Quotes About Church

Tame worship is easier to agree on than any other kind, and bringing fire requires a lot more energy than simply showing up. When life is pretty good and church is pleasant enough, who needs resurrection?

This may be the real reason many of us fear silence in church—because anyone sitting near us may hear the hissing, rumbling, wheezing sounds of a living human being, which do not match up with the attractive countenances that we work so hard to present to one another.

Because they were not old enough to serve on committees or wrangle over the order of worship, the children often had a better grasp of what church was all about than the rest of us did.

I understood their reasoning, but I was sorry that church did not strike these wounded souls as a place they could bring the dark fruits of their equally dark nights.

All these years later, the way many of us are doing church is broken and we know it, even if we do not know what to do about it.

Think hard before you do this," one said to me when I told him I wanted to be ordained. "Right now, you have the broadest ministry imaginable. As a layperson, you can serve God no matter what you do for a living, and you can reach out to people who will never set foot inside a church. Once you are ordained, that is going to change. Every layer of responsibility you add is going to narrow your ministry, so think hard before you choose a smaller box.

Gradually I remembered what I had known all along, which is that church is not a stopping place but a starting place for discerning God's presence in this world. By offering people a place where they may engage the steady practice of listening to divine words and celebrating divine sacraments, church can help people gain a feel for how God shows up—not only in Holy Bibles and Holy Communion but also in near neighbors, mysterious strangers, sliced bread, and grocery store wine.

It was Sunday morning, and old people passed me like sad grey waves on their way to church.

I love Evensong. There's something sad and essentially English about it.

October. She knew that she dared not pray for humility, to be granted the grace of humility, it being such a precious thing, but when others were decorating the church for Harvest Festival she chose a humble, even humiliating task, emptying the cat's tray, bundling the soiled Katlitta into a newspaper. Yet had she even chosen it – it was just something that had to be done. Whatever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might.

Only the Church offered an organizing principle, which was the reason for its success, for society cannot bear anarchy.

ecclesiam nulla salus

A Bishop of Durham in 1318 could not understand or pronounce Latin and after struggling helplessly with the word Metropolitanus at his own consecration, muttered in the vernacular, "Let us take that word as read." Later when ordaining candidates for holy orders, he met the word aenigmate (through a glass darkly) and this time swore in honest outrage, "By St. Louis, that was no courteous man who wrote this word!

the symptoms of depression, despair or melancholy, and lethargy were considered by the Church the sin of accidia or sloth.

Wherever the Reformation took hold the Bible replaced the Pope as the final spiritual authority.

To understand the popes we must look at the princes.

When those who have the title of shepherd play the part of wolves," said Lothar of Saxony, "heresy grows in the garden of the Church.

When pardoners allowed the belief—though never explicitly stated by the popes—that indulgences could take care of future sins not yet committed, the Church had reached the point of virtually encouraging sin, as its critics did not fail to point out.

virtue without power," as a speaker had said at the Council of Basle half a century earlier, "will only be mocked, and that the Roman Pope without the patrimony of the Church would be a mere slave of Kings and princes,

No Pope ever issued a Bull to approve of something.

Clement VI to shorten the interval to fifty years. The Pope of the joyous murals operated on the amiable principle that "a pontiff should make his subjects happy." He complied with Rome's request in a Bull of 1343. Momentously for the Church, Clement formulated in the same Bull the theory of indulgences, and fixed its fatal equation with money.

The claim of the Church to spiritual leadership could never be made wholly credible to all its communicants when it was founded in material wealth. The more riches the Church amassed, the more visible and disturbing became the flaw; nor could it ever be resolved, but continued to renew doubt and dissent in every century.

That conflict between the reach for the divine and the lure of earthly things was to be the central problem of the Middle Ages. The claim of the Church to spiritual leadership could never be made wholly credible to all its communicants when it was founded in material wealth. The more riches the Church amassed, the more visible and disturbing became the flaw; nor could it ever be resolved, but continued to renew doubt and dissent in every century.

Supposed to be commissioned by the Church, the pardoners would sell absolution for any sin from gluttony to homicide, cancel any vow of chastity or fasting, remit any penance for money, most of which they pocketed.