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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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Barbara Brown Taylor
Age: 72
Born: 1951
Born: September 21
Anglican Priest
Priest
Traditional
Community
Aware
Mainline
Church
Memory
Denominations
Moving
Especially
Institutional
Making
Move
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History
Associates
Often
Memories
Churches
Real
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More quotes by Barbara Brown Taylor

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When someone asks us where we want to be in our lives, the last thing that occurs to us is to look down at our feet and say, 'Here, I guess, since this is where I am.'
Barbara Brown Taylor
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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
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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
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You probably can't get much closer to God than serving a congregation 24/7. At the same time, there's a different kind of closeness in this present life I have in which I have much more freedom to come and go and to engage some of the silence and stillness and solitude that I was missing before.
Barbara Brown Taylor
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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
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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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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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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
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I can't help but note that God is being useful to a lot of people trying to do harm to one another.
Barbara Brown Taylor
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Every human interaction offers you the chance to make things better or to make things worse.
Barbara Brown Taylor
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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
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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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The only real difference between Anxiety and Excitement was my willingness to let go of Fear.
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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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
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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
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The poets began drifting away from churches as the jurists grew louder and more insistent.
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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Kindness is not a bad religion, no matter what name you use for God.
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