for a job that doesn’t leave me time to be quiet or still or to pray.
Barbara Brown TaylorBarbara Brown Taylor To be fully human is perhaps why I’m Christian, because I see in the life of Jesus a way of being fully human.
Barbara Brown TaylorBarbara Brown Taylor I don’t miss the ministry, because I’m completely engaged in it. In terms of parish ministry, I miss the intimacy with a group of people.
Barbara Brown TaylorBarbara Brown Taylor 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.
Barbara Brown TaylorBarbara Brown Taylor 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 TaylorBarbara Brown Taylor To get God on your side is a great way to feel powerful.
Barbara Brown TaylorBarbara Brown Taylor The effort to untangle the human words from the divine seems not only futile to me but also unnecessary, since God works with what is. God uses whatever is usable in a life, both to speak and to act, and those who insist on fireworks in the sky may miss the electricity that sparks the human heart.
Barbara Brown TaylorBarbara Brown Taylor Every human interaction offers you the chance to make things better or to make things worse.
Barbara Brown TaylorBarbara Brown Taylor Beliefs have become unimportant to me. Faith as radical trust became even more important to me.
Barbara Brown TaylorBarbara Brown Taylor
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More on baptism
Baptism is an outward expression of an inward faith.
Watchman NeeWatchman Nee There are two sides to this Baptism: The first is, you possess the Spirit; The second is that the Spirit possesses you.
Smith WigglesworthSmith Wigglesworth I settled down in the full persuasion, that the immersion of a professing believer in Christ is the only Christian baptism.
Adoniram JudsonAdoniram Judson After many painful trials, which none can know,
Adoniram JudsonAdoniram Judson The rituals we use for marriage, baptism or inaugurating a president are as elaborate as they are because we associate the ritual with a major life passage, the crossing of a critical threshold, or in other words, with transformation.
Abraham VergheseAbraham Verghese Rituals, anthropologists will tell us, are about transformation.
Abraham VergheseAbraham Verghese I called it a baptism in flaming ink that forced me to shed my shyness about recognizing myself
AberjhaniAberjhani As a poet and to accept the fact that life had never given me any choice in the matter. And then I had to discover exactly what that meant.
AberjhaniAberjhani