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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

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Barbara Brown Taylor
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: September 21
Anglican Priest
Priest
Boring
Church
Character
Littles
Little
Fizz
Forming
Extremely
Meaningful

More quotes by Barbara Brown Taylor

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There was no time anymore to be quiet or still or pray. So, in many ways, that's what led to my downward spin.
Barbara Brown Taylor
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Once I gave up the hunt for villains, I had little recourse but to take responsibility for my choices.... Needless to say, this is far less satisfying that nailing villains. It also turned out to be more healing in the end.
Barbara Brown Taylor
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To be fully human is perhaps why I'm Christian, because I see in the life of Jesus a way of being fully human.
Barbara Brown Taylor
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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
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I don't have time for a job that doesn't leave me time to be quiet or still or to pray.
Barbara Brown Taylor
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It can be difficult to be an introvert in church, especially if you happen to be the pastor. Liking to be alone can be interpreted as a judgment on other people's company. Liking to be quiet can be construed as aloofness. There is so much emphasis on community in most congregations that anyone who does not participate risks being labeled a loner.
Barbara Brown Taylor
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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
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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
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Beliefs have become unimportant to me. Faith as radical trust became even more important to me.
Barbara Brown Taylor
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I've got a hold of something that won't move. It's a willingness to keep walking into the next day, open to whatever may turn out to be true that day.
Barbara Brown Taylor
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Salvation happens every time someone with a key uses it to open a door he could lock instead.
Barbara Brown Taylor
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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
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Most of us spend so much time thinking about where we have been or where we are supposed to be going that we have a hard time recognizing where we actually are.
Barbara Brown Taylor
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It's difficult for me to ignore how many conflicts locally and worldwide have religion tagged to them.
Barbara Brown Taylor
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As hard as I have tried to remember the exact moment when I fell in love with God, I cannot do it. My earliest memories are bathed in a kind of golden light that seemed to embrace me as surely as my mother's arms. The divine presence was strongest outdoors, and most palpable when I was alone.
Barbara Brown Taylor
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You only need to lose track of who you are, or who you thought you were supposed to be, so that you end up lying flat on the dirt floor basement of your heart. Do this, Jesus says, and you will live.
Barbara Brown Taylor
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The effort to untangle the human words from the divine seems not only futile to me but also unnecessary, since God works with what is. 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.
Barbara Brown Taylor
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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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I have learned things in the dark that I could never have learned in the light, things that have saved my life over and over again, so that there is really only one logical conclusion. I need darkness as much as I need light.
Barbara Brown Taylor
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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