As Kingfishers Catch Fire: A Conversation on the Ways of God Formed by the Words of God

by Eugene H. Peterson

His final image is Christ, who lives and acts in us in such ways that our lives express the congruence of inside and outside, this congruence of ends and means, Christ as both the means and the end playing through our limbs and eyes to the Father through the features of our faces so that we find ourselves living, almost in spite of ourselves, the Christ life in the Christ way.

I was learning to embrace the congregation just as they were, not how I wanted them to be.

I began to weed out the depersonalizing stereotypes that identified the souls in my care as either problems to be fixed or resources to be exploited.

Congregation was not a collection of individuals but something more like a body with distinctive parts, but all the parts working organically with Christ as the head.

So for many of our pastor colleagues, the long practice of reading the Bible as a book of faith has played second fiddle to reading it strictly as history.

most writers are highly offended when people get more interested in the contents of their wastebaskets and filing cabinets than the books they write.

science and religion are opposites, the way your thumb and forefinger are opposites: if you are going to get a grip on things, you need them both.

it is the work of God to set the world—and us—right.

Consciousness of sin is a regular part of worship; despair isn’t.

We don’t read Paul’s letters very long before we realize that Paul is not an independent thinker figuring things out on his own. Nor is he a speculative thinker playing with “religious” ideas, searching for some novel ultimate truth.