I wasn't a bad basketball player, but I was far from the world's greatest. Good defense, no offense - that was me.
The Church must be seen as the company of pilgrims on the way to the end of the world and the ends of the earth.
Mission begins with a kind of explosion of joy. The news that the rejected and crucified Jesus is alive is something that cannot possibly be suppressed. It must be told. Who could be silent about such a fact? The mission of the Church in the pages of the New Testament is like the fallout from a vast explosion, a radioactive fallout which is not lethal but life-giving.
Live in the kingdom of God in such a way that it provokes questions for which the gospel is the answer.
I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist. Jesus Christ is risen from the dead.
The church is not meant to call men and women out of the world into a safe religious enclave but to call them out in order to send them back as agents of God's kingship.
It is less important to ask a Christian what he or she believes about the Bible than it is to inquire what he or she does with it.
No matter how much work a man can do, no matter how engaging his personality may be, he will not advance far in business if he cannot work through others.
He thinks like a Tory, and talks like a Radical, and that's so important nowadays.
We urge persons with same-gender attractions to control those and to refrain from acting upon them, which is a sin, just as we urge persons with heterosexual attractions to refrain from acting upon them until they have the opportunity for a marriage recognized by God as well as by the law of the land. That is the way to happiness and eternal life.
So in everything: power lies with those who control finance, not with those who know the matter upon which the money is to be spent. Thus, the holders of power are, in general, ignorant and malevolent, and the less they exercise their power the better.