Amen Pope Francis from a non Catholic....
“I prefer a Church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a Church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security,” the Pope said in a major new statement.
“I do not want a Church concerned with being at the center and then ends by being caught up in a web of obsessions and procedures,” (Pope Francis 2013)
"The secret of Christian quietness is not indifference, but the knowledge that God is my Father, He loves me, I shall never think of anything He will forget, and worry becomes an impossibility.
It is not so true that "prayer changes things" as that prayer changes us, and then we change things. Consequently we must not ask God to do what he has created us to do. For instance, Jesus Christ is not a social reformer, He came to alter us first, and if there is any social reform to be done on earth, we must do it. God has so constituted things that prayer on the basis of redemption alters the way we look at things. Prayer is not altering things externally, but working wonders within our disposition." - Oswald Chambers 2 Corinthians 5:17
"The ekklesia (church) in the New Testament is a communion of persons and nothing else."
(Emil Brunner, The Misunderstanding of the Church. 1952)
"When I seriously thought about what I was going to do in this unrewarding spot for eighteen more months, it sent me spinning into a real depression. I locked myself in my room for three days and read Ian Fleming novels and drank about five gallons of coffee. In the afternoons when the little kids knocked at the door, I held my breath until they went away. I had thought that I could move into a completely different culture and, if not love it, at least accept it enough that I could do the job I had been trained for. It came as an ego-shriveling shock to discover after the first month that I wasn't doing much of anything but reacting naively and emotionally to the poverty around me. Then little by little I began, however superficially, to become involved with the life of the town."(Living Poor. A Peace Corps Chronicle. Moritz Thomsen. Pg 35-36)
"Similarly, if we resort to techniques in our churches - or once we resort to them - it is very hard to get rid of them. Worship gimmicks create superficial Christians. Once we condition our congregation to Twinkles in worship, it is hard to help people appreciate good vegetables.12 As spiritual leaders, we must be constantly on the alert against methods, gimmicks, marketing strategies."
"He never drinks water, you know, only beer, about a case a day. Imagine being so rich that you don't have to drink water." (Ecuadorian Alexandro's observation about a balsa mill "gringo" owner, who was a good man.
”A physical church building is not important and is sometimes a liability
more than an asset because anyone who enters it will be branded as an
apostate from Islam. There is no such negative stigma against joining a church meeting in someone's home. Newcomers, seekers, those not so
strong in their faith can more easily attend a meeting in a home without
facing the wrath of their community." (SIM Now Magazine. Pg 8. October 2013)
According to any institution.
"Christian culture has no category for anger at harm done in God’s name. They label it all as cynicism rather than the first step to healing” (Stephanie Drury)
"The idea of churchmanship was to be wholly unattractive. I was not in the least anticlerical, but I was deeply antiecclesiastical.
…But though I liked clergymen as I liked bears, I had as little wish to be in the Church as in the zoo.
It was, to begin with, a kind of collective; a wearisome “get-together” affair. I couldn’t yet see how a concern of that sort should have anything to do with one’s spiritual life. To me, religion ought to have been a matter of good men praying alone and meeting by twos and threes to talk of spiritual matters.
And then the fussy, time-wasting botheration of it all! The bells, the crowds, the umbrellas, the notices, the bustle, the perpetual arranging and organizing. Hymns were (and are) extremely disagreeable to me. Of all musical instruments I liked (and like) the organ least. I have, too, a sort of spiritual gaucherie which makes me unapt to participate in any rite."
"Why did God create us? There is only one answer: for relationships. God
decided not to have a life of God's own but to share the divine life with us.
God gets lonely when God has no one to walk with in the dew of the day. This
is one of the greatest self-disclosures in all of history. Amazing, vulnerable,
divine self-disclosure. God created us for companionship."
(Leonard Sweet. What Matters Most. Pg 16)
"I came to a decision. Whatever anyone said they believed, including myself, if it didn’t produce love, freedom and beauty, I didn’t want to have anything to do with it." (Jim Palmer. On Being Off The Grid of Christendom.)
"I found that most people don’t really want to know the truth. There are plenty of people who want to know the truth on their terms or require that the truth be contained within certain boundaries of comfort. But truth can never be known this way. You have to seek truth from a place of not knowing, and that can be a very threatening place because we think we already know the truth or we are afraid of what the truth might be."
"When I Googled “women cannot,” the popular searches (each search page has eight of the most popular searches for each term towards the bottom of the page) include “be priests, speak in church, teach the Bible, be pastors.” In this search, 50 percent of the issues mentioned were church related. In contrast, the corresponding search for “men cannot” had only one that is church related–man cannot live on bread alone; that is hardly gender specific." (Felicity Dale)
Popular Google Search Terms to Show How the World Really Feels About Women
A campaign from UN Women places popular search terms about women in front of portraits
A cartoon sketch about women and church by the NakedPastor, David Hayward.... What do we do with women
