Quotes about Clergy

When it comes to the whole Bible, I believe we should not only be reading right through the Bible individually at least once a year — for clergy I'd say twice a year at least, and perhaps the gospels four times a year, and if this means reworking your personal schedules then fine, do it — but that we should make it possible for our congregations to try creative experiments for how to experience the whole Bible.

As good heirs of the Bible, we think that a great misfortune necessarily follows a great infraction. In this respect the intellectual caste, in our world, is the penitential class par excellence, continuing the role of the clergy under the Old Regime. We have to call its members what they are: officials of original sin.

The clergymen call us sinners, conceived and born in sin. Bah! What confounded nonsense that is. Is it a sin to love, to feel the need for love, not to be able to live without love? I consider a life without love a sinful and immoral state.

There is little question Islamist terrorists and molesting clergy have both played a role in the rise of atheism in our time. No atheist activist is nearly as effective in alienating people from God and religion as are evil 'religious' people.

If unity lies in the Apostolical succession, an act of schism is from the nature of the case impossible; for as no one can reverse his parentage, so no Church can undo the fact that its clergy have come by lineal descent from the Apostles. Either there is no such sin as schism, or unity does not lie in the Episcopal form or in the Episcopal ordination.

The Clergy is the greatest hindrance to faith.

Pray we for the Clergy; that they may rightly divide, that they may rightly walk; that while they teach others, themselves may learn.

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.

The Church of Christ is constituted in two orders, the clergy and the people, the one having the care of the Church that all may be ruled for the salvation of souls; the other contains kings, princes, and nobles who have to carry on secular government that all things may lead to the peace and unity of the Church.

Religious institutions that use government power in support of themselves and force their views on persons of other faiths, or of no faith, undermine all our civil rights. Moreover, state support of an established religion tends to make the clergy unresponsive to their own people, and leads to corruption within religion itself. Erecting the 'wall of separation between church and state,' therefore, is absolutely essential in a free society.

If all Church power vests in the clergy, then the people are practically bound to passive obedience in all matters of faith and practice for all right of private judgment is then denied.

There is a long and well-documented tradition of wisdom in the Christian faith that any venture into leadership, whether by laity or clergy, is hazardous. it is necessary that there be leaders, but woe to those who become leaders.