When we sin and mess up our lives, we find that God doesn't go off and leave us- he enters into our trouble and saves us.

Go out into the world uncorrupted, a breath of fresh air in this squalid and polluted society. Provide people with a glimpse of good living and of the living God.

The minute the church and pastors start saying what do people want and then giving it to them, we betray our calling. We're called to have people follow Jesus. We're called to have people learn how to forgive their enemies.

Prayer is the disciplined refusal to act before God acts.

Wisdom is the art of living skillfully in whatever actual conditions we find ourselves.

Every call to worship is a call into the Real World.... I encounter such constant and widespread lying about reality each day and meet with such skilled and systematic distortion of the truth that I'm always in danger of losing my grip on reality. The reality, of course, is that God is sovereign and Christ is savior. The reality is that prayer is my mother tongue and the eucharist my basic food. The reality is that baptism, not Myers-Briggs, defines who I am.

I cannot fail to call the congregation to worship God, to listen to his Word, to offer themselves to God.