Glorify Quotes

“It is charity only in the sense of the original meaning of the word, the one that comes from charis, or grace. And for Christians it is the sharing of a grace that has been given generously to us. Our work in the world, our grateful sharing of the grace we have received, is about loving a broken world enough to want to fix it. It’s about continually trying, even though we know we never will quite succeed. Not entirely, anyway. But because we are witnesses of the triumph of God’s love over sure destruction, we know that our work in this life will never be entirely in vain. It can’t be if we believe, in any way, that resurrection is true.”
― Emily C. Heath, Glorify: Reclaiming the Heart of Progressive Christianity

“Carved in stone on the front of Old South Church in Boston is this inscription from the book of Revelation: “Behold, I Set Before Thee an Open Door.”
― Emily C. Heath, Glorify: Reclaiming the Heart of Progressive Christianity

“there is a man who is mentioned in the Book of Exodus who is named “Nahshon.” And when Moses calls on God to part the Red Sea, as this version of the story goes, it doesn’t automatically part. Instead, everyone stands there wondering why nothing is happening. But then Nahshon steps out into the water. First one step. Then another. The water gets up to his ankles, up to his knees, up to his hips and shoulders. And finally, when it is up to his nose, the water finally parts. I like that telling of the story because I believe that God could have parted those waters in one fell swoop. I believe that the Israelites could have seen the shore and known that they were going to be safe from the get-go. But I believe that sometimes God asks us to show a little bit of faith, and a little bit of commitment. Sometimes God wants us to be a Nahshon, and so God lets us get nose-deep in the waters. That’s not because God is toying with us, or being sadistic. Instead, that’s because God is preparing us for something better. God is using our faith and our hope to shape us and to teach us that our actions, our responses, matter too. The name “Nahshon” is sometimes used to mean “an initiator.” That’s what he did that day. He took the initiative and started the crossing. And there are some who push this text even further and say that even after he got nose deep, and even after the sea started to part, it was a gradual process. The people took one step, and a little more of the sea parted. And then another, and it parted more. And another, and another, trusting that if they just took the next right step, God would show them the next place after that. And eventually, God would lead them to dry ground. When you think about it, that’s what the journey of faith is like. We don’t get to see the end. We don’t get to see dry land on our first step. But sometimes we get to see just enough to know where to take the next right step. And then we step out in faith believing that God won’t leave us stranded, and that the waters will not overpower us. We step out believing that God will make a way.”
― Emily C. Heath, Glorify: Reclaiming the Heart of Progressive Christianity

“why are Christians generally regarded as such a dour bunch? I’ll confess that even I have thought of Christians that way. And when I’m visiting a church and walk in on Sunday morning, if I can’t sense any kind of palpable joy it’s hard for me to even sit there for the service. Why? Because if I can’t sense any joy in a congregation, I wonder whether the gospel is being preached there at all. Let me be clear again, as I was in an earlier chapter, that joy is different from just being happy. I have been at devastatingly tragic funerals where joy was nonetheless at least still present at moments. And I’ve known joy even in the midst of times of deep sorrow. Joy is not about everything being okay. Joy, at a basic level, is about the hope that God’s love is capable of transforming everything, even us. God’s glory and our joy cannot be separated from one another. Because God is worthy of being glorified, we who are God’s creation can find joy. And, conversely, because we can find joy, we know that God is worthy of glory.”
― Emily C. Heath, Glorify: Reclaiming the Heart of Progressive Christianity

“if you have something capable of lighting up your whole house, why would you ever want to hide that light? The only logical thing to do is to place it in the center of your home, so that everything will be transformed by its light. At its brightest, that light will fill not just our homes, but the world as well.”
― Emily C. Heath, Glorify: Reclaiming the Heart of Progressive Christianity

“the suspicion of science is not based in actual Christian belief. My congregation full of educators and scientists disproves that. But the bumper sticker is an accurate summary of what too many people think Christians actually believe. It gets worse. During the months I wrote this book Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who refused to issue same-sex marriage licenses, sat in jail for contempt of court. On social media, television, and in the newspaper, outraged Christian leaders proclaimed that she was a victim of religious persecution and that Christians in this country are under attack. At the same time conservative Christians ranted that Starbucks had declared a war on Christmas by not writing “Merry Christmas” on their plain red coffee cups. And all the while, Christian governors across the country attempted to close their states’ borders to Syrian refugees.”
― Emily C. Heath, Glorify: Reclaiming the Heart of Progressive Christianity

“people who come through your doors and stay are there not because they have to be, but because they want to be. And that is very good news. I would rather have a congregation of one hundred people committed to walking on a journey of faith together than a packed sanctuary of five hundred people who won’t think about God again until next Sunday morning. The church of the willing will always be able to go deeper than the church of obligatory attendees. But when the willing come to our doors (or, if they are already there, decide to stay) we have to do some deep reflection on ourselves, on who we are, and on who we will be in the world.”
― Emily C. Heath, Glorify: Reclaiming the Heart of Progressive Christianity

“Fifty years ago there were no Little League games on Sunday mornings, and the stores stayed closed. But while we like to complain about Sunday soccer practice, the reality is that those practices would have never been moved to Sunday mornings had the church not already lost so many of its faithful. Sunday soccer did not kill church attendance. Sunday soccer sprang up when people stopped finding something more worthwhile in our houses of faith, and instead looked to something new. Like I said, I share this news without panic. I deeply love my denomination, as well as the other denominations that make up the mainline traditions.”
― Emily C. Heath, Glorify: Reclaiming the Heart of Progressive Christianity

“the United Church of Christ, has gone from more than two million members in 1957 (the year two denominations merged to form the current one) to less than one million today. And each of the other mainline denominations can tell a similar story. At the same time, more conservative traditions are seeing growth, or at least declining at a much slower rate. Evangelical Christians saw only a 0.9 percent decline in the same seven-year period mentioned above. For Orthodox Christians and Mormons that rate was only 0.1 percent. But what is most interesting is what traditions (and nontraditions) are growing. Islam, Judaism, and Buddhism all saw modest gains in the United States.”
― Emily C. Heath, Glorify: Reclaiming the Heart of Progressive Christianity

“for purposes of discussion, let’s just say it is time for the mainline church to start looking for the “next big thing” that will unite us in purpose and divide us in debate. What will it be? As I said, I have some ideas. Caring for the environment is on the top of the list. Responding to growing numbers of refugees and to other humanitarian crises is too. So is interfaith understanding. And I don’t think it will be too long until the church seriously begins to discuss economic inequalities. There are a lot of possibilities. I was thinking about that recently. I was sitting with other clergy from my denomination, talking about my views on why it’s important for progressive ministers to be able to talk about our faith, and about what Christ means to us. I was talking about discipleship, and why it matters for our progressive church, and about how we’ve lost so much of our theological heritage, and our language of faith. That’s when the question came, part curious, part suspect: “But what about social justice? Doesn’t that matter to you?” The person who asked that question didn’t know me. They didn’t know that for more than twenty now years I have been openly gay. They didn’t know about the times when anonymous, antigay hate letters showed up in my church’s mailbox during my last call, or about how I’d grown up in a place where being gay could literally get you blown up, or about how my wife, Heidi, and I had needed to file separate federal tax returns even after we were married. They also didn’t know about the times my faith had compelled me to take action. I could have told them about how a group of us had stood in the New York State Capitol building for the better part of a week as right-wing Christians rallying against equal marriage had yelled at us that we were going to hell. I’ve gone a few rounds in the social justice arena.”
― Emily C. Heath, Glorify: Reclaiming the Heart of Progressive Christianity

“we spend a lot of our time navel gazing. We talk about church decline, and whether or not to sell our buildings, and what our new denominational structures will look like. We run to the next new church vitality prophet and listen for something that will “save” us. And then, when all of this fails to revive our churches, we do it again. It becomes an echo chamber, and we get so focused on ourselves that we get nothing done. But when we are at our best, we become people of work. The transformative work that the church is capable of doing, when we get our heads out of the clouds, is extraordinary.”
― Emily C. Heath, Glorify: Reclaiming the Heart of Progressive Christianity

“if we believe that being a Christian is about more than just works, and if we believe that who we are as children of God matters, then we have to start by grounding our actions and identity in something greater than ourselves. That’s the work of discipleship. And that work, that growth, means we must be ready to learn and to be changed.”
― Emily C. Heath, Glorify: Reclaiming the Heart of Progressive Christianity

“when they’ve taken some time and then told me about their thoughts, at the core of nearly every answer is this: a sense that God has something more in store for us. We’ve already talked about purpose, and about glorifying God. But what does that mean in practice? And”
― Emily C. Heath, Glorify: Reclaiming the Heart of Progressive Christianity

“for the next week we endured what can only be described as verbal abuse from anti-equality Christians. Truly, not all of those opposing marriage equality were mean spirited. Some were nice enough, and went so far as to offer us water and snacks. Too many others, though, were just plain unkind, and too few of the good Christians who stood nearby did anything to rein them in. The most harrowing moment for me came when a prominent ex-gay activist pointed at my clergy collar and yelled, “You’re not fooling anyone with that thing!” He yelled that I was not a real pastor, and that I had simply bought a clergy shirt to try to deceive others. When I replied that I was an ordained minister he looked incredulous and told me to read the Bible. (I let him know that I’d read it cover to cover, in English and the original Hebrew and Greek.) Fuming, he told me I was going to hell. Before I could respond Heidi grabbed my shoulder and guided me away. The incident left me shaken, not so much for me, but for Christians everywhere. Too often progressive Christians have ceded the public proclamation of Christian values to conservatives and fundamentalists. If you asked the youth and young adults who were with us in that hallway that week what Christians thought of them, they would likely have believed that the vast majority of Christians hated them. That was true, even with Heidi, myself, and a moderate number of other supportive clergy visible and engaged. This is probably not all that surprising to you if you are a progressive Christian. If you’re anything like me, you roll your eyes in frustration every time a right-wing extremist clergy person claims to offer the “Christian perspective” on an issue. Or,”
― Emily C. Heath, Glorify: Reclaiming the Heart of Progressive Christianity

“churches and denominations must be in the business of actively helping to create disciples. Disciples, people who are actively being transformed by the grace of God, are the body of the church. If we cannot build and sustain disciples, we cannot help to build and sustain anything else.”
― Emily C. Heath, Glorify: Reclaiming the Heart of Progressive Christianity

“We must reacquaint ourselves with the Scriptures, learning to read them in life-giving ways. Truly, many of us have been deeply hurt by those who have used the Bible to tear us down. It is tempting to respond by walking away entirely from what hurts us. But if we do that, we are ceding to the fundamentalist and literalist Christians of this world our birthright and inheritance. Instead, progressive Christianity must help seekers to fall in love with Scripture. We must teach ways in which Scripture can both be read with twenty-first-century eyes and yet also be cherished as timeless. Scripture”
― Emily C. Heath, Glorify: Reclaiming the Heart of Progressive Christianity

“what both Jesus and Paul were saying is this: If you want to have a bountiful harvest, you have to plant. And if you want to plant, before you do anything you have to first have good soil. And even the best soil needs to be cultivated first. Our spiritual lives are the soil onto which God’s blessings are poured. The good news is that none of us is created with a bad soul, or bad soil. In fact, we are all created, as Genesis tells us, “very good,” and we possess within ourselves ground in which God’s Holy Spirit can move and create new life.”
― Emily C. Heath, Glorify: Reclaiming the Heart of Progressive Christianity