I guess you could say, I'm just a typical Methodist kid at heart.

I guess you could say, I'm just a typical Methodist kid at heart.

When I retired from the circus at the grand old age of 11, my parents thought it would be best to focus more on the challenges ahead, and so I started at Methodist College Belfast.

I am - and have always been - a Methodist.

In George W. Bush's case, the public paid far too little attention to the role of religion in his thinking. Many voters failed to appreciate that while Bush's religious beliefs may be moderate Methodist ones, he was someone who relied on his faith immoderately, as an alternative to rational understanding of complex issues.

I'm a Methodist, but not as an actor.

I grew up in a little Methodist church that was very rural, very community support-oriented, made up of great people who talked about love and grace and the spiritual experience, but only in rhetorical terms.

In 2011, my wife, Courtney, and I, with my amazing mother and sister, opened the Nantz National Alzheimer Center at Houston Methodist Hospital.

My Methodist upbringing was very formative in my politics. I was born in 1969, and there was all this ecumenical 'we're in this together' sensitivity that was part of the United Methodist Church in the 1970s.

My mother had aspirations to become a concert singer. Her Methodist Minister father didn't approve of young girls leaving home until they married, so she had to pass it up.

My aunt Geraldine was the unofficial historian and storyteller. She had all the information about family members and the gossip that came out of the church because we were very much part of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. At family gatherings, the older folk had the floor, had pride of place, and it was their stories I remember.

Were it not for Jackie Robinson, Branch Rickey would be remembered, if at all, as a Bible-thumping midwestern Methodist windbag who neither played baseball on Sundays when he was a mediocre catcher for the St. Louis Browns and the New York Highlanders, nor attended games on the Sabbath as a baseball executive.

Pamphlets on Sabbath writing are in request here I have been applied to for them by several of the old Methodists knowing that I had them to sell before.

I lived in Meadowbrook. I went to church at Meadowbrook United Methodist Church. I went to school at Meadowbrook Elementary School and then Meadowbrook Middle School. I learned to dance at Meadowbrook Country Club. All those things grounded me in one place and I think most of Fort Worth is just like the area I grew up in.

I'm terrified of being poor, I always have been. It's growing up as a Methodist. I'll spend that bit of extra money to get a better seat on a train sometimes, because it's quieter and calmer, but I refuse to spend money on clothes.

I remember, when I went away to college at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, my aunt sent me a book with the rules of being a Southern Belle. One of the rules was to never wear white after Labor Day. Fashion has a lot to do with confidence and making up your own rules.

I was raised in a little church, the Grundy Methodist Church, that was very straight-laced, but I had a friend whose mother spoke in tongues. I was just wild for this family. My own parents were older, and they were so over-protective. I just loved the 'letting go' that would happen when I went to church with my friend.

I was raised in the Methodist Church, which is a very Germanic, military kind of music they have there. I heard this other music on the radio: Pentecostal. That was right up my street.

I know I wanted to be a comic when I was nine. I was thirteen the first time I did it. I was attending a Methodist Church youth retreat at the University of Southern Alabama. They held a talent show on the last night. I won, and then I made out with a 14-year-old girl from Prattville, Alabama.

I'm a firm believer in God himself, but that's as far as I can go. I'm not any denomination. I'm not Catholic or Presbyterian or Baptist or Methodist or Jewish or Muslim. I'm none of those things. And I'm sure that's just fine with God.

Without transformation, you can assume you're at a high moral, spiritual level just because you call yourself Lutheran or Methodist or Catholic. I think my great disappointment as a priest has been to see how little actual spiritual curiosity there is in so many people.

I grew up in the Methodist church. My wife grew up in the Baptist church. And wives get everything they want. So we got married in the Baptist church.

My mother grew up in abject poverty in Mississippi, an elementary school dropout. Yet, with the support of women around her, she returned to school and graduated as class valedictorian - the only one of her seven siblings to finish high school. She became a librarian and then a United Methodist minister.

I was raised in an evangelical Methodist church. Evangelical meant that though you had been baptized and made a member of the church on Sunday morning, you still had to be 'saved' on Sunday night. I wanted to be saved, but I did not think you should fake it.

Let me be clear: I am a Methodist. By that, I mean I think John Wesley was a recovery of Catholic Christianity through disciplined congregational life.

My father was a Methodist and my mother was a Baptist.

My father was a preacher in Maryland and we had crab feasts - with corn on the cob, but no beer, being Methodist - outside on the church lawn.

I grew up very heavily involved in a United Methodist Youth organization. I grew up going to church camp for years. I ministered, and country music stole me away. It was just where my heart wound up. It's what I wanted to do.

To me there's nothing different in principle with a Catholic adoption agency, or indeed Methodist adoption agency, saying the rules in our community are different and therefore the law shouldn't apply to us. Why not then say sharia can be applied to different parts of the country? It doesn't work.

The average Liberian, it turns out, does not share the same assumptions as the average black Methodist minister from Chicago.