He said he plans to meet Monday with his Council of Advice and on Tuesday with the Diocesan Standing Committee. Beginning July 1, Lawrence said he would open meetings with deans and clergy. “Given these changes in the doctrine, discipline and worship of the Episcopal Church, the question that is before us is: “What does being faithful to Jesus Christ look like for this diocese at this time?”

"The problem biblically is: legalism sends people to hell and antinomianism sends people to hell," he said. "Reacting against a hellish-legalism with a hellish-antinomianism is still sending people to hell." --R. Moore

I used to avoid using 5th gear in our manual transmission car just because it frightened me. I asked my husband, "How could I stop the car suddenly from such a high gear?" He wisely said, "The same way you stop it in 1st gear."

There was not a single Baptist, northern or Southern. Certainly, no African American or Pentecostal picture and write-up could suggest to the scholar centuries from now that nationally the members in this last group were huge presences not unrepresented in greater New York but nowhere that week in the Times.

If we’re honest with ourselves, we really don’t want God’s grace. Maybe a more accurate way of putting it is that we don’t want to have to need it…In a sense, we buy into the lie that says we never needed God’s grace until we blew it! Kind of like my saying that until I got Vitiligo my skin was perfect. Like I never had a zit!

Religious ritual cannot take away sin. The Jewish people made a tragic mistake. They took the symbols of sacrifice and started to treat them like they were the real thing, like adherence to religious ritual could actually take away sin. People do that today when they think that certain religious rituals (like taking communion, regular church attendance, tithing, or saying a ‘Hail Mary’) can take away their sin

[W]e are not to try to guess the result of our behavior. We are supposed to do what God commands. We are not responsible for the results of what we do. We are responsible to obey whatsoever God commands. We are called not to success, but to obedience.

T]he Christianity that animated causes such as the Social Gospel and the civil rights movement was much more dogmatic than present-day liberal faith. Its leaders had a “deep grounding in Bible study, family devotions, personal prayer and worship.” They argued for progressive reform in the context of “a personal transcendent God ... the divinity of Christ, the need of personal redemption and the importance of Christian missions.”

Notice that in the current debate about spiritual gifts many in the charismatic movement (but probably not most Pentecostals) agree that apostles - in the sense of those who are "first" among the gifts given to the Church, like the 12 and Paul - are not present in the Church today. In that respect, at least, whether or not they care to think of themselves as such, the large majority of today's charismatics are in fact "cessationists."

“They are all greatly concerned about the ramifications of the ruling, but mostly for Jewish and Muslim life in Germany,” Mr. Westerwelle said. There are 100,000 Jews and four million Muslims living here.