Leaving Church Quotes

The following quotes are from the book, Leaving Church, by Barbara Brown Taylor. It is available for purchase here.

“I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do,” she once said, ”because I notice it always coincides with their own desires. “ 7

God uses whatever is usable in a life, both to speak and to act, and those who insist on fireworks in the sky may miss the electricity that sparks the human heart. 26

“I know people who come to this church,” he said, “and I finally had to come see for myself how they got through a Sunday morning without assaulting each other.” 66

The real problem with transference for clergy without the skills to deal with it is that it feeds our sense that we are more powerful than we really are. 73

I know the Bible is a special kind of book, but I find it as seductive as any other. If I am not careful, I can begin to mistake the words on the page for the realities they describe. I can begin to love the dried ink marks on the page more than I love the encounters that gave rise to them. If I am not careful, I can decide that I am really much happier reading my Bible than I am entering into what God is doing in my own time and place, since shutting the book to go outside will involve the very great risk of taking part in stories that are still taking shape. Neither I nor anyone else knows how these stories will turn out, since at this point they involve more blood than ink. The whole purpose of the Bible, it seems to me, is to convince people to set the written word down in order to become living words in the world for God’s sake. For me, this willing conversion of ink back to blood is the full substance of faith. 107

Most of us do not live especially holy lives, after all. We spend most of our time sitting in traffic, paying bills, and being irritated with one another. Yet every week we are invited to stop all of that for one hour at least. We are invited to participate in a great drama that has been going on without us for thousands of years, and one that will go on as long as there is a single player left standing. 161

Week after week, I was permitted to stand up in special clothes and talk while everyone else sat quietly and listened. Week after week, they heard the gospel filtered through my sensibilities. On Sunday mornings they sand the hymns I had chosen, and on Wednesday evenings they engaged the topics I had picked.

“We know a lot about what matters to you,” he wrote, not unkindly. “ I thought you might like to know about something that matters to me.” 162

For half my life, the axis of my world had run through the altar of a church. I spent most of my time in church, with church people, engaging in the work of the church. My view of reality grew from that center. I looked at life through the windows of the church, using the language I had learned there not only to describe what I saw but also to make sense of it. My context was so tightly focused that even my junk mail was Christian. 168

As my friend Becca once said, “The church answered all my questions while I was growing up, but they also gave me the questions I could ask.” 170

The clear message was that God did not live at the seminary. God lived in the world. The seminary existed so that people had a place to make sense of their experience in the world, as well as a community to support them wile they did. 222

If churches saw their mission in the same way, there is no telling what might happen. What if people were invited to come tell what they already know of God instead of to learn what they are supposed to believe? What if they were blessed for what they are doing in the world instead of chastened for not doing more at church? What if church felt more like a way station than a destination? What if the church’s job were to move people out the door instead of trying to keep them in, by convincing them that God needed them more in the world than in the church? 222

In the Bible, human beings experience God’s salvation when peace ends war, when food follows famine, when health supplants sickness and freedom trumps oppression. Salvation is a word for the divine spaciousness that comes to human beings in all the tight places where their lives are at risk, regardless of how they got there or whether they know God’s name. Sometimes it comes as an extended human hand and sometimes as a bolt from the blue, but either way it opens a door in what looked for all the world like a wall. This is he way of life, and God alone knows how it works.

Although we might use different words to describe it, most of us know what is killing us. For some it is the deadly rush of our lives; for others it is the inability to move. For some it is the prison of our possessions; for others the crushing poverty that dooms our children to more of the same. Few of us can choose our circumstances, but we can choose how we respond to them. 226

Matter matters to God. 228