“The old cathedrals are good, but the great blue dome that hangs over everything is better.”
“I believe with all my heart that the Church of Jesus Christ should be a Church of blurred edges.”
“In the Church, considered as a social organism, the mysteries inevitably degenerate into beliefs.”
“He was of the faith chiefly in the sense that the church he currently did not attend was Catholic.”
“Church attendance is as vital to a disciple as a transfusion of rich, healthy blood to a sick man.”
“There is not in the universe a more ridiculous, nor a more contemptible animal, than a proud clergyman.”
“The problem is not that the churches are filled with empty pews, but that the pews are filled with empty people.”
“How can a bishop marry? How can he flirt? The most he can say is ''I will see you in the vestry after service.''”
“People have described me as a ''management bishop'' but I say to my critics, ''Jesus was a management expert too.''”
“The Church is not a gallery for the exhibition of eminent Christians, but a school for the education of imperfect ones.”
“The church is so subnormal that if it ever got back to the New Testament normal it would seem to people to be abnormal.”
“A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.”
“But a priest's life is not supposed to be well-rounded; it is supposed to be one-pointed -- a compass, not a weathercock.”
“A woman's asking for equality in the church would be comparable to a black person's demanding equality in the Ku Klux Klan.”
“It's about time we quit playing church in these services that start at eleven o clock sharp and end at twelve o clock dull.”
“Churchgoers are like coals in a fire. When they cling together, they keep the flame aglow; when they separate, they die out.”
“Nearly all the evils in the Church have arisen from bishops desiring power more than light. They want authority, not outlook.”
“The Church cannot be content to live in its stained-glass house and throw stones through the picture window of modern culture.”
“It will, I believe, be everywhere found, that as the clergy are, or are not what they ought to be, so are the rest of the nation.”
“His creed no parson ever knew, for this was still his ''simple plan,'' to have with clergymen to do as little as a Christian can.”
“Standards of conduct appropriate to civil society or the workings of a democracy cannot be purely and simply applied to the Church.”
“An instinctive taste teaches men to build their churches with spire steeples which point as with a silent finger to the sky and stars.”
“The act of bell ringing is symbolic of all proselytizing religions. It implies the pointless interference with the quiet of other people.”
“I never weary of great churches. It is my favorite kind of mountain scenery. Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral.”
“What makes a church great in the eyes of God? Participation, proclamation, preservation, and propagation. Every church ought to exhibit all four.”
“Many are called but few are chosen. There are sayings of Christ which suggest that the Church he came to establish will always be a minority affair.”
“The priesthood in many ways is the ultimate closet in Western civilization, where gay people particularly have hidden for the past two thousand years.”
“Yes, I see the Church as the body of Christ. But, oh! How we have blemished and scarred that body through social neglect and through fear of being nonconformists.”
“The church exists to train its member through the practice of the presence of God to be servants of others, to the end that Christlikeness may become common property.”
“The separation of church and state is a source of strength, but the conscience of our nation does not call for separation between men of state and faith in the Supreme Being.”