An ancient faith no longer practiced.....

 

When Barbara Brown Taylor visited the ruins of a church from the land where St. Paul baptized the first Christians she found only "vestiges of an ancient faith no longer practiced in the land."

"Such a thing is not impossible [here]; that is what I learned in that ruin on the hillside.  God has given us good news in human form and has even given us the grace to proclaim it, but part of our terrible freedom is the freedom to lose our voices, to forget where we were going and why.  While that knowledge does not yet strike me as prophetic, it does keep me from taking both my own ministry and the ministry of the whole church for granted.  If we do not attend to God's presence in our midst and bring all our best gifts to serving that presence in the world, we may find ourselves selling tickets to a museum."

The entire book is worth the read for all who claim the name of Jesus.
The Preaching Life, Barbara Brown Taylor, Crowley Publications, 1993, p 5.