“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.”

Most of us spend so much time thinking about where we have been or where we are supposed to be going that we have a hard time recognizing where we actually are.

I have learned to prize holy ignorance more highly than religious certainty and to seek companions who have arrived at the same place.

Having been brought up with a definition of faith as adherence to a set of beliefs, I have more and more begun to turn instead toward a definition of faith as openness to truth, whatever truth may turn out to be.

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.

I’m a follower of the Christ path, and that opens a huge discussion about what we even mean by words like “Christian.”

For a long time I listened to other people to decide whether I was still Christian or not, and I would sort of vet myself by the traditional formulae.

I can’t help but note that God is being useful to a lot of people trying to do harm to one another.

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.

The great thing about civility is that it does not require you to agree with or approve of anything. You don’t even have to love your neighbor to be civil. You just have to treat your neighbor the same way you would like your neighbor to treat your grandmother, or your child.

Kindness is not a bad religion, no matter what name you use for God.

I wanted to be as close as I could to the Really Real, and I’ll capitalize both of those R’s, because God is a word that means different things to different people, but we might all agree it’s what is most real.

The boundaries became constrictive in what I was doing, and if my faith grew, it was because I pressed some of the boundaries in ways I hadn’t felt comfortable or responsible doing that before.

I thought being faithful was about becoming someone other than who I was…it wasn’t until I failed that I began to wonder if my human wholeness might be more useful to God than my exhausting goodness.

That’s enough, and I have a ministry as a neighbor as well. A ministry as a friend and a ministry as an aunt and a godmother, and family is very much in the circle of my vocation.

Church can be extremely boring. It can be very meaningful, it can be character forming, but can be have very little fizz in it.

There was no time anymore to be quiet or still or pray. So, in many ways, that’s what led to my downward spin.

Because we believe that somewhere in the nest of paradigms contained in the phrase “missional church” lies nothing less that the future viability of Western Christianity.

The language of the Church Of England still reflects that Victorian time.

Unless the church is equipping believers to embrace the values and vision of the kingdom of God and turn away from the materialism, consumerism, greed, and power of the present age.

The notion that the church, the press, and the universities should serve the state is essentially a Communist notion.

That requires that we listen to one another and get challenged and grow by living with difference within the body of the church.

In missional churches, the baby birds have been pushed out of the nest and are learning to fly for themselves.

The ones that are running rampant within our churches largely go unaddressed.

Whether [new Protestant church movements] place their emphasis on new worship styles.