5 Quotes by Thomas G. Long

To be baptized is a sign that everything we are – work and play, personality and character, commitments and passions, family and ethnicity – is gathered up and given shape and definition by our identity as one of God's own children.

A couple you do not recognize - visitors, strangers - come to the door. How are you to view these people and what is your responsibility towards them? ... To assume that these visitors are really like you, that there are no real difference between you and them, and that the highest goal possible is that you and the other members of your congregation will become intimate friends with them and invite them into the private spaces of your life.

Belief is the capacity to see not only life’s surfaces but also its holy depths, to be able to look at events unfolding around us but also to look through them, above them and beneath them to preceive what is truly happening.

Why biblical texts? Because biblical texts have the power to release what Brueggemann calls a “counter-imagination,” a way of seeing the world that is an alternative to the consumerist, militaristic, death-obsessed imagination of the culture.

The move from text to sermon is a move from beholding to attesting, from seeing to saying, from listening to telling, from perceiving to testifying, from being a witness to bearing witness.