Quotes from Fred B. Craddock

Boredom is a form of evil; perhaps one of Kierkegaard's characters was more correct when he said, "Boredom is the root of all evil." Boredom is a preview of death, if not itself a form of death, and when trapped in prolonged boredom, even the most saintly of us will hope for, pray for, or even engineer relief, however demonic.

don't sit on your patio in the high noon of your tranquility and make light of the huts that people build in the midnight of their desperation.

Learning to preach is difficult because preaching is difficult.

If in reading the Bible you find justification for abusing, humiliating, disgracing, harming, or hurting, especially when it makes you feel better about yourself, you are absolutely wrong.

I'm crucified between the sky of what I intend to be and the earth of my performance.

If there is a disease in the preaching that I hear most often, it's not that what the minister says is wrong. It's that it is just too small.

It is not uncommon in the church for us to urge each other to witness to our faith and sometimes we do so as though it were easy to do. It is not. Our faith is so profoundly intimate and important that we draw our breath in pain to tell the story of our faith in God. And to find the appropriate word to speak even to a receptive mind is difficult. Especially if the opportunity that presents itself comes as a total surprise.

The first is that learning to preach is difficult, and the difficulty is not greatly relieved by having a skilled instructor or by the discovery that one seems to be naturally a "good talker.

Preaching is the concerted engagement of one's faculties of body, mind, and spirit.

The surest way to stop growing is to stop reading.

If the stories of our faith are such that you're too young to remember them, then you are not old enough to preach.

Art is not a gift which a few people are given, but rather it is a gift which most people throw away.

Temptations are a compliment to our power, not our weakness.

Just because I'm a wren doesn't mean I can't preach an eagle message. Of course I can. Is that a lack of integrity if I preach something bigger than I can even feel, if I preach a message that I haven't even grown to? That's not a lack of integrity. That's accepting the call. That's what it is because there's too much at stake to do otherwise.

No one can increase the volume in the pulpit to such a level as to muffle the echo of lost convictions.

Passion makes one persuasive.