Winfield Bevins > Quotes

“the church community is a hospital for recovering addicts to selfishness.”
― Winfield Bevins, Our Common Prayer: A Field Guide to the Book of Common Prayer

“A. Smith reminds us, “The capital L-Liturgy of Sunday morning should generate lowercase-l liturgies that govern our existence throughout the rest of the week.”
― Winfield Bevins, Liturgical Mission: The Work of the People for the Life of the World

“Silence reminds us that God is always speaking, and through many avenues, but we can easily drown out his voice with noise and activity.”
― Winfield Bevins, Ever Ancient, Ever New: The Allure of Liturgy for a New Generation

“Show us your mercy, O Lord; And grant us your salvation. Clothe your ministers with righteousness; Let your people sing with joy. Give peace, O Lord, in all the world; For only in you can we live in safety. Lord, keep this nation under your care; And guide us in the way of justice and truth. Let your way be known upon earth; Your saving health among all nations. Let not the needy, O Lord, be forgotten; Nor the hope of the poor be taken away. Create in us clean hearts, O God; And sustain us with your Holy Spirit.”
― Winfield Bevins, Our Common Prayer: A Field Guide to the Book of Common Prayer

“While doctrine can seem stuffy, boring, and useless, it can also be surprisingly devotional. Yes, the study of God can profoundly deepen your faith and strengthen your relationship with the living God because doctrine helps us know more about Him. The more we know about Him, the more we love Him.”
― Winfield Bevins, Creed

“The pragmatic consumerism that has infected the church leads us to value the elements of our faith and practice that are most “relevant” to us today. For example, many contemporary churches play worship music that echoes secular pop songs, and we’ve designed our church buildings to look like Walmarts or movie theaters, neglecting theologically informed architectural designs that were once popular in church buildings and sanctuaries. Young adults sense intuitively that today’s churches have lost a vision for aesthetic beauty that encourages us to experience the mystery and transcendence of God. And they have grown tired of shallow, alternative approaches to the historic liturgical practices of past centuries. Young adults want more. They want depth and mystery, and they aren’t afraid to say it. They are harboring a longing for a church that transcends any single culture, not an approach that simply accommodates the surrounding culture.”
― Winfield Bevins, Ever Ancient, Ever New: The Allure of Liturgy for a New Generation

“I’ve found that many young adults are looking for a faith that moves beyond these labels, transcending the “evangelical” or “charismatic,” “liberal” or “conservative” divisions. They are seeking a holistic spirituality that embraces all aspects of their person—mind, body, and soul. Many are tired of the religious culture wars and would prefer to move past them in search of a holistic Christian faith that embraces the best of all sides.”
― Winfield Bevins, Ever Ancient, Ever New: The Allure of Liturgy for a New Generation

“Today many young people are searching for truth that has been tested and tried, truth that acknowledges the holistic nature of the human person—addressing the heart, soul, mind, and body. Many are searching for this truth by looking not to the future but to the past. Looking beyond the modern age, they are looking to the premodern roots of our history.”
― Winfield Bevins, Ever Ancient, Ever New: The Allure of Liturgy for a New Generation

“By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” The phrase one another comes from the Greek word allēlōn, which means “one another, each other; mutually, reciprocally.” It occurs one hundred times in the New Testament within ninety-four verses. About one-third of the one another commands are about Christian unity, and about one-third of these are instructing Christians to love one another.”
― Winfield Bevins, Liturgical Mission: The Work of the People for the Life of the World

“Churches in North America began to define success by measuring growth, emphasizing size and numbers over traditional signs of spiritual fruitfulness and biblical holiness.”
― Winfield Bevins, Ever Ancient, Ever New: The Allure of Liturgy for a New Generation

“I have come to the conclusion that liturgy, when rightly appropriated, is one of the best ways for us to make disciples in a postmodern context. It is this emphasis—the appropriation of ancient practices for disciple formation today—that is the unifying theme of this book.”
― Winfield Bevins, Ever Ancient, Ever New: The Allure of Liturgy for a New Generation

“Those who are attracted to liturgical expressions of the faith feel these practices allow them to “inhabit” the faith that has existed for over two thousand years. These practices also provide a sense of connection, to one another and to Christians throughout the ages.”
― Winfield Bevins, Ever Ancient, Ever New: The Allure of Liturgy for a New Generation

“Exploring liturgical practices without understanding the original context can idolize the method rather than embracing true God-centered worship.”
― Winfield Bevins, Liturgical Mission: The Work of the People for the Life of the World

“their book, Worship and Mission After Christendom, Alan and Eleanor Kreider say the church needs to both inhale in worship and exhale by going into the world and sharing the good news; making peace; and caring for creation, reconciliation, and the marginalized of society.”
― Winfield Bevins, Liturgical Mission: The Work of the People for the Life of the World

“Christianity is unified by its center, not by its boundaries.”
― Winfield Bevins, Liturgical Mission: The Work of the People for the Life of the World

“Embrace and reconciliation. One of the most profound and challenging ways that the Eucharist is a part of the church’s mission is through embrace and reconciliation between friends as well as enemies. The Eucharist calls us to love, forgive, and to be reconciled to one another.”
― Winfield Bevins, Liturgical Mission: The Work of the People for the Life of the World

“As the body of Christ, we come together to worship God in order to be sent back out into the world through mission.”
― Winfield Bevins, Liturgical Mission: The Work of the People for the Life of the World

“Because we have shut out the Holy Spirit in so many ways, we are stumbling along as though we are spiritually blindfolded. A. W. TOZER”
― Winfield Bevins, Creed

“We do not need to reinvent our faith; we need to get back to the basics of Christianity. Every generation of believers should revisit the passionate faith and doctrine of the early church as found in the creeds.”
― Winfield Bevins, Our Common Prayer: A Field Guide to the Book of Common Prayer

“Theology without worship is meaningless; and worship without theology is baseless.”
― Winfield Bevins, Liturgical Mission: The Work of the People for the Life of the World

“Some historians have suggested that the Wesleyan revival saved England from a bloody revolution like the one France would shortly experience.”
― Winfield Bevins, Marks of a Movement: What the Church Today Can Learn From the Wesleyan Revival

“While liturgy often represents more formalized services, every church has its own liturgy, no matter how unstructured its worship service may seem. The real question is not whether a church has a liturgy, but does it lead the church to mission in the world?”
― Winfield Bevins, Liturgical Mission: The Work of the People for the Life of the World

“Saint Vincent of Lérins, a fifth-century monk from Gaul who taught that “all possible care must be taken, that we hold that faith which has been believed everywhere, always, by all.”
― Winfield Bevins, Liturgical Mission: The Work of the People for the Life of the World

“Martin Smith states, “Faithfulness to tradition does not mean mere perpetuation or copying of ways from the past but a creative recovery of the past as a source of inspiration and guidance in our faithfulness to God’s future.”
― Winfield Bevins, Liturgical Mission: The Work of the People for the Life of the World

“We won’t find the answers to our current church crisis by inventing new, innovative ideas, nor will an awareness of the past magically fix the problems of the present. Instead, we’ll find signposts pointing toward the future as we explore the intersection where the past and the present meet.”
― Winfield Bevins, Ever Ancient, Ever New: The Allure of Liturgy for a New Generation

“One of the common habitas of the early church was hospitality. This does not mean inviting people over for a dinner party; rather, the word hospitality literally means “love of strangers” and is found several times in the New Testament (Romans 12:13; 1 Timothy 3:2; Titus 1:8; 1 Peter 4”
― Winfield Bevins, Liturgical Mission: The Work of the People for the Life of the World

“Professor Michael Green stated, “The whole of the Christian life, in time and in eternity is, in a sense, encapsulated in baptism. The Christian life is a baptismal life, and it is all about dying and rising with Christ, in this world and hereafter.”
― Winfield Bevins, Liturgical Mission: The Work of the People for the Life of the World

“Christianity did not grow because of miracle working in the market place . . . the primary means of its growth was through the united and motivated efforts of the growing number of believers, who invited their friends, relatives, and neighbors to share the ‘good news.”
― Winfield Bevins, Liturgical Mission: The Work of the People for the Life of the World

“Ordinary things of this world become sacramental in the hands of the living God.”
― Winfield Bevins, Liturgical Mission: The Work of the People for the Life of the World

“we cannot worship what we do not know. There is an old Latin phrase lex orandi, lex credendi, which is translated “the law of praying is the law of believing.”
― Winfield Bevins, Liturgical Mission: The Work of the People for the Life of the World