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" The church is in the hope business. "

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" Ghettos and barrios and abusive homes and trauma wards may produce scarred souls; they can cripple more human spirits than they strengthen. "

" When I teach the formal curriculum, I have the chance to think about it ahead of time. I can rehearse it. I can illustrate it with self-deprecating humor and humble-sounding personal disclosure. I can try to make it comes out just right. "

" You can only love and be loved to the extent that you know and are known by somebody. "

" I need an inspiration that is grounded in reality while thoroughly transcendent. "

" Prudence is foresight and far-sightedness. It's the ability to make immediate decisions on the basis of their longer-range effects. "

" When it comes to sermon writing, generally there are two problems. Some preachers love the research stage but hate the writing, and they start writing too late. Others don't like doing research, so they move way too fast to the writing part. "

" I have given up the idea that there is an opposition-free church out there. But I have gained something else - an appreciation for the gift of opposition. When it comes, I learn something about my motives. When it comes, I get to test my courage. "

" Churches can become places of cynicism, resistance, and pessimism. "

" When someone is in crisis, don't start by teaching, leveraging, or explaining. Just be with. "

" When the soul is understood and attended to, we can be liberated from hurry, preoccupation, unsatisfied desires, and chronic discontent. "

" Sometimes in churches somebody will discover a particular vein of spirituality and seek to recruit others into it, or assume a superior position because they have found certain techniques - but no one actually wants to become like them. "

" Jesus' life as a foot-washing servant would eventually lead to the adoption of humility as a widely admired virtue. "

" Art is built on the deepest themes of human meaning: good and evil, beauty and ugliness, life and death, love and hate. No other story has incarnated those themes more than the story of Jesus. "

" Being deeply contented with God in my everyday life is a focused attitude. It is always available. It means practicing letting go of my obsession with how I'm doing. It means training myself to learn to actually be present with people, and seeking to love them. "

" Opposition is an inevitable reality of pastoral life. "

" What influences our behavior, and what our level of responsibility is, are very complex issues. And anytime we try to make this simplistic, we don't serve people well. "

" Skill at helping people grow spiritually, like skill at playing chess, depends on understanding and valuing differences. "

" Prudence is not the same thing as caution. Caution is a helpful strategy when you're crossing a minefield; it's a disaster when you're in a gold rush. "

" The day people around me stop questioning my character is the day my character begins to grow vulnerable. "

" I know that those of us who go into church work are to regard ourselves as servants, are to offer our lives as a gift. "

" Women are the first witnesses to the resurrection and pillars of the early church. "

" This much I have learned: human beings come with very different sets of wiring, different interests, different temperaments, different learning styles, different gifts, different temptations. These differences are tremendously important in the spiritual formation of human beings. "

" Nobody lives up to the norms that God had in mind when he first created human beings. "

" My main job is to live with deep contentment, joy, and confidence in my everyday experience of life with God. Everything else is job number two. "

" When people feel they're getting to speak into what's being preached, there is high built-in motivation to participate. "

" People with the strongest and healthiest sense of calling are not obsessed with their calling. They are preoccupied with the Caller. "

" The only true and lasting inspiration for life is genuine love for God, and submitted gratitude that I get to be a part of the redemptive quest. "

" Tithing is considerably less popular than words like generosity or sharing. "

" Universities such as Cambridge, Oxford, and Harvard all began as Jesus-inspired efforts to love God with all ones' mind. "

" One of the reasons I'm an interesting person to be married to is my intensely late-blooming self-awareness. "