Not Coercion of Critics, Moral Integrity

"In an op-ed piece in the paper, Turkish writer Mustafa Akyol calls on the Muslim world to ease its concept of blasphemy.

"Rage is a sign of nothing but immaturity," he says. "The power of any faith comes not from its coercion of critics and dissenters. It comes from the moral integrity and the intellectual strength of its believers.""

Reform Thy Self

The church is always trying to get other people to reform; it might not be a bad idea to reform itself a little, by way of example.
- A Tramp Abroad

A Cantankerous Chruch Choir

The choir always tittered and whispered all through the service. There was once a church choir that was not ill-bred, but I have forgotten where it was.
- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Only Hogs Go To Church?

 “There warn't anybody at the church, except maybe a hog or two, for there warn't any lock on the door, and hogs likes a puncheon floor in summer-time because it's cool. If you notice, most folks don't go to church only when they've got to; but a hog is different.”

 ― Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Only Jesus Makes True Community

"I now often wonder whether it is true that America is the country without a reformation. If reformation means the God-given knowledge of the failure of all ways of building up a kingdom of God on earth, then it is probably true......

Whether the church in America is really “free,” I doubt . They are lonely Sundays over here. Only the Word makes a true community."

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy.  Eric Metaxas

Headless Church

How can you “love Jesus but hate church?” Church is the body of Christ and bride of Christ. I do sometimes hate what we’ve made of the church, our body modifications, plastic surgeries, and all our attempts to go headless.

— Leonard Sweet

Graduating From One Local Church To The Universal Church

Theologically, I find myself in the evangelical camp in many ways, but as for the “one way to do life and church” I’ve gone a different path. And I’m hardly alone. While I love the traditional church, I love it like a foundational part of my past, as though it were a University I’ve graduated from to join a much larger church those still in the University program are quite suspicious of. (More on church as school later)

For many, though, the church is where people find spiritual security through communion with both God and a local tribe. People love their churches, their pastors and their community. Some people believe church is the main place we worship God, that it’s superior and more sacred than worshipping with their family or friends or through other outlets such as work or daily life. 

Donald Miller

There Is No Theology in New York

"There is no theology here. . . . They talk a blue streak without the slightest substantive foundation and with no evidence of any criteria. The students— on the average twenty-five to thirty years old— are completely clueless with respect to what dogmatics is really about. They are unfamiliar with even the most basic questions. They become intoxicated with liberal and humanistic phrases, laugh at the fundamentalists, and yet basically are not even up to their level."

Bonhoeffer. To his superintendent, Max Diestel, he wrote about Theology School in New York.

We Are Consumer Christianity. It's The Norm

"Consumer Christianity is now normative. The consumer question is one who utilizes the grace of God for forgiveness and the services of the church for special occasions, but does not give his or her life and innermost thoughts, feelings, and intentions over to the kingdom of the heavens. Such Christians are not inwardly transformed and not committed to it.

Because this is so, they remain not just "imperfect," for all of us remaining perfect, but routinely and seriously unable and unwilling to do the good they know to do."

~ Dallas Willard. The Divine Conspiracy

The Musts and Oughts Bullshit

"We simply go along with the many "musts" and "oughts" that have been handed on to us, and we live with them as if they were authentic translations of the Gospel of Our Lord.

~ Henri Nouwen

The Best Religion

"I’ve come to see that what matters most is not our status but our trajectory, not where we are but where we’re going, not where we stand but where we’re headed. . . .

[Religion] is at its best when it leads us forward, when it guides us on our spiritual growth as individuals and in our cultural evolution as a species. Unfortunately, religion often becomes more of a cage than a guide, holding us back rather than summoning us onward, a buffer to constructive change rather than a catalyst for it."

~ Richard Rohr

When Church Is The Problem

"Let’s be honest: religion has probably never had such a bad name. Christianity is now seen as “irrelevant” by many and often as part of the problem more than any kind of solution. Some of us are almost embarrassed to say we are Christian because of the negative images that word conjures in others’ minds. Young people especially are turned off by how judgmental, exclusionary, impractical, and ineffective Christian culture seems to be. The church seems hostile toward most science (the objective outer world) and thus unable to talk about its inner dimensions with any authority."

Richard Rohr

Not About Protection of Church Doctrine Or Institution

"For too long we have thought of the Christian Life is essentially either involvement in political, economic, social concerns that wear us out and result in depression or activity which keeps the church intact and doctrinally pure. Our primary orientation cannot be an institution or some great cause or even other people, but first and forever to God......"

"Without the single-minded attentiveness of prayer we will rarely hear anything worth repeating or catch a vision worth asking anyone else to gaze upon."

(The Spiritual Life. John H. Westerhoff & John Eusden)

We Fear People Speaking Openly

"There us very little time and occasion for openness in most of our gatherings because we fear it. We think it may lead to confrontation, anger, and divisiveness. We are not open because we fear what others  will think of us and do to us."

(Dallas Willard. The Divine Conspiracy)

Go Home From Church

"Every day people go to church trying to substitute or compensate for not responding to the situations of their lives as they require. People walk into church thinking they are living a spiritual life when what they need to do is leave and go home, and start sensibly addressing the broken parts of their lives that are hurting others."

(Jim Palmer. Notes From Over The Edge)

Practicing Quiet Noncooperation With Organized Religion

"You must now take full responsibility for your spiritual journey. Perhaps you feel you gave too many years of your life away in vain to religion. Don’t make the mistake of giving away more years in your bitterness. You have to move on. Stop railing against religion. It will keep you stalled on your spiritual journey, and feed your ego’s need to feel superior. Your ego is sneaky and would like nothing more than to distract you from your true Self by convincing you to forge an identity of being super spiritual or anti-religion. Instead, practice simple avoidance or quiet noncooperation with organized religion, but don’t waste time or energy being oppositional to it."

(Jim Palmer. Notes From Over The Edge)

No Place Where God Expects To Be worshipped

“There is no mountain, sacred place, or church building where God expects to be worshipped."

Jim Palmer. Notes From Over The Edge

Expensive Sheep Sheds

"My heart is one with the body of Christ no matter where or how or why they gather, but this never hinders me from recognizing the seriousness of the errors of the institutional church approach. I'm not into isolationism, but I'm also not at peace with a system that has marginalized Jesus, usurped His headship, turned the body into passive spectators, robbed believers of billions of dollars to build expensive sheep sheds, and a leadership that lord's it over God's flock."
- Tom Sparks

One Class Church

We instinctively contrast the ministry with the laity, the priesthood with the people, the professional with the amateur. But the New Testament church knew nothing of this. This is perfectly astounding when you recall that every society in the world, including Israel, had had its specialized holy seasons, holy places, and holy people. In Christianity, all three were abolished. The keeping of holy days was a matter of indifference to the early Christians. They had no holy buildings, but met in private houses--the incarnation of God had made the secular sacred. As for holy people, why, all believers were called to be that holy people, that universal priesthood envisioned long ago in the Old Testament but never hitherto realized. The mediation of Jesus has abolished the need for an intermediary caste of priests: all can have access to God in virtue of the sacrifice of Christ; all have the priestly responsibility of interceding for man to God; all have the prophetic task of speaking God's message to men. There is no priestly body within Christianity. It is a one-class society, though you would never guess as much, so grossly has conformity to pagan and Old-Testament models distorted this unique facet of Christ's community.
  
... Michael Green (b. 1930), "Mission and Ministry"

A Church Not Worth Attacking

"There are a lot of churches that are not even on the battlefield yet because they aren't good enough to be attacked by the devil. Many churches are not good enough to come into real spiritual warfare as the enemy doesn't have to attack them because they do a pretty good job of attacking themselves.

The devil can simply come up and press a few buttons of the flesh, and resentment, and bitterness, and ambition, and pride, and arrogance, and offense, and unteachable behavior, and as long as he continues to press those buttons then we'll never deal with the battle field that is out there, as long as he's dealing with the battlefield in here."
Jesus said these words in Luke 22."Who is more important, the one who sits at the table or the one who serves? The one who who sits at the table of course. But, not here, for i am among those who serves. I have come as one who serves........"

(Pastor Andrew Brice. Summerside Community Church. Sunday, Sept 24, 2017)