Bishop Willimon quote on Church
"I'll admit that church can be boring, unexciting. There are Sundays when the Holy Spirit is close and undeniable, and [there are] Sundays that are blah. I think Wesley would have me add that the church is not supposed to make discipleship thrilling; it's supposed to make it normal.We go to church to practice the faith, to rehearse the faith, to get so good at it that obeying Jesus on Sunday - that joyful obedience - will become the most natural, noramal thing we do on Monday through Saturday."
-United Methodist Bishop Will Willimon from his book, This We Believe: The Core of Wesleyan Faith and Practice, p. 149.
Bishop Willimon has written several books on Methodist beliefs and Wesleyan Spirituality and this one is pretty good. He is here re-affirming something that the Church has taught through the ages, but which many in Western (particularly American) culture don't always immediately recognize because of our ubiquitous celebration of individual spontaneity:
rituals are powerful; habits and symbols shape our awareness of who we are and who we can become. This is why the liturgy of the Church works the way it does.
Labels: Quotes, Spirituality and Liturgy
posted by Rev. Daniel McLain Hixon at 12/14/2010
2 Comments:
note: the image is the emblem of United Methodist bishops, incorporating the chi-rho and the alpha-omega of Christ on the shield, as well as the crosier (shepherd's staff or crook) a traditional symbol of a bishop
This reminds me of my brother's comments on the BCP one time at his rural parish in Saskatchewan. He said that the prayers we pray in Church on Sunday with the prayerbook are to inform our prayers throughout the week; they remind us whom and what to pray for so that we get into a pattern of healthy petition in our own spiritual lives.
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