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

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.

If we are to use our minds rightly, we must live in an attitude of constant openness and learning.

The different parts of the automobile like the ignition switch, the various buttons, the steering wheel – the interfaces between the driver and the machine – is our spirit or heart.

I learned more stuff in church than I did in the world.

I was crawling around inside of her. She was a church pianist. My dad was a brilliant singer. I was hearing it.

I did a concert at five years old in the garden of one of the church members, and we raised some money to buy a new piano in our little church.

Theres a lot of churches that hide their dirty laundry under the rug, and I know about that from being in the church 27 years. Oh, yeah.

For me, the Church is the enemy.

People like Clyde McPhatter who came out of the black churches – like Sam Cooke and Aretha Franklin – were all church singers who became great pop singers because gospel singing is very close to the blues.

If we go to church we are confronted with a system of begging so complicated and so resolute that all other demands sink into insignificance by its side.

The church persecuted is the church pure, and the church pure is the church powerful.