Christian Smith Quotes

• The clergy profession is fundamentally self-defeating. Its stated purpose is to nurture spiritual maturity in the church - a valuable goal. In actuality, however; it accomplishes the opposite by nurturing a permanent dependence of the laity on the clergy. Clergy become to their congregations like parents whose children never grow up, like therapists whose clients never become healed, like teachers whose students never graduate.

  Christian Smith

  Spiritual, Teacher, Children

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• The problem is that, regardless of what our theologies tell us about the purpose of the clergy, the actual effect of the clergy profession is to make the body of Christ lame. This happens not because clergy intend it (they usually intend the opposite) but because the objective nature of the profession inevitably turns the laity into passive receivers.

  Christian Smith

  Opposites, Purpose, Lame

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• Adults have their own issues and their own problems, which are understandable, and some adults are working through their own adolescent issues.-

  Christian Smith

  Issues, Adults, Problem

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• Human social life, I suggest, is the magma that erupts and builds up, so to speak, at the fault lines where natural human capacities meet and grind against and over natural human limitations…. This meeting of powers and limitations produces a creative, dynamic tension and energy that generates and fuels the making of human social life and social structures…. It is real human persons living through the tensions of natural existential contradictions who construct patterned social meanings, interactions, institutions, and structures.

  Christian Smith

  Real, Creative, Fuel

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• Evangelicals come from all ethnic and racial backgrounds, but nearly 90 percent of Americans who call themselves evangelicals are white.

  Christian Smith

  White, Backgrounds, Percent

  Michael O. Emerson, Christian Smith (2000). “Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America”, p.12, Oxford University Press

  4 Copy quote

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