church

The Rochester group [of VOTF], however, was met with some concern as they found it hard to believe my account as it unfolded before them. I feel that some people have a hard time with the truths around us, not only the sexual abuse by priests, but all bad things. I call it chosen ignorance. This modified form of ignorance is found in people who, if confronted with certain truths realize that they have to accept them and thereby acknowledge evil, and that scares them. Opening up and letting the truth in might knock them off their perceived center. It is too hard, period."(VOTF - Voice of the Faithful - a Catholic group that wants to change the Church, keep the faith.)

The most evil institution in the world is the Roman Catholic Church.

Christianity now is in crisis, and a large part because people have marketed it as a religion of good people getting better, when in fact it is religion a bad people coping with their failure to be good.

Provided there is a church which proclaims the mutual humanity and deity of the Lord Jesus Christ, evil will never be able to bring it to the point of attrition.

I cannot think why we should be astonished at all the evils which exist in the Church, when those who ought to be models on which all may pattern their virtues are annulling the work wrought in the religious Orders by the spirit of the saints of old.

The church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints.

We have taught this generation how to "market" the Gospel but we have neglected to encourage them to "preach" the Gospel.

Law does, "because God said so!"; Grace does because it understands the reason God said so.

Fear not, brothers and sisters, God, who is full of grace and abounding in steadfast love, meets us in our sin and transforms us for God's glory and the healing of God's world. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, your sins are forgiven, be now at peace.

People who say we are just preaching "extreme grace" must not understand how extremely gracious our Father is.

Love is a heart smile.

The burden of sin leads you to the need for a Savior.

God love's in the dark.

The Church is not called to overthrow government but to influence culture.

Whatever your problems may be, they pale in insignificance in the light of eternity. No matter how great your failures, God's grace is greater still. Lift up your heart and face life head-on.

If anyone had a right to lecture people about their sin, it was the sinless son of God. If even he could meet sinners as equals, how much more should we Christians---all sinners ourselves---treat as equals the people we encounter in our lives?

It is not the balance in your check book that makes life count. It is the investment one makes in the lives of others.

My vision of the gathered church that had come to me... had been replaced by a vision of the gathered community. What I saw now was the community imperfect and irresolute but held together by the frayed and always fraying, incomplete and yet ever-holding bonds of the various sorts of affection. There had maybe never been anybody who had not been loved by somebody, who had been loved by somebody else, and so on and on... It was a community always disappointed in itself, disappointing its members, always trying to contain its divisions and gentle its meanness, always failing and yet always preserving a sort of will toward goodwill. I knew that, in the midst of all the ignorance and error, this was a membership; it was the membership of Port William and of no other place on earth. My vision gathered the community as it never has been and never will be gathered in this world of time, for the community must always be marred by members who are indifferent to it or against it, who are nonetheless its members and maybe nonetheless essential to it. And yet I saw them all as somehow perfected, beyond time, by one another's love, compassion, and forgiveness, as it is said we may be perfected by grace.