Quotes About Church

I grew up around a lot of church musicians.

I grew up in a church. My mom is a minister so she would make us go to every possible church she could muster.

In my house, it's family first - but I was spending most of my time at the church. So, I was saying 'family first,' but I wasn't showing that. I didn't like the message that sent my daughter.

The Eucharistic sacrifice of the body and blood of Christ embraces in turn the mystery of our Lord's continuing passion in the members of his mystical body, the church in every age.

I never thought about it, but as an atheist, maybe Nascar is my church?

Après l'avoir condamnée, l'Église a fait de la pensée de Thomas d'Aquin sa doctrine officielle. Elle lui a assuré à la fois une gloire sans égale mais l'a aussi enfermée dans une espèce d'enfer dogmatique dont il n'est pas sûr qu'elle soit aujourd'hui sortie.

The Reformation thus does not call for celebration. It calls for sorrow, repentance, and reconciliation.

In forty-nine years of churchgoing, I have never heard a sermon preached on this passage. And for good reason. It reads almost like a tasteless, private email message that was mistakenly forwarded by the recipient to readers who were not meant to see

How much stronger and healthier might the Body of Christ be if it was not torn into pieces? How powerful and vibrant could the Church become if in unity all of today's separated evangelicals and other Protestants brought together in it all of their gifts, talents, energies, and devotion? We are so used to division that that is almost unimaginable.

scripture. Yet a bit of reflection on orthodox Christian theology makes clear that numerous absolutely crucial doctrinal terms are not themselves found in the Bible but were invented or appropriated by the church during the patristic era.

in our quest for spiritual discovery we found that God moves in many mysterious ways. He is active in other continents, and I quickly realized that the church is much bigger than I ever thought it could be.

the church fathers do not provide detailed codes and laws for answering the question of sufficiency and need. Instead, they spend much more time describing the kind of person who can possess and administer goods safely and wisely.

Yet, although many priests were extremely poor, the Church as an institution was not only very rich but also powerful. It paid no taxes, voluntarily contributing instead a grant to the state every five years, and, as the amount of this grant was decided in the quinquennial Church Assemblies, the clergy were able to exercise a considerable influence over the policies of the Government.

Everything about Christianity is contained in the pathetic image of 'the flock.

It's a curious thing in American life that the most abject nonsense will be excused if the utterer can claim the sanction of religion. A country which forbids an established church by law is prey to any denomination. The best that can be said is that this is pluralism of a kind.

The prince's official job description as king will be 'defender of the faith,' which currently means the state-financed absurdity of the Anglican Church, but he has more than once said publicly that he wants to be anointed as defender of all faiths—another indication of the amazing conceit he has developed in six decades of performing the only job allowed him by the hereditary principle: that of waiting for his mother to expire.

In the very recent past, we have seen the Church of Rome befouled by its complicity with the unpardonable sin of child rape, or, as it might be phrased in Latin form, no child's behind left.

The leaders of the church know perfectly well that prayer is not intended to gratify the devout. So that, every time they accept a donation in return for some petition, they are accepting a gross negation of their faith: a faith that depends on the passive acceptance of the devout and not on their making demands for betterment

the ministries of the Church are regarded by the masses merely as dignities, her offices as posts of emolument—in short, popular religion may be summed up as respect for ecclesiastics.

The church has made efforts to apologize for all this, but its complicity with fascism is an ineffaceable mark on its history, and was not a short-term or a hasty commitment so much as a working alliance which did not break down until after the fascist period had itself passed into history.

The best argument I know for the highly questionable existence of Jesus is this. His illiterate living disciples left us no record and in any event could not have been Christians, since they were never to read those later books in which Christians must affirm belief, and in any case had no idea that anyone would ever found a church on their master's announcements. (There is scarcely a word in any of the later-assembled Gospels to suggest that Jesus wanted to be the founder of a church, either.)

Many people who belong to no church, and who are even hostile to organized faith, profess a belief in God because, in the usual phrase, it gives their life meaning. (This is of course subject to the same grand regress as the creationist argument: just as we have to ask who then created the Creator, so we're bound to ask if God's life has meaning and, if so, from what deity He or She derives it.)

Tertullian, one of the many church fathers who found it difficult to give a persuasive account of paradise, was perhaps clever in going for the lowest possible common denominator and promising that one of the most intense pleasures of the afterlife would be endless contemplation of the tortures of the damned. He spoke more truly than he knew in evoking the man-made character of faith.

Mission is not ours; mission is God's. Certainly, the mission of God is the prior reality out of which flows any mission that we get involved in. Or, as has been nicely put, it is not so much the case that God has a mission for his church in the world but that God has a church for his mission in the world. Mission was not made for the church; the church was made for mission-God's mission.14