Quotes About Church

El domingo, después del oficio, había bastantes enfermos; pedían socorros y se les daba sólo palabras: -Has pecado y Dios te aflige. Da gracias, menos tendrás que sufrir en la otra vida. Resígnate, sufre, muere. La Iglesia tiene plegarias para sus difuntos.- Débiles, desmadejados, sin esperanza, ni ganas de vivir, seguían bien este consejo y dejaban escapar la vida.

The world does not need the church to talk about what is already possible. The work of the church is to battle the world's definition of what is believable and unbelievable.

The church will not have power to act or believe until it recovers its tradition of faith and permits that tradition to be the primal way out of enculturation. This is not a cry for traditionalism but rather a judgment that the church has no business more pressing than the reappropriation of its memory in its full power and authenticity.

For I believe the crisis in the U.S. church has almost nothing to do with being liberal or conservative; it has everything to do with giving up on the faith and discipline of our Christian baptism and settling for a common, generic U.S. identity that is part patriotism, part consumerism, part violence, and part affluence.

The church has a huge stake in breaking the silence, because the God of the Bible characteristically appears at the margins of established power arrangements, whether theological or socioeconomic and political.

Since we now live in a society—and a world—that is fitfully drifting toward fascism, the breaking of silence is altogether urgent. In the institutional life of the church, moreover, the breaking of silence by the testimony of the gospel often means breaking the silence among those who have a determined stake in maintaining the status quo.

But this is real prayer, down and dirty. It is not nice church prayer that refuses to ask anything because we mostly do not believe that prayers are heard or answered.

The church will not have power to act or believe until it recovers its tradition of faith and permits that tradition to be the primal way out of enculturation.

As the church in reform draws closer to its core confession, it inescapably embraces its most radical vision that violates and contradicts conventional practice in its social context. What makes such reform difficult, moreover, is the fact that while we ponder the radical core claims of faith, we ourselves are variously enmeshed in conventional practices that are inimical to the gospel.

In my judgment, the church in the United States must now face hard decisions such as we have not faced for a long time. We have indeed bought in as individual persons, even as a church, on consumerism, aimed at self-indulgence, comfort, security, and safety. We live our lives out of our affluence, and we discover that all our self-indulgence makes us satiated but neither happy nor safe.

It is most unfortunate that, in the long history of the church, "faith" has been almost everywhere transubstantiated into "belief," which transposes the concrete practicality of trust into a cognitive enterprise. How ludicrous that in the long, oppressive history of orthodoxy—which guards cognitive formulations—that those who enforce right belief seem most often to be themselves unable or unwilling to engage in deep trust.

the church is, in my judgment, called to its public vocation to practice neighborliness in a way that includes both support of policies of distributive justice and practices of face-to-face restorative generosity.

My judgment is that as long as the pastors of the church are embarrassed by this urgent language to God and assume in our Enlightenment model that such rhetoric has no actual force, we will not get very far in the struggle for justice.

In practice, I suggest that it is the liturgy that is to enact the settled coherence of church faith, and the sermon that provides the "alien" witness of the text, which rubs against the liturgic coherence.118 There can, in my judgment, be no final resolution of the tension between the systemizing task of theology and the disruptive work of biblical interpretation. It is the ongoing interaction between the two that is the work of interpretation.

The contemporary American church is so largely enculturated to the American ethos of consumerism that it has little power to believe or to act.

Intercession, that is, intrusion into the courts of power on behalf of another, is central to the church's action in prayer.

There is no practical area in the life of the church in which reform is more urgent than in the church's propensity (in all of its manifestations) to silence. Such reform, like every moment of reform, means a return to the core claims of the gospel. In this case, it is the core claim of the baptismal formula of Galatians 3:28 concerning the third element of "male and female.

The cure for many of the ills afflicting the church and the seminaries of the day is to be found in the faithful exposition of the Word of God. Faithfulness in this area is the primary prerequisite for alleviating the deepest concerns currently held by the church and society.

Nowhere in the New Testament can one find evidence advocating that the writers went outside the boundaries of the Old Testament text to gain their view of the Messiah, or that they just rejected outright what these texts taught about the coming one. The "story" the early church told was the story of the promise-plan of God and the line of the "seed" that would end in David's final son, Jesus. This was the gospel they proclaimed.

Finally, it was "to anoint the most holy [One or place]." Since this expression is never used of a person, it probably is not a reference to the Messiah or even to his church.

The primary task of the Church is not to mend the manners of the community, but to proclaim the matchless Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. When men hear that Gospel and believe it, their lives will give evidence of their faith.

read your Bible, go to church, say your prayers, and ask God to take care of you; then you need never fear dreams or anything else, for you must always remember that God has more power than the devil, and always will have.

Podemos rezar siempre si convertimos en oración cada acción, cada tarea y cada sufrimiento diarios porque antes se los hemos ofrecido y prometido a Dios. Tenemos que buscar soluciones dentro de la Iglesia, y no fuera de ella. No podemos separar sin más nuestra vida personal de la de Cristo ni del cuerpo del que Él es la cabeza movidos por un sentimiento personal de insatisfacción u ofensa.

the north and south ends, there wasn't much to Bridger's Wells: Arthur Davies' general store, the land and mining claims office, Canby's saloon, the long, sagging Bridger Inn, with its double-decker porch, and the Union Church, square and bare as a New England meeting house, and set out on the west edge of town, as if it wanted to get as far from the other church as it could without being left alone.