Arthur Middleton Church Quotations

We are to introduce our people into the life of the Church, which is salvation, that they may grasp its meaning, its contents and purpose, to taste and see how good the Lord is.

Priesthood is not a convenient, historically conditioned form of Church organisation, but is rooted in the Incarnation, in the priesthood and mission of Christ himself.

There is a kind of thinking in the Church that wants to reduce the priest to a mere functionary, a managing director, where administration rather than doctrine and worship are to determine the form of the Church.

The Church's note must be a supernatural note which distinguishes incarnation from immanence, redemption from evolution, the Kingdom of God from mere spiritual process.

Gladstone, at the end of the 19th century, said that the task of the priest had become much more difficult than it had ever been. Today it has worsened rather than improved, in a Church that is divided and in a culture where God has been pushed out of many lives and is not given the opportunity to influence scores of others.

The evil of the Church is the doing of Church work in a spirit of business, something to be got through. The only way to avoid this is for the priest to be instant in prayer. If he is not, he will lose that touch of the supernatural, without which he has no right to be a priest at all.