Quotes About Church

Augustine's formula, with its conscious echoes of Plato's Republic, remains the basis of the Western idea of a church to this day: Catholic or Protestant, Methodist or Mormon. This is the idea of the church as a community, whose members share the same values and beliefs and who are bound together in their dedication to love God as they love one another; and to serve His commands rather than those of some bureaucrat or politician.

Erasmus had no intention of becoming a martyr. In the end, he preferred to work within the boundaries of the Church, not outside them. Despite their mutual antipathy toward the Aristotle of the scholastics, Luther's opposition ran far deeper. It hinged on an issue that had separated Boethius and Saint Augustine at the onset of the Middle Ages. It had at its heart the clash between Plato and Aristotle on free will.

Thanks to Boethius, Aristotle's logic was now available to apply the same test to Christianity's weightiest assertions about God, heaven and hell, and the Church's most cherished views about human beings and nature.

The substitution of so-called "practical" preaching for the doctrinal exposition which it has supplanted is the root cause of many of the evil maladies which now afflict the church of God. The reason why there is so little depth, so little intelligence, so little grasp of the fundamental verities of Christianity, is because so few believers have been established in the faith, through hearing expounded and through their own personal study of the doctrines of grace.

Scholars tell us that "Zion" is derived from tzun, which means "a monument raised up." Such indeed is the church of God: a monument of grace now, and of glory hereafter; raised up to all eternity.

Behind many of our besetting sins and personal failures, behind the many ills that infect our church fellowships and clog the channels of Christian service—the clash of personalities and temperaments, the strife and division—lies that insidious pride of the human heart.

In giving us the privilege of fasting as well as praying, God has added a powerful weapon to our spiritual armory. In her folly and ignorance, the church has largely looked upon it as obsolete. She has thrown it down in some dark corner to rust, and there it has lain forgotten for centuries. An hour of impending crisis for the church and the world demands its recovery!

con el creciente radicalismo atizado por la cada vez más arrogante Iglesia católica, las persecuciones contra moros y judíos menudearon en la zona cristiana (hubo un poco en todas partes, pero los navarros se lo curraron con verdadero entusiasmo, asaltando un par de veces la judería de Pamplona y luego arrasando la de Estella, calentados por un cura llamado Oillogoyen, que además de estar como una cabra era un hijo de puta con balcones a la calle).

entre sacristanes procurábamos no soplarnos el cirio.

la Santa Madre Iglesia —dijo por fin, sin volverse—. Tan católica, apostólica y romana que ha terminado traicionando su mensaje original. Con la Reforma perdió la mitad de Europa, y en el siglo XVIII excomulgó a la Razón. Cien años más tarde perdió a los trabajadores, que comprendieron que estaba del lado de los amos y los opresores. En este siglo que termina está perdiendo a la juventud y a las mujeres.

Bendito el cura que la bautizó a usted, hermosa.

church planters need to be aware of their natural gifts as well as their spiritual ones.

It's my view that if the church planter believes in his ministry and the need for it, he will be willing to do whatever it takes to see God provide the necessary funding.

Not enough church leaders understand and practice visionary strategic planning. According to an article in American Demographics, Gary McIntosh of the American Society for Church Growth estimates that only 20 percent of America's 367,000 congregations actively pursue strategic planning. In the same article, George Hunter, professor of evangelism and church growth at Asbury Theological Seminary, warns that churches without plans for growth invariably stagnate.[13]

I believe that there are five general church functions. They are teaching, fellowship, worship, evangelism, and service. All are found in Acts 2:42–47 and are prescribed in other parts of the New Testament. All five of them must be somewhat balanced and are necessary in a church's ministry if its people are to become spiritually mature.

Forms are the temporal, changing, and negotiable practices that are based on culture and are methods that all churches are free to choose to accomplish their functions.

Four Reasons Why Culture Is Important • It profoundly shapes and influences our life and all our beliefs. • It affects the development of our theology and what we believe about the Bible. • It affects the way we conduct our ministries in the church. • It helps us understand better the different people we seek to reach for Christ.

I believe it was Peter Wagner who said a church that attempts to reach everyone in general will likely reach no one in particular.

Does this mean that these people are upset with or even angry at the institution of the church? Not necessarily. When asked why they no longer attend church, many unchurched felt that it simply wasn't that important, while 34 percent said they were just too busy.5 And many others are looking elsewhere for answers to their questions about spiritual matters because they believe the church is answering questions that most of them aren't asking.

a large number of the Busters and Mosaics have rarely attended church, if at all. Their question for the established church is, Why should I attend your church when there are so many other things that I could be doing?

The mission of the church, according to Matthew 28:19–20, is to make disciples, and that includes evangelism as well as other functions.

I'm interested in planting church-planting churches.

But this could be interpreted primarily in terms of the ministry of word and sacrament, in accordance with the previous models of the Church, rather than in terms of caritative service.

Because the Church is mystery, there can be no question of deductive or crudely empirical tests. Deduction is ruled out because we have no clear abstract concepts of the Church that could furnish terms for a syllogism. Empirical tests are inadequate because visible results and statistics will never by themselves tell us whether a given decision was right or wrong.