“The problem is, many of the people in need of saving are in churches, and at least part of what they need saving from is the idea that God sees the world the same way they do.”

Once I gave up the hunt for villains, I had little recourse but to take responsibility for my choices…. Needless to say, this is far less satisfying that nailing villains. It also turned out to be more healing in the end.

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.

Prayer is happening, and it is not necessarily something that I am doing. God is happening, and I am lucky enough to know that I am in The Midst.

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.

When I say I trust Jesus, that is what I mean: I trust that the way of life leads through perishability, not around it.

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.

You can create an intimate community of about 20 or 25 people, and beyond that you’re into a different kind of relationship.

God does some of God’s best work with people who are seriously lost.

Humanity can be pretty stinky.

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.

Day by day we are given not what we want but what we need. Sometimes it is a feast and sometimes…swept crumbs, but by faith we believe it is enough.

I didn’t want to be a priest. I wanted to do the work that priests do, and that required becoming a priest.

I read more widely. I made friends more widely. I wore more red. I stayed home on Sundays. I did things that were never in the realm of possible things to do before. That was a real desert experience for me.

I began to get notes from people saying they were sorry to hear I’d left ministry. And for a while, I halfway believed they were right, that I’d left.

I’m leaving out some of the hugely successful megachurches, of which I have very little experience.

The great wisdom traditions of the world all recognize that the main impediment to living a life of meaning is being self-absorbed.

Voluntary self-directed religion was more dangerous to the Church than any number of infidels.

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.

I think it is going to be very difficult for any church that still calls itself a church, never to try and convince someone that their religion is the best one.

When nations are to perish in their sins, ’tis in the Church the leprosy begins.

Although I myself don’t go to church or synagogue, I do, whether it’s superstition or whatever, pray every time I get on a plane. I just automatically do it. I say the same thing every time.

Built God a church and laughed His word to scorn.

Woman was the Church’s rival, the temptress, the distraction, the obstacle to holiness, the Devil’s decoy.

A red brick Presbyterian church… captured by kudzu vines as surely as a butterfly in a net.