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Book: The Wounded Healer: Ministry in Contemporary Society
Quotes of Book: The Wounded Healer: Ministry
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  1. Henri J.M. Nouwen _ The Wounded Healer: Ministry

    The great illusion of leadership is to think that man can be led out of the desert by someone who has never been there. Our lives are filled with examples which tell us that leadership asks for understanding and that understanding requires sharing.
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  2. Henri J.M. Nouwen _ The Wounded Healer: Ministry

    Mysticism and revolution are two aspects of the same attempt to bring about radical change. Mystics cannot prevent themselves from becoming social critics, since in self-reflection they will discover the roots of a sick society. Similarly, revolutionaries cannot avoid facing their own human condition, since in the midst of their struggle for a new world they will find that they are also fighting their own reactionary fears and false ambitions.
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  3. Henri J.M. Nouwen _ The Wounded Healer: Ministry

    When we wonder why the language of tradition Christianity has lost its liberation power for nuclear man, we have to realize that most Christian preaching is still based on the presupposition that man sees himself as meaningfully integrated with a history in which God came to us in the past, is living under us in the present, and will come to liberate us in the future. But when man's historical consciousness is broken, the whole Christian message seems like a lecture about the great pioneers to a boy on an acid trip.
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  4. Henri J.M. Nouwen _ The Wounded Healer: Ministry

    Building a vocation on the expectations of concrete results, however conceived, is like building a house on sand instead of on solid rock, and even takes away the ability to accept successes as free gifts.
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  5. Henri J.M. Nouwen _ The Wounded Healer: Ministry

    The first and most basic task of the minister of tomorrow is to clarify the immense confusion which can arise when people enter this new internal world. It is a painful fact indeed to realize how poorly prepared most Christian leaders prove to be when they are invited to be spiritual leaders in the true sense. Most of them are used to thinking in terms of large-scale organization, getting people together in churches … running the show as a circus director. They have become unfamiliar with, and even somewhat afraid of, the deep and significant movements of the Spirit. I am afraid that in a few decades the Church will be accused of having failed in its most basic task: to offer men creative ways to communicate with the source of human life.
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  6. Henri J.M. Nouwen _ The Wounded Healer: Ministry

    Therefore every real revolutionary is challenged to be a mystic at heart, and he who walks the mystical way is called to unmask the illusory quality of human society.
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  7. Henri J.M. Nouwen _ The Wounded Healer: Ministry

    Christian leaders are called to help others affirm this great news, and to make visible in daily events the fact that behind the dirty curtain of our painful symptoms there is something great to be seen: the face of God in whose image we are shaped.
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  8. Henri J.M. Nouwen _ The Wounded Healer: Ministry

    Thus the authority of compassion is the possibility of man to forgive his brother, because forgiveness is only real for him who has discovered the
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  9. Henri J.M. Nouwen _ The Wounded Healer: Ministry

    Christian leadership is a dead-end street when nothing new is expected, when everything sounds familiar and when ministry has regressed to the level of routine.
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  10. Henri J.M. Nouwen _ The Wounded Healer: Ministry

    But human withdrawal is a very painful and lonely process, because it forces us to face directly our own condition in all its beauty as well as misery.
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  11. Henri J.M. Nouwen _ The Wounded Healer: Ministry

    A door opens to me. I go in and am faced with a hundred closed doors.
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  12. Henri J.M. Nouwen _ The Wounded Healer: Ministry

    Who can save a child from a burning house without taking the risk of being hurt by the flames? Who can listen to a story of loneliness and despair without taking the risk of experiencing similar pains in his own heart and even losing his precious peace of mind? In short: "Who can take away suffering without entering it?
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