Faith & Spirit Quote by Gene Robinson

There is a quiet dare embedded in Robinson's conditional: "If indeed this is the work of God..". It's a phrase that respects religious instinct while refusing its easy escape hatches. He doesn't deny providence; he challenges the way people invoke it to sanitize suffering or excuse inaction. The ellipsis functions like a raised eyebrow, a pause that lets the listener hear their own reflexes before he tightens the screw.

The rhetorical pivot is "then". If you want to claim divine authorship, Robinson argues, you're on the hook for a divine standard of response. That flips a common church posture on its head. Too often institutions treat crisis as a liability-management problem: protect the brand, protect the budget, protect the pews. Robinson recasts crisis as a test of integrity, the moment when a church proves whether it exists to preserve itself or to serve something larger than itself.

"Be its very best self" is pastoral language with teeth. It implies the church has a worst self too: anxious, inward, calculating. And "not worry about risking itself" is the real provocation. He's naming the fear under the pieties: that doing the right thing might cost members, money, status, even safety. The subtext is that a church that cannot risk itself isn't really a church; it's a club with hymns.

Context matters because Robinson, as an openly gay bishop long positioned at the fault lines of institutional courage, speaks from experience. The line reads like a manifesto for public faith under pressure: not certainty, but accountability; not self-preservation, but moral exposure.