You can create an intimate community of about 20 or 25 people, and beyond that you're into a different kind of relationship.
Barbara Brown TaylorThat'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.
Barbara Brown TaylorI became so attentive to the souls of other people that I was not as attentive as I might have been to my own.
Barbara Brown TaylorI'm in a mainline church, I'm very aware, especially as I move through community churches and new-start churches that are making real efforts not to associate themselves with traditional denominations - very often they have no history. They have no institutional memory.
Barbara Brown TaylorI discovered a version of the sinner's prayer that increased my faith far more than the one that I had said years earlier...In this version, there were no formulas, no set phrases that promised us safe passage across the abyss. There was only our tattered trust that the Spirit who had given us life would not leave us in the wilderness without offering us life again.
Barbara Brown TaylorAll I am saying is that anyone can do this. Anyone can ask and anyone can bless, whether anyone has authorized you to do it or not. All I am saying is that the world needs you to do this, because there is a real shortage of people willing to kneel wherever they are and recognize the holiness holding its sometimes bony, often tender, always life-giving hand above their heads. That we are able to bless one another at all is evidence that we have been blessed, whether we can remember when or not. That we are willing to bless one another is miracle enough to stagger the very stars.
Barbara Brown Taylor