Quotes About Church

St. Bruno of Asti, who says: " The first tabernacle, therefore, is the Synagogue; the second, the Church; the third, Heaven. . . . The first was in a shadow and an image, the second is in an image and in truth, and the third [will be] in the truth alone. In the first, life is foreshadowed; in the second it is given; in the third it is possessed.

The fact that the church is convinced of not having the right to confer priestly ordination on women is now considered by some as irreconcilable with the European Constitution.

Afuera los primeros pájaros cantan tristes, llamando al sol. Es la hora de las tinieblas. Y la iglesia está helada, como llena de demonios, mientras seguimos en la noche recitando los salmos.

If the Church had not always stood so watchfully behind the ruling powers, there would not have been such attacks against everything it stood for.

Stephen Weatherby, still filling in for Nick, clears his throat at the podium. "Hey, good to see all of you," he says, which is church-speak for "Please shut up and sit down.

My training in Science of Mind had begun with my mother. She took me to a different church every Sunday, and she encouraged me to question the minister afterward.

Every congregation is a congregation of sinners. As if that weren't bad enough, they all have sinners for pastors.

The church is the primary arena in which we learn that glory does not consist in what we do for God but in what God does for us.

Church is the textured context in which we grow up in Christ to maturity. But church is difficult. Sooner or later, though, if we are serious about growing up in Christ, we have to deal with church. I say sooner.

Congregation is composed of people, who, upon entering a church, leave behind what people on the street name or call them. A church can never be reduced to a place where goods and services are exchanged. It must never be a place where a person is labeled. It can never be a place where gossip is perpetuated. Before anything else, it is a place where a person is named and greeted, whether implicitly or explicitly, in Jesus's name. A place where dignity is conferred.

I was astonished to learn in one of these best-selling books (on church life) that the size of my church parking lot had far more to do with how things fared in my congregation than my choice of texts in preaching. I was being lied to and I knew it.

The North American church at present is conspicuous for replacing the Jesus way with the American way.

The devil does some of his best work behind stained glass.

The contrast between world and church in this regard is stark: American culture is doing its dead level best with its celebrities, consumerism, and violence to keep us in a perpetually arrested state of adolescence. Yet all the while the church is quietly and without false advertising immersing us in the conditions of becoming mature to the measure of the full stature of Christ.

The church is never in so much danger as when it is popular and millions of people are saying "I'm born again, born again, born again.

Morris again. "This is good, helpful. Now that we are talking this way, I realize that for those twenty years that I was an engineer sitting in the pew each Sunday, I never had a patient pastor—they were all trying to get me 'with the program,' shape me up, get me, as they put it, 'involved.' I don't want to become a pastor like that. I don't think that is what pastors are for.

Ziklag: for me this became the premier biblical site for realizing that when we get serious about the Christian life, we eventually end up in a place and among people decidedly uncongenial to what we expected. At least uncongenial to what I expected. That place and people is often called a church. It is hard to get over the disappointment that God, having made an exception in my case, didn't seem to call nice, accomplished, courteous, alert people to worship.

Whether we like it or not, the moment we confess Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, that is, from the time we become a Christian, we are at the same time a member of the Christian church

My uncle Ernie didn't believe in God. At least that's what he said. But he always Went to church on Christmas. Which I thought Seriously compromised his atheism.

One person says, "I don't feel like worshiping; therefore I am not going to church. I will wait till I feel like it and then I will go." Another says, "I don't feel like worshiping; therefore I will go to church and put myself in the way of worship." In the process she finds herself blessed and begins, in turn, to bless.

The cultivation of consumer spirituality is the antithesis of a sacrificial, "deny yourself" congregation.

Backslider was a basic word in the religious vocabulary I learned as I grew up. Exempla were on display throughout the town: people who had made a commitment of faith to our Lord, had been active in our little church but had lost their footing on the ascent to Christ and backslid.

The hunger problem is not going to be solved by government or by industry but in church, among Christians who learn a different way to pursue happiness.

So much of the time it is not complacency that threatens but its opposite, impetuosity. We see something that is wrong, whether in the world or in the church, and we fly into action, righting the wrong, confronting sin and wickedness, battling the enemy, and then we go out vigorously recruiting "Christian soldiers".