Quotes About Church

I'm first a Christian, next a Catholic, then a Calvinist, fourth a Paedobaptist and finally a Presbyterian. I cannot reverse the order.

within a few short years of the Crucifixion, the Jesus movement was in grave danger of being reabsorbed by Judaism. If there was a future, it lay with the gentiles living under Roman rule. The evangelists and the Church Fathers had to make the new faith acceptable to the Empire. There was nothing they could do to change the fact that Jesus died a Roman death at the hands of Roman troops. But if they could suggest that the Jews had forced Pilate's hand . . .

His Holiness carried the burden of the whole Church on his shoulders - answered Albanese - but in his death he was as light as a feather.

It is simultaneously the blessing and the curse of the reflective Christian that believers are called to live out their faith in the church. No institution has accomplished so much for good in the world; none has fallen so short of its calling! The church is God-ordained, God-inspired, but accomplishes its work through human beings subject to every possible failing.

There's something about death that gets our attention. When it's close—in the family or shared by the community—it sends us back to our most basic understanding of things. Back to our presuppositions you might say. Death requires of us an explanation. Some invoke the periodic table, some the human condition, and some go back to church—at least for a while.

So we're going to church. But which church? Americans like choice in their churches, as in their snack foods. We favor designer churches and a God designed to fit our tastes. We even start sentences with "My God is" followed by a descriptor, as though we each get to create the kind of god we want from a checklist of qualities that please us: loving (check), reasonable (check), favors my causes (double check).

A good example is like a bell that calls many to church.

We went to church every Sunday. When I was a kid, the only time I sang was around my family.

We can still fall into the trap of self-deceit today. It always begins through pride and arrogance, somehow thinking that our ways are superior to God's ways. In this season when the church celebrates Jesus' mighty work of redemption, let's not miss the joy of complete obedience to God's will and plans for our life.

There is so much wisdom in the straightforward words of A. W. Tozer: The church is famishing for want of his presence. The instant cure of most of our religious ills would be to enter the presence in spiritual experience, to become suddenly aware that we are in God and that God is in us. This would lift us out of our pitiful narrowness and cause our hearts to be enlarged.2

Is it any wonder why church is so important? Some think they can live the Christian life without a strong local fellowship, but I'm not one of them. I know how important it is for me to unite with others to fix my mind on what is right, pure, lovely, and admirable—to think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise. What's on your mind? Is it excellent?

It must never be forgotten that Almighty God rules this world. He is not an absentee God. His hand is ever on the throttle of human affairs. He is everywhere present in the concerns of time. His eyes behold, his eyelids try the children of men. He rules the world just as He rules the church by prayer.

This oral tradition took the form of doctrinal summaries, hymns, and sacraments that underscored the fundamental theology of the church

It is the divorce between Jesus' entire message and the practice of the church.

The first is "divide and conquer." Here related themes are split apart from each other and isolated so one is early and another is late. The second principle is that "difference equals either disagreement or a distinct theology," so we can again lift out and separate what goes back to Jesus and what the church came to say later.

Like all soul singers, I grew up singing in church but sometimes I would leave early and sit in the car listening to gospel band, The Blind Boys of Alabama. Hearing their lead singer Clarence made me connect the idea of church and show business and see how I could make a career singing music that stirred the soul.

The world once had real problems with heretics splitting the Church and infidels at the gates of Vienna. What real benefit was the discovery of America?" "None to the inhabitants thereof," Cannon admitted. "And its mineral wealth wrecked half the economies of Europe and financed endless wars." "In the end was it good for the world? You cannot price knowledge you haven't gained yet.

Discipleship in the church today has more to do with consuming and absorbing cognitive content than it has anything to do with missional action.

We first must plant the gospel in the hearts and lives of people and then see what form of ecclesia emerges from the transformed community. If we begin with the premise that we are starting a "church," it will often come loaded with intuitional and cultural assumptions. Churches should grow out of the mission, not the other way around.

After the resurrection of Christ, the Septuagint became the Bible of the Christian church and a powerful instrument for conveying to the whole world the knowledge of the true God that had already been given to the Jews.

The diligent reading of Sacred Scripture accompanied by prayer brings about that intimate dialogue in which the person reading hears God who is speaking, and in praying, responds to him with trusting openness of heart. If it is effectively promoted, this practice will bring to the Church—I am convinced of it—a new spiritual springtime. —Pope Benedict XVI

The whole account of baptism in the New Testament is plain and intelligible, and the state of this ordinance, during the lives of the apostles, is to be gathered mostly from the book of Acts, written by Luke, the first ecclesiastical historian.

I have never seen myself as a spokesman. I am a witness. In the church in which I was raised you were supposed to bear witness to the truth. Now, later on, you wonder what in the world the truth is, but you do know what a lie is.

As all who come into the country must obey the King, so all who come into an university must be of the Church.