Quotes About Church

I believe there is complete equality between men and women. And I believe those passages in the New Testament, not by Jesus, but by Paul, that say women should not adorn themselves, they should always wear hats or color their hair in church - things like that - I think they are signs of the times and should not apply to modern-day life.

Almost any poll of regular churchgoers will reveal that their favorite book in the New Testament is the Gospel of John. It is the book that is most often used at Christian funerals.

It's kind of fun to listen to Christians who say: I'm a New Testament Christian. What other kind of Christian is there?

When I was young, I had an 'aha' moment in church. There was a thing called testimony service, and somebody would sing a song, and everyone else would join in, finding a note where they fit. During one of those, a light went on in my head. In that moment, I heard everything - Parliament, the Staple Singers, Curtis Mayfield, Prince - in there.

blunt conclusion was that "Christianity has an image problem" among American youth.48 Similarly,

Defining a mono-racial church as one that has more than 80 percent of its membership consisting of a single racial group, nearly nine in ten (86 percent) congregations, which account for 80 percent of churchgoers, remain essentially mono-racial.46

If you were recruiting for a white supremacist cause on a Sunday morning, you'd likely have more success hanging out in the parking lot have an average white Christian Church —evangelical Protestant, mainline Protestant, or Catholic —than approaching whites sitting out services at the local coffee shop.

The principle that certain sins should not receive the Church's testimony of forgiveness was probably no novelty at all, but had been applied in various churches perhaps, however, with no strict consistency.

This heretical perversion of the message of Jesus that most often passes for Christianity today has been aptly termed churchianity. People go to church, profess a belief in Jesus totally devoid of a belief in his teachings, and then self-righteously proclaim themselves to be "Christians.

Though, in the infancy of the Church, God taught his people without the written Word, yet now that the former ways of revealing his will to his people have ceased, the Holy Scripture, or written Word, is most necessary. Without this the Church would be left to the uncertainty of tradition and oral teaching; but the written Word is a sure test of doctrines, and a light in a dark place, both of which are most necessary.

The church is the great lost and found department.

The standard by which we will be judged and by which we should evaluate ourselves is not the pragmatic standard of the world. Being church and being disciples of Christ is not like driving a Plymouth to Dallas. While the world should look upon Jesus's life and ministry as failures and what he calls us to be as foolish, futile, and contrary to our nature, the Word teaches the church a new meaning of success and calls us to follow him.

Like a black shadow a priest stole across the square. Above him the cross on the church glowed like a live cinder, flashing its reflection along the purple-slated roof from the eaves of which a cloud of ash-gray pigeons drifted into the gutter below.

Any pattern of thought that in any way abstracts God 'himself' from this person [Jesus], from his death or his career or his birth or his family or his Jewishness or his maleness or his teaching or the particular intercession and rule he as risen now exercises, has, according to Nicaea, no place in the church.

The canon without the creed will not serve to protect the church against perversion of the Gospel, and neither will the creed without the canon.

The doctrine of the Trinity is the Christian church's answer to the question, How does truth hang together? And how may it be grasped as one?

Yeah, church is way better when you're not mad at God," Jimmy said. "And it gets even better when you no longer believe he's mad at you.

The Church condemned and suppressed his work, and probably destroyed a lot of it. In the 1880s, two Latin manuscripts of Eckhart's were found. Since 1980 the Dominican Order has sought to reveal that Eckhart was an exemplary Christian mystic and priest.

He asked whether Quincy knew what church his mother belonged to. He asked whether he himself had any religious preferences. Quincy said his mother belonged to the Christian Church of Fallen Angels. Or no, maybe it had another name. He couldn't remember. You're right, said Mr. Lawrence, it does have a different name, it's the Christian Church of Angels Redeemed. That's the one, said Quincy.

Halfway through the second chorus, he closed his eyes and mouth and listened to the other voices filling the small sanctuary. This was why God had drawn him there this morning, he thought. He could sing along with others while streaming a church service, but it wasn't the same as being in their midst, as hearing other voices raised in a song of praise.

Plain crosses replaced images of Christ and the saints in other parts of the empire, as in the apse of the Church of the Koimesis of the Virgin at Nicaea, where a cross supplanted a mosaic image of the Virgin.32 After the reaffirmation of the orthodoxy of icons in the ninth century, iconophiles removed the cross and reinstalled an image of the Theotokos holding the Christ child.

America is going fascist, and it's doing so with the help of religious zealots whose real passion is for the politics of privilege, not the radically disturbing presence of Jesus. This will sound alarmist to some, but the truth is that no country ever thinks it is going fascist until it wakes up one day to that indisputable reality. Then the people will say, "How did this happen?" And the answer is "one day at a time, and with the blessing of the church.

Because there is no fight like a church fight, all hell broke loose.

If the church is to survive as a place where head and heart are equal partners in faith, then we will need to commit ourselves once again not to the worship of Christ, but to the imitation of Jesus. His invitation was not to believe, but to follow. (p. 145)