Quotes About Faith

It was easy to think the worst of humanity when all I saw was brutality and selfishness, and these people showed me there was still good in the world, even if I rarely saw it.

How was he standing on top of the water, but still moving?

Seven thousand Jews had been collected and taken away to die, but we were not among them.

Julia Gary.

After a moment, there was a quiet splash, and the mourners said together, "Remember, God, that we are of dust." One by one they stepped to the rail, where they released handfuls of sand—the sand Josef's father had told him to take from the sandbox. Josef joined his father at the rail, and they scattered their sand in the sea.

You simply cannot be a disciple without being a missionary—a sent one. For way too long discipleship has been limited to issues relating to our own personal morality and worked out in the context of the four walls of the church with its privatized religion.

we are perfectly designed to achieve what we are currently achieving. If Christianity is in decline, at least part of the issue goes to the contemporary way we live out faith in a watching world.

The greatest proof of Christianity for others is not how far a man can logically analyze his reasons for believing, but how far in practice he will stake his life on his belief. T. S. Eliot

It is only when the people of God as a whole are activated in a movement that real world transformation takes place.

At the heart of all great movements is a recovery of a simple Christology (essential conceptions of who Jesus is and what he does), yet one that accurately reflects the Jesus of New Testament faith—they are in a very literal sense Jesus movements.

I have come to believe that the major threat to the viability of our faith is that of consumerism. This

Christianity is concerned with the unfolding of the Kingdom of God in this world, not the longevity of organizations.

The great Christian revolutions came not by the discovery of something that was not known before. They happen when someone takes radically something that was always there. —H. Richard Niebuhr

C. S. Lewis rightly understood that the purpose of the church was to draw people to Christ and make them like Christ. He said that the church exists for no other purpose. "If the Church is not doing this, then all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible, are a waste of time.

Discipleship is all about adherence to Christ.

My mother kept asking me, 'When are you going to do a gospel album?' And I've always wanted to do a gospel album. Everybody was going on about it, so mom started hounding me more.

Where were you when the world stopped turning

In between the two were the writers of the Apostolic Tradition, who forbade a catechumen or baptized believer from entering the legions, but permitted him, if he were attracted to the faith while in the legions, to stay there on one condition: "Let him not kill.

Religion must be defended not by killing but by dying, not by violence but by patience.

This, the Christians believed, was God's work and not theirs. So they did not engage in frantic action to save those who were not baptized; instead they entrusted the outsiders to God. The church, patiently, also entrusted itself to God, who would bring people into "the community of saints participating in truth" by the arduous means of catechesis and baptism.

As Tertullian put it around AD 200, "Christians are made, not born." 4

I must warn you," he says. Whatever persecutions the Christians have experienced, and whether it has been Jews or pagans or heretics who have mistreated them, Christians must not avenge themselves. Cyprian places himself among them: "We should not hasten to revenge their pain with an angry speed.

We can hear the catechist intoning precept 26: "That it is of small account to be baptized and to receive the eucharist unless you profit both in deeds and works.

it's a hymn of the heretic, a piyut [liturgical poem] of a modern, doubtful person.