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Having been brought up with a definition of faith as adherence to a set of beliefs, I have more and more begun to turn instead toward a definition of faith as openness to truth, whatever truth may turn out to be.
Barbara Brown Taylor
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Barbara Brown Taylor
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: September 21
Anglican Priest
Priest
Whatever
Beliefs
Faith
Definitions
Truth
Brought
May
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Adherence
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Definition
More quotes by Barbara Brown Taylor
I'm in a mainline church, I'm very aware, especially as I move through community churches and new-start churches that are making real efforts not to associate themselves with traditional denominations - very often they have no history. They have no institutional memory.
Barbara Brown Taylor
Church can be extremely boring. It can be very meaningful, it can be character forming, but can be have very little fizz in it.
Barbara Brown Taylor
The value for me being in a mainline tradition is history and memory, which is not just Christian tradition but denominational tradition, and characters, you know, with real distinct flavors of ways to be Christian.
Barbara Brown Taylor
The boundaries became constrictive in what I was doing, and if my faith grew, it was because I pressed some of the boundaries in ways I hadn't felt comfortable or responsible doing that before.
Barbara Brown Taylor
The tradition piece is so embedded in me I don't know that I can see it any more, but the community piece is one I've been in danger of losing.
Barbara Brown Taylor
With so much effort being poured into church growth, so much press being given to the benefits of faith, and so much flexing of religious muscle in the public square, the poor in spirit have no one but Jesus to call them blessed anymore.
Barbara Brown Taylor
I thought being faithful was about becoming someone other than who I was...it wasn't until I failed that I began to wonder if my human wholeness might be more useful to God than my exhausting goodness.
Barbara Brown Taylor
I'm leaving out some of the hugely successful megachurches, of which I have very little experience.
Barbara Brown Taylor
I'll do my best to always put God and neighbor ahead of ego, but I want to find myself, and if finding myself means losing my ego self, I'll go there.
Barbara Brown Taylor
I read more widely. I made friends more widely. I wore more red. I stayed home on Sundays. I did things that were never in the realm of possible things to do before. That was a real desert experience for me.
Barbara Brown Taylor
I found myself in a maze where I'd taken the wrong turn. In my wish to do well for that congregation I wasn't doing particularly well for myself or my friends or my family, and I even found that the work for God was taking me away from God.
Barbara Brown Taylor
I wanted to be as close as I could to the Really Real, and I'll capitalize both of those R's, because God is a word that means different things to different people, but we might all agree it's what is most real.
Barbara Brown Taylor
It's difficult for me to ignore how many conflicts locally and worldwide have religion tagged to them.
Barbara Brown Taylor
The real problem has far less to do with what is really out there than it does with our resistance to finding out what is really out there.
Barbara Brown Taylor
Most of us like thinking we are God's only children...At least one of the purposes of church is to remind us that God has other children, easily as precious as we. Baptism and narcissism cancel each other out.
Barbara Brown Taylor
Most of us will have more than one job in our working lives, which means we will have more than one opportunity to seek meaningful work at different stages of our own deepening humanity.
Barbara Brown Taylor
I am always surprised by people who speak of faith as if it happens in the air somewhere. Our bodies are God's best way of getting to us. Revelation begins in the flesh.
Barbara Brown Taylor
I didn't want to be a priest. I wanted to do the work that priests do, and that required becoming a priest.
Barbara Brown Taylor
I miss the hot spots. I miss the hospital calls. I miss the nursing homes. I miss the really intimate human contact with other people, which I did nothing to earn.
Barbara Brown Taylor
I began to get notes from people saying they were sorry to hear I'd left ministry. And for a while, I halfway believed they were right, that I'd left.
Barbara Brown Taylor
