Quotes About Church

the church (the ecclesia), when true to its real calling, when it is on about what God is on about, is by far and away the most potent force for transformational change the world has ever seen.

C. S. Lewis rightly understood that the purpose of the church was to draw people to Christ and make them like Christ. He said that the church exists for no other purpose. "If the Church is not doing this, then all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible, are a waste of time.

Unless, as leaders, we are willing to enter this in-between space that disrupts our settled assumptions and threatens our formulas and expectations, we will remain locked into a monologue of church questions and strategies.

Just as one will not get far on the road to happiness by predefining the characteristics of happiness and then going to look for them, we will not grasp what it means to be the church in our time by beginning with church questions, even if they are questions about the church's health, effectiveness, or its natural development!

Over the past twenty-five years much has been written about the need for the church to change; however, if we are to hear what God might be doing in the massively shifting contexts in which we live, we must move beyond conversations about the church, about how to make it work, and about patterns for success. I find most of these conversations are really seeking to restore the church to some imagined place in culture.

What is God up to in our neighborhoods and communities? How do we join with what God is doing in these places? Church questions are a subset of these far more important questions.

By the early fifth century the problem had become so acute that some theologians updated the church's theology of witness so that they no longer emphasized the Christians' exemplary behavior.

This, the Christians believed, was God's work and not theirs. So they did not engage in frantic action to save those who were not baptized; instead they entrusted the outsiders to God. The church, patiently, also entrusted itself to God, who would bring people into "the community of saints participating in truth" by the arduous means of catechesis and baptism.

the church's growth; it is life in "the way of Christ," distinctive and hopeful. Christians, as Cyprian knew well, were growing in numbers because they were distinct from the "unjust"—living patiently in relation to their neighbors and enemies, doing good to them, and waiting for them to come to faith.

In the United States of America there are twenty-seven million people under twenty-one years of age who receive no Christian training at all. Juvenile crime in the big cities is tremendous—sometimes it seems absolutely out of control. Every week one million people are dying without Jesus. In one minute, eighty-five people pass into eternity. In just the brief span of a church service hundreds are passing out into the presence of God. Does that mean anything to you?

What about your church prayer meeting? Is it tucked away somewhere because there is a busy program in operation and folks have no time to stop and pray? What would happen if your whole Sunday school gathered together for one hour to wait upon God, to beseech Him to pour out His blessing on your church? Too frequently our programs make no room for God's presence or for His power to work. Churches have plenty of people ready to interfere, but very few willing to intercede.

The recessional of "Amazing Grace" was familiar to all. John Newton had written the hymn, and I wondered how many people in the church knew that he'd been a slave-ship captain before realizing the error of his ways and becoming an abolitionist.

For most of us church folks, the norm has been defined by what we have or haven't experienced up to this point. Another way of saying this is we've allowed our experience to define normal. What we experience determines what is normal; what we consider to be normal is authoritative, and thus our experience becomes our authority. What we have or haven't experienced sets the bar for what we do and don't expect from God.

The style of God venerated in the church, mosque, or synagogue seems completely different from the style of the natural universe.

For the first time, I understood the ancients' need to find explanations for why things happen. It's a quintessential human imperative. Random is not emotionally satisfying. Therefore, lightning was the bolt from an angry god. Crop failure was punishment for failing to honor the gods with a fatted calf. The plague happened because you took the Lord's name in vain or coveted your neighbor's wife. Going to church regularly and praying could forestall illness. And on and on.

I personally believe, as church law sets out, that sanctions are an absolute last resort, particularly penal sanctions of depriving people of the sacraments.

The Church is presided over personally by Jesus Christ.

People can't stand it when you deal with issues of race and class, and also sometimes the church, and you give a perspective that flushes out hypocrisy.

You can't show up at a church every 4 October and say, 'Vote for me,' and call that persuasion.

I went to church irregularly and was mostly reading comics in the pew.

I was the second-youngest child in a family that took up the better part of an entire pew at our Baptist church.

'Phantom of the Opera' started in my little 100-seater converted church in Britain with a stage where we did what we did. But it was the score itself was what made it.

People who put money in the church basket and people who go to church and pay the pastor: that isn't real philanthropy; that's just like you belong to a country club. You pay your dues to belong to that church, so you pay your tithing or whatever it is.

For me, I listened to a lot of female jazz artists. And of course, the Motown and Philly sounds, all that stuff was very influential. And church and gospel.