Quotes About Church

Erasmus of Rotterdam, a sixteenth-century priest who was committed to reforming the church from within, said, "When faith came to be in writings rather than in hearts, contention grew hot and love grew cold. That which is forced cannot be sincere, and that which is not voluntary cannot please Christ.

Perhaps one of the most powerful things the contemporary church could do is to confess our sins to the world, the humbly get on our knees and repent for the terrible things we have done in the name of God.

I am convinced that if we lose kids to the culture of drugs and materialism, of violence and war, it's because we don't dare them, not because we don't entertain them. It's because we make the gospel too easy, not because we make it too difficult. Kids want to do something heroic with their lives, which is why they play video games and join the army. But what are they to do with a church that teaches them to tiptoe through life so they can arrive safely at death?

Christendom seems unprepared for people who take the gospel that seriously.

We can admire and worship Jesus without doing what he did. We can applaud what he preached and stood for without caring about the same things. We can adore his cross without taking up ours. I had come to see that the great tragedy in the church is not that rich Christians do not care about the poor but that rich Christians do not know the poor.

Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero said this shortly before his assassination: "I am going to speak to you simply as a pastor, as one who, together with his people, has been learning the beautiful but harsh truth that the Christian faith does not cut us off from the world but immerses us in it; the church is not a fortress set apart from the city. The church follows Jesus, who lived, worked, struggled and died in the midst of a city, in the polis.

I used to think you all were missionaries bringing the gospel to your neighborhood, but now I see that it is in your neighborhood that you have learned the gospel, and that you are actually missionaries to the church.

An older charismatic woman told me, "If the devil can't steal your soul, he'll just keep you busy doing meaningless church work." There

Church father Ignatius said that if our church is not marked by caring for the poor, the oppressed, and the hungry, then we are guilty of heresy.

When the church becomes a place of brokerage rather than an organic community, she ceases to be alive. She ceases to be something we are, the living bride of Christ. The church becomes a distribution center, a place where the poor come to get stuff and the rich come to dump stuff. Both go away satisfied (the rich feel good, the poor get clothed and fed), but no one leaves transformed.

Jesus never says to the poor, 'Come find the church,' but he says to those of us in the church, 'Go into the world and find the poor, hungry, homeless, imprisoned,' Jesus in his disguises.

It was a shame Christians had become so normal.

Repair my church which is in ruins.

There are so many people who are longing to be brought to life, who know all too well that they have done evil and long to hear not only of a God who embraces evildoers but also of a church that does the same.

It is an altar call to the world, an invitation to see a new kind of Christianity and to hear the confession of a church on its knees asking your forgiveness for the mess we have helped create. And it is an "alter" call to the church, to alter our vision from the patterns of this world and create new ways of living.

A friend just told us that perhaps we should relate to the church as a dysfunctional parent. We honor, submit to, and love her. But we do not allow her to destroy those we love with her dysfunction. We recognize that our beauty and our brokenness are inseparable from hers. The Creator and the church are our parents, and having one without the other leaves us very empty. Though our mother has many illegitimate children, we still love her.

St. Augustine: "The Church is a whore, but she's my mother." She is a mess and has many illegitimate children. But she is also our momma and managed to give birth to us and to give us enough of the truth that we have been able to ask the questions that we have in this book.

Sometimes I was incredibly frustrated and angry, wondering how these extremes could exist in the same world, let alone in the same church. Sometimes I just got cynical. That was the easiest thing to feel, as cynicism takes very little energy.

Ammon Hennacy, a Catholic Worker, said, "Love without courage and wisdom is sentimentality, as with the ordinary church member. Courage without love and wisdom is foolhardiness, as with the ordinary soldier. Wisdom without love and courage is cowardice, as with the ordinary intellectual.

Jesus never says to the poor, 'Come find the church,' but he says to those of us in the church, 'Go into the world and find the poor, hungry, homeless, imprisoned,' Jesus in his disguises.

By the way, I like letters. Letter writing has been an important pasttime for the church. I can't promise I'll write you back, but I will read your letter, and I'll do my best to reply. Right now, I'm running about six months behind on writing. And I prefer old-school snail mail: Shane Claiborne, PO Box 12798, Philadelphia, PA 19134.

Cyril lived in the fourth century. His gift to the church was his refusal to separate good doctrine from good living, insisting that orthodoxy (right belief) and orthopraxis (right living) must be married.

For the church as we know it is a tragically dysfunctional family, in which some children are starving while others have food stashed in their closets. Some of us are living on the street while others have empty rooms in our homes. And, of course, there are all sorts of things being done that bring great dishonor and embarrassment to the family name.

Augustine said, "The church is a whore, but she's our mother." The early Christians said that if we do not accept the church as our mother, we cannot call God our Father. We are not to leave her, but we are to work for her healing, as we would with a dysfunctional parent. Our work is not "para-church" but "pro-church." The church needs our discontent, and we need the rest of the body of Christ.