Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes
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I'm leaving out some of the hugely successful megachurches, of which I have very little experience.
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We're children of God through our blood kinship with Christ. We're also sons and daughters of Adam and Eve, with a hereditary craving for forbidden fruit salad.
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To get God on your side is a great way to feel powerful.
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The only real difference between Anxiety and Excitement was my willingness to let go of Fear.
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I'm a follower of the Christ path, and that opens a huge discussion about what we even mean by words like "Christian."
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You probably can't get much closer to God than serving a congregation 24/7. At the same time, there's a different kind of closeness in this present life I have in which I have much more freedom to come and go and to engage some of the silence and stillness and solitude that I was missing before.
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The church grew, and I gained a reputation for preaching, and people came, and it was a wonderful community. But we had a building that seated 82 people, and with a congregation then approaching 400 we were up to four services on Sunday, and everyone was tired.
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Every human interaction offers you the chance to make things better or to make things worse.
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I live by the simplest, perhaps facile command that Jesus ever gave, which is to love God with the whole self and the neighbor as the self, and I find that's entirely consuming. To do those two things leaves me very little time to do much else.
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I love being alone. I learned that from my father, I think, who loved his own company.
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When I say I trust Jesus, that is what I mean: I trust that the way of life leads through perishability, not around it.
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To be fully human is perhaps why I'm Christian, because I see in the life of Jesus a way of being fully human.
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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.
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You can create an intimate community of about 20 or 25 people, and beyond that you're into a different kind of relationship.
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Wisdom is not gained by knowing what is right. Wisdom is gained by practicing what is right, and noticing what happens when that practice succeeds and when it fails.
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What I noticed at Grace-Calvary is the same thing I notice whenever people aim to solve their conflicts with one another by turning to the bible: defending the dried ink marks on the page becomes more vital than defending their neighbor. As a general rule, I would say that human beings never behave more badly toward one another than when they believe they are protecting God. In the words of Arun Gandhi, grandson of Mohandas, 'People of the Book risk putting the book above people.
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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.
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Prayer is happening, and it is not necessarily something that I am doing. God is happening, and I am lucky enough to know that I am in The Midst.
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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.
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I think we d like life to be like a train..but it turns out to be a sailboat.
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I have learned to prize holy ignorance more highly than religious certainty and to seek companions who have arrived at the same place. We are a motley crew, distinguished not only by our inability to explain ourselves to those who are more certain of their beliefs than we are but in many cases by our distance from the centers of our faith communities as well.
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The hardest spiritual work in the world is to love the neighbor as the self – to encounter another human being not as someone you can use, change, fix, help, save, enroll, convince or control, but simply as someone who can spring you from the prison of yourself, if you will allow it.
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If God is about putting God ahead of myself then I've just quit being religious, because that's what got me into such deep trouble.
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The tradition piece is so embedded in me I don't know that I can see it any more, but the community piece is one I've been in danger of losing.