As I was clearing up so old files in my office the other day, I came across a quote I had cut out of a Leadership Journal almost 25 years ago now. I remember being captured by this quote when I first read it and it is as fresh and true today as it was then.
These words were written by Father John McKenzie, a Catholic scholar back in the 1970s, which gives rise to a few of questions: First, why would someone who says such things still travel with the title ‘Father’? And second, why didn’t anybody listen to him? And finally, why didn’t I actually believe these words when I first read them? They would have saved me years of grief. For I have found out in the years since that it is exactly true. Until we give up all the false places where we’ve tried to control God’s people, we won’t know the reality of the church of Jesus Christ as she has existed down through time outside the walls of our own institutions.
I guess it is easier to speak words of that ring of truth, or jot them down in journals, than to actually heed them.
