Quotes about Crowds

He moved through life with measured steps, never hurried, though always surrounded by demands and crowds.

There is an incessant craving after any teaching that is sensational, exciting, and stirs up emotion. There is an unhealthy appetite for a sort of intermittent and emotional Christianity. The religious life of many is little better than spiritual taste testing, and the agreeable spirit and peaceful that Peter commends is completely forgotten (1 Peter 3:4). Crowds, crying, feelings, entertaining singing, and an incessant stirring up of the emotions are the only things that many people care for.

In one of the greatest invitations ever offered to man, Christ stood up amid the crowds in Jerusalem and said, "If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink.

Jesus himself, even in his obscurity, dreaded the gathering of crowds, and where possible avoided them. Everything in Christianity that matters is from individual to individual; collectivities belong to the Devil, and so easily respond to his persuasion. The Devil is a demagogue and sloganeer; Jesus was, and is, concerned with individual souls, with the Living Word. What he gives us is truth carried on the wings of love, not slogans carried on the thrust of power.

That Jesus is popular in Mark 2:2, however, is not a general model for Christian ministry; the rest of Mark itself shows that eventually crowds denounced Jesus (15:13—14). From these narratives we might learn to use any popularity for good at the moment but not to count on it enduring.

We live among the wealthiest people of the world (top 2 percent), a tough mission field. We are preaching a gospel that declares that it's easier to fit a camel through the eye of a needle than for the rich to enter the kingdom. But look on the bright side. After we preach the crowds down, we will not need such expensive buildings.

Classically, there are three ways in which humans try to find transcendence--religious meaning--apart from God as revealed through the cross of Jesus: through the ecstasy of alcohol and drugs, through the ecstasy of recreational sex, through the ecstasy of crowds. Church leaders frequently warn against the drugs and the sex, but at least, in America, almost never against the crowds.

Great crowds followed our Lord . . . as He healed the sick, raised the dead, and fed the hungry. However, the moment He started talking about the cross . . . "many . . . no longer followed him" (John 6:66 NIV).

The great crowds themselves are meaningless. The thing that counts is what happens in the hearts of the people. The evangelist sows the seed, and much inevitably falls upon stony ground and bears no fruit. But if only a few seeds flourish, the results are manifold.

I am convinced that fine art is the subtlest, the most seductive, the most effective instrument of moral propaganda in the world, excepting only the example of personal conduct; and I waive even this exception in favor of the art of the stage, because it works by exhibiting examples of personal conduct made intelligible and moving to crowds of unobservant, unreflecting people to whom real life means nothing.

We've taken the lifeblood out of Christianity and put Kool-Aid in its place so that it tastes better to the crowds, and the consequences are catastrophic.

He could close his eyes and recall the shouts of the crowds. So that is what they hope, he thought. And he remembered what the old Reverend Mother had said: Kwisatz Haderach. The memories touched his feelings of terrible purpose, shading this strange world