It is unlikely that the church in our lifetime will be able to find a figure as interesting and intriguing.
Here we met John, an elder in the church and a lifetime Mormon.
That's a far cry from the 1990s when the faith's leaders excommunicated some women who advocated for gender equity, said Nadine Hansen, a lifetime church member and an attorney who published her first article about women's ordination nearly 30 years ago.
In fact, churches didn't exist in his lifetime; rather, churches are social institutions that emerged among his followers after his death.
A lifetime of church had convinced him, Lax explained to his father, that "killing was wrong" and that "Jesus was an example of pacifism and nonviolence".
"There is a great danger just now because the spirit of materialism is on the increase," said Bishop Mar James Pazhayattil, the founding bishop of the Diocese of Irinjalakuda, as he sat barefoot at his desk, surrounded by mementos of a lifetime of church service.
Lewis Carroll's callow but smart Alice asserts that 'There's no use trying… one can't believe impossible things.' But the Red Queen - who's presumably had a lifetime of church attendance - is the very personification of wisdom when she asserts: 'I daresay you haven't had much practice… When I was younger I always did it for half an hour a day.
The litany of the saints includes countless figures — from Joan of Arc to the newly canonized Mary MacKillop, an Australian nun involved in the reporting of child abuse by a priest — who suffered injustices from church authorities in their lifetimes.
In my lifetime, most churches have stopped perpetuating the lie that being gay is a choice and have "progressed" (if you can call it that) to taking the position that if a child is "blessed" with being born straight, he or she can have intimate relations with another person of the opposite sex within marriage.
Church was lauded in his lifetime for "exquisitely poetical work," but his reputation largely faded after his death in 1924.
