Church can be extremely boring. It can be very meaningful, it can be character forming, but can be have very little fizz in it.

I've got a hold of something that won't move. It's a willingness to keep walking into the next day, open to whatever may turn out to be true that day.

Church can be extremely boring. It can be very meaningful, it can be character forming, but can be have very little fizz in it.

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.

I think a toxic message in a lot of Christianity has been that the self has to be annihilated in order for God to be found. I think that has been a toxic message.

The effort to untangle the human words from the divine seems not only futile to me but also unnecessary, since God works with what is. God uses whatever is usable in a life, both to speak and to act, and those who insist on fireworks in the sky may miss the electricity that sparks the human heart.

I'm leaving out some of the hugely successful megachurches, of which I have very little experience.