"If we once have the courage to give up our defense of the old facades which have nothing or very little behind them; if we cease to maintain, in public, the pretense of a universal Christendom; if we stop straining every nerve to get everybody baptized, to get everybody married in church and onto our registers (even when success means only, at bottom, a victory for tradition, custom and ancestry, not for true faith and interior conviction); if, by letting go, we visibly relieve Christianity of the burdensome impression that it accepts responsibility for everything that goes on under this Christian top-dressing, the impression that Christianity is a sort of Everyman's Religious Varnish, a folk-relgion (at the same level as that of folk-costumes)- then we can be free for real missionary adventure and apostolic self-confidence.....
Douglas John Hall quoted in The shaping of things to come, Page 13
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