'The institutional residues of Christendom often appear to be empty fossils left by previous life, shells that were once inhabited by growing organisms but are now inert and useless. But this is a mistaken image. The best analog is perhaps a southwestern desert landscape. All around us are arroyos, the empty gullies dug by floods from the spring rains, and the great river of institutional Christianity into which they lead is now an extensive mud flat with a thin ribbon of living water wandering through the center, almost hiddden from view. But it requires only a spring for the gullies to fill again and the river to flow full to its banks, to make all things alive and even old things new.'
Richard Lovelace, Dynamics of Spiritual Life, p.336.
