Marilynne Robinson Quotes

Preachers are always pleasant company when they are off duty.

I used to be married to a pastor, and I had a church for two years. Pastors are just men, too, with a different job description than others. We're all called to bear one another's burdens. We're all called to pray for the sick. They do it on a larger scale, but they're just a man. A lot of women don't think that. Trust me. I know.

I am in the hands of Deori Maa. Every time I come to Ranchi, I visit her temple. I still remember my first visit.

Church is the only place where someone speaks to me and I do not have to answer back.

Stories about vicars are always being told because they're at the heart of our society. Vicars touch all parts of the community and see life in all its extremity.

I go farther, and say, that it is plainly our duty to desire pastors and teachers to take the care of such congregations, and that God did raise up such in the church as we see it in the word.

We need worship for our spirit, fellowship for our soul and committed subservience for our body.

When a church is spending more of its budget on media than shepherding, something is out of whack. We have gotten things twisted around.

Yes, I was a parish priest for five years. I was a curate in a large working class parish in Bristol and the Vicar of a village in Kent.

As a pastor, you get invited into the most poignant moments of people's lives. Whether it's a wedding or a funeral or a hospital visit, you get invited into the center of the event, whether or not you know the people.

Churches need to figure out how they will address the spiritual lives of their staffs and leadership teams.

Preaching is personal counseling on a group basis.

I am very much looking forward to being a parish priest.

I would say it simply: No one can give that which he doesn't personally possess, which means we cannot transmit the Holy Spirit in an effective way, render the Spirit perceptible, if we ourselves aren't close to the Spirit.

Among our own people also the church sorely needs clergy in close touch with the ordinary life of the laity, living the life of ordinary men, sharing their difficulties and understanding their trials by close personal experience.

I am a youth minister, ordained by the Riverside Church in upper New York. But to declare myself a minister and begin to preach from the pulpit, from the Bible, to a congregation and to build a church, so to speak - I don't have a desire for that.

The man who attempts Christianity without the church shoots himself in the foot, shoots his children in the leg, and shoots his grandchildren in the heart.

Parsons are soules waggoners.

Pastors must welcome the lost sheep. Actually, I made a mistake. I said welcome, rather, go out and find them.

Give the clergy your sympathy; don't give them anything else.

I am grateful for the men and women who pastor, who lead in churches across our country. Ultimately, their role of loving people and seeing hearts changed is probably the greatest calling.

I am a person of faith, so I come from a community that's involved in 360,000 churches across the country, that is an institution that could, in a relatively short period of time, provide hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of positive male role models.

...churchgoing is not synonymous with personal spirituality. There are some people who get so busy in church worship and projects that they become insensitive to the pressing human needs that sourround them, contradicting the very precepts they profess to believe deeply.

I think you could say every pastor is writing this book [ Max on Life]; for many it just never gets published.

Support your priests with your love and prayers, that they may always be shepherds after Christ’s heart