John Shelby Spong Church Quotations

The audience that I try to reach are members of what I call the church alumni association. Now they are people who have not found in institutional religion a God big enough to be God for their world.

I still hope. I wouldn't be in this position if I didn't. I love the church. I love the Bible. But I think we're in a time where we're desperately in need of a great reformation.

The church had to find a way to protect Jesus' perfection so that he could do the work of salvation which, in their frame of reference, only God could do, because God had to come into this world from outside this world to rescue the fallen creation.

The Protestant reformation was an attempt to recast the Christian faith in terms of the new learning of the 16th century, the enlightenment learning. It was the first time that the Christian church did not have the capacity to keep itself unified as it recast itself, so it split into Protestant and Catholic traditions.

Oh the Christian church has encouraged enormous immaturity among the peoples who are its primary adherence.

The task of the church, for example, becomes less that of indoctrinating or relating people to an external divine power and more that of providing opportunities for people to touch the infinite center of all things and to grow into all that they are destined to be.

My sense is if the Episcopal Church can't stand challenge within its own ranks, then it is not a church I would want to be a member of anyway.

I would like the church to be a place where the questions of people are honored rather than a place where we have all the answers. The church has to get out of propaganda. The future will involve us in more interfaith dialogue. ... We cannot say we have the only truth.

The church is like a swimming pool. Most of the noise comes from the shallow end.

Some people in the church, like Martin Luther King, Jr., came out against segregation. But if you look at the bulk of organized religion, you will discover that it endorsed slavery and quoted the Bible to approve it; the Pope even owned slaves.

The church is not going to survive if they are going to tell people that they have to twist their minds into 1st century pretzels.