277 Quotes by John Shelby Spong

It’s just not easy enough to say that I pray and God will accomplish.

When a human life is open to all that humanity can be, humanity and divinity flow together as one. It was and is a radical insight, and one the consciousness of the mystic is destined to understand.

My sense is if the Episcopal Church can’t stand challenge within its own ranks, then it is not a church I would want to be a member of anyway.

It is the nature of human life to feed our ever-present security needs by displaying fear in the presence of anyone who is “different.

The Bible Belt, the religious South, is the section of the country that practiced slavery until the war made them give it up. They practiced segregation. They practiced lynchings. I don’t see any great value in that.

I have no problem with anybody who wants to bear public witness to their religion, but I don’t think they can do it on public property. They have to do it on private property. There’s nothing unconstitutional about that.

The Christian story did not drop from heaven fully written. It grew and developed year by year over a period of forty-two to seventy years. That is not what most Christians have been taught to think, but it is factual. Christianity has always been an evolving story. It was never, even in the New Testament, a finished story.

If you begin to give people hope that there is a brighter future, there is a new tomorrow, then the people who were yesterday’s terrorists become tomorrow’s elected officials and they’re part of the system.

It’s almost inevitable that we become religious people. The question is, what kind of religion is it?