Catherine Booth Quotes

Demographics are changing and we have to change, not necessarily our core believes, but the tone of our message and the intensity…. Long term, conservative principles if they are to be successful and implemented there has to be a concerted effort to reach out to a much broader audience than we do today.

I speak to people in the languagethey understand. First I have a dialogue, if that is not understood I speak inanother language. There is no remedy for this.

Conventions are convenient. It is inconvenient to say people are dead when they are alive, or alive when they have been buried, or that the world is crumbling when it is, as everyone can see, there as usual. If all A that does not fit B is ipso facto disqualified, we have to tailor A to shape and size to avoid serious trouble, and not all are equally gifted in this art.

I've also found thousands that have reached out to me in a way that maybe they never did. And it's broadened the ministry in other ways that people now relate.

Downsizing trends and the changing global market require people to reinvent themselves and think like entrepreneurs.

But I know what's important to me, and what isn't. And I think I know what people can get used to, and what they can even learn to like. (It just takes some people longer than others. :-)

For a lifetime I had bathed with becoming regularity, and thought the world would come to an end unless I changed my socks every day. But in Africa I sometimes went without a bath for two months, and I went two weeks at a time without even changing my socks. Oddly enough, it didn't seem to make much difference.

Principles-and I have in mind such principles as states' rights or national sovereignty or the free market or pacifism-have a way of drying up while the sap of life goes flowing in another direction.

In Europe, even more so than in national politics, we have to follow the principle laid down by Martin Luther: Use language that the people will understand, but don't just tell them what they want to hear.

Reshaping life! People who can say that have never understood a thing about life—they have never felt its breath, its heartbeat—however much they have seen or done. They look on it as a lump of raw material that needs to be processed by them, to be ennobled by their touch. But life is never a material, a substance to be molded. If you want to know, life is the principle of self-renewal, it is constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself, it is infinitely beyond your or my obtuse theories about it.

Dealing with the unknown, the unexpected, is a reflection for me musically of what's happening in the world, because people are learning how to dialog with each other without any past strategy or any kind of formula from the past.

If you will please people, you must please them in their own way; and as you cannot make them what they should be, you must take them as they are.

No object is stuck with its name so irrevocably that one cannot find another which suits it better.

Doing business is all about providing a good product or service to your customers. A good businessman is he who knows that what is successful today may not be so tomorrow. Technology changes so fast, and so do people's needs and wants. That's why it would do well for a businessman to know how to adapt to change. He must constantly reinvent the business, or it won't last.

Some people come to me and say, "Mr. Moody, don't you feel a great responsibility when you come before an audience like this - don't you feel a great weight upon your shoulders?" "Well." I say, "no; I cannot convert men; I can only proclaim the Gospel.

Because you have to just go with the flow. Your life is not your own, with people coming in and out all the time. You get mellow because you have to.

Be flexible, but stick to your principles.

If you want to shrink something, you must first allow it to expand. If you want to get rid of something, you must first allow it to flourish. If you want to take something, you must first allow it to be given. This is called the subtler perception of the way things are. The soft overcomes the hard. The slow overcomes the fast. Let your workings remain a mystery. Just show people the results.

The only way a church is going to be relevant is to get out of its comfort zone and connect with unchurched people.

We don't have to make the bible relevant-it is-but we have to show its relevance. What is irrelevant, in my opinion, is our style of communicating it. We are tending to still use the style from 50 years back that doesn't match who we are trying to reach today.

Now, I believe that one of the reasons that Jesus was accused of being a homosexual is because he spent time with homosexuals. I've often had people ask me, would you allow a homosexual to be your friend. Yes, I will. And the reason I will is because I know that that person has problems, and if I can minister to those problems, I will.

It's OK to offend people with the Gospel, but, good grief- let's don't offend them with something else.

We do not need to understand other people and their customs fully to interact with them and learn in the process; it is making the effort to interact without knowing all the rules, improvising certain situations, which allows us to grow.

Some people would rather change and some people don't. Some people don't want to be forced to stay in a certain atmosphere.

The important thing about travel in foreign lands is that it breaks the speech habits and makes you blab less, and breaks the habitual space-feeling because of different village plans and different landscapes. It is less important that there are different mores, for you counteract these with your own reaction-formations.