Quotes from Samuel Wells

Bonhoeffer knew that when the church stops talking about Jesus, it has nothing to say. And when it assumes dominance, it's not talking about Jesus.

I will always be marked by the struggle. But it is through it that I have seen God.

Church means giving up the fantasy that we can find fulfillment and righteousness alone. It means doing things at inconvenient times with eccentric people in sometimes clumsy ways--because life is a team game, and on judgment day God will have nothing to say to us if we think we can come without the others.

The Eucharist is the technology God uses for constructing a new society.

There are two dimensions of discipleship. Ons is the learning of habits and the forming of character, the shaping of commitments and the inscribing of rhythms, the training in disciplines and the facing of sacrifices, Some people speak as if that were the only part. But the other dimension is perhaps even more important. It is the acknowledgment of weakness, the asking for help, the naming of failure, the request for forgiveness, the desire for reconciliation, and the longing for restoration.

An artist who is inspired is being obvious.

People with dull lives often think that their lives are dull by chance. In reality everyone chooses more or less what kind of events will happen to them by their conscious patterns of blocking and yielding.

Instead we have a tradition of common prayer, a general commitment to the well-being of all, including nonmembers of the church, and a desire to seek a faith that can be shared by people of a wide diversity of

no man can be in danger by loving others too much, that loveth God as he ought.

One of Origen's arguments for the truth of Christianity was that while philosophy had only made the elite good, Christianity had lifted people of all levels of society and of every different type and race to a "philosophical" way of life. . . . Just as male needs female, rich needs poor, white needs black, so intellectuals need the simple. . . . The church is itself when it bridges all these gaps and tensions between people of different kinds.

Bonhoeffer did not expect his life to be a tidy edifice of perfection.

He assumed that the shape of renewal is death and resurrection.

Stories...told with...heroes at the centre of them...are told to laud the virtues of the heroes---for if the hero failed, all would be lost. By contrast, a saint can fail in a way the hero can't, because the failure of the saint reveals the forgiveness and the new possibilities made in God, and the saint is just a small character in a story that's always fundamentally about God.

Our society celebrates nothing more than the overcoming of limitation – in sport, in science, in communications, in health. Every invention, every new world record, every new gadget is a sacrament of the deepest human desire of our age – to become free by transcending limitation, and thus, for a moment, believing we can withstand even death.