20 Quotes by Ken Wilson

While the Bible does speak clearly on many matters—you'd have to be deaf not to hear the condemnations of murder, stealing, adultery, greed, etc.—there are, in fact, many questions at the margins of each of these, for which there are not clear answers. If you are not a pastor it's easier to maintain the comforting illusion that these hard cases are rare. But they are not.

In the deepest, most central place of our being, we don't want to cross God and our not wanting to is the beginning of wisdom.

Over four decades of pastoral ministry—I got started early—you make mistakes. But the mistakes you most regret are the ones that obscure the gospel and hurt the people you love, by saying in effect, "You do not belong," to those for whom Christ died to provide a place of belonging.

The conscience is a communal organ—a way of knowing that we do with others formed always in reference to others.

If we have a hair trigger on the exclusion gun, shouldn't it be aimed at those who are using their power to abuse someone who is in a weaker, more vulnerable position?

Too many congregations look to their pastors for simple answers to problems that their pastors see as anything but simple. And too many pastors don't trust their congregations enough to say, "It's not that simple from my point of view and here’s why.

I love you, but I hate your overeating" doesn’t help a marriage. It's not helpful because hatred is a powerful emotion (a posture, really) that is not easy to wield or maintain carefully. Hatred is more a bludgeon than a scalpel. Our ability to distinguish sin from sinner, especially in others, is so limited, so vulnerable to our own unexamined subjectivity.

Virtually every church tradition, by theology, interpretive strategies, or pastoral practice, makes accommodations for divorced people who seek to remarry. These accommodations permit divorced people to enter unions that are outside the rule laid down in the Bible. But we can't have it both ways. We can't apply a strict "biblical marriage" rule to gay people and not apply it to those who are divorced and remarried.

Just saying "celibacy is the solution" doesn’t make it so. People have to be able to do it. Paul, a huge proponent of celibacy, knew this. The difficulty that divorced people have maintaining lifelong celibacy was part of the pastoral dilemma that forced us to take a closer look at our very restrictive policies regarding remarriage, policies that most contemporary pastors are unfamiliar with because it was the controversy of an earlier era.