The church is like manure. Pile it up, and it stinks up the neighborhood. Spread it out, and it enriches the world.
Interpretation
The quote uses a metaphor to express how the church's influence can be harmful when concentrated but beneficial when shared broadly.
Luis Palau's quote compares the church to manure, suggesting that when its teachings and values are hoarded or centralized, it results in negativity and conflict, much like a foul smell in a neighborhood. However, when the church's messages and actions are disseminated widely and thoughtfully, they have the potential to nourish and improve society, just as spread manure can enhance the fertility of soil.
In practice
During a sermon, a pastor might use this quote to illustrate the importance of outreach.
I am one who has always been interested only in the edges of the body and the spirit, the outlying regions of the body and the outlying regions of the spirit. The depths hold no interest for me; I leave them to others, for they are shallow, commonplace. What is there, then, at the outer most edge? Nothing, perhaps, save a few ribbons, dangling down into the void.
Since the nation's founding, African Americans repeatedly have been controlled through institutions such as slavery and Jim Crow, which appear to die, but then are reborn in new form, tailored to the needs and constraints of the time.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, old people in America had prayed, "Please God, don't let me look poor." In the year 2000, they prayed, "Please God, don't let me look old." Sexiness was equated with youth, and youth ruled. The most widespread age-related disease was not senility but juvenility.
The woman's perspective is like the dark side of the moon: it always exists, but it is never exposed, at least not in my culture.
If we do wrong and no harm comes of it, we are not thereby justified. If we did evil and good came of it, the evil would be just as evil. It is not the result of the action, but the action itself which God weighs.
It is the intense spirituality of India, and not any great political structure or social organisation that it has developed, that has enabled it to resist the ravages of time and the accidents of history.
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