Living Deeply

Be the Church (Shane Claiborne)

 

Stop complaining about the Church and be the church you want to see.

Why We Go To Church (Paul Evdokimov)

We go to church for love, for the new love of Christ himself, which is granted to us in our unity.  We go to church so that this divine love will again and again be “poured into our hearts,” so that again and again we may “put on love” so that, constituting the body of Christ, we can abide in Christ’s love and manifest it in the world.

The Event and Effect of Jesus (Rowan Williams)

Church is the event of Jesus' presence with its characteristic effect of gathering people around him and making them see one another differently as they see him. The church is the immediate effect of Jesus being there.

Hidden Power (Annie Dillard)

On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.

Engaging the Word (Tom Wright)

I see more clearly that if the Church is to be true to its origins, it must recognize that it is in the business of actual public truth. We are not offering people a private religious experience, an option among many for reordering one's interior world. We are actually talking about something that happened in history that has changed decisively the way the world is. And the Church must therefore never be a place where we retreat into a ghetto. The Church must be rather the means through which the life and love and light of God are flowing into the wider world. That means that wherever there is pain and anguish and fear and hatred in the world, the Church has got to be there, not hiding it.

Enduring the Church (Flannery O'Connor)

The Church is the only thing that can make the terrible world we are coming to endurable; the only thing that makes the Church endurable is that it is somehow the body of Christ and on this we are fed. It seems to be a fact that you have to suffer as much from the Church as for it, but if you believe in the divinity of Christ, you have to cherish the Church while at the same time you struggle to endure it.