Quotes About Church

We always go to downtown Oklahoma City to look at all the Christmas lights that have been put up... We go to the Christmas Eve service at church, and we always beg my parents to open a present - just one present - on Christmas Eve. We get them to cave.

My parents felt old-fashioned, growing up - they were quite disciplinarian. We went to church and had to learn music, but in hindsight it was a good thing.

The Catholic Church is one of the oldest, largest and richest institutions on earth, with a following 1.2 billion strong, and change does not come naturally.

I go to church for the cultural element. It's where you go to see Greek people once a week. It's real important to me, and I hope my children see they're part of something bigger than just this family.

We can never get around to being one nation under God if we can't even get around to being one Church under God.

One of the things my mom used to do - I don't know why she chose me, but she chose me out of her six children to take to the African-American church that was in the town that we lived in Springfield, Missouri. And we would go to the church, and we would sit in the back row, and we would listen to all of the spirituals in the hymns.

I have a relationship with Christ and it is ongoing. I study my Bible, I do fellowship at a Church, it's a life thing.

We were always in church, and always singing, so once I realized that music was something that I had a knack for, I sort of latched onto it, and it helped give me an identity and figure out who I was as a person. It informed my way into theater, which informed my way into television.

I have never pretended to be the best Scientologist, but I openly and vigorously defended the church whenever it was criticized, as I railed against the kind of intolerance that I believed was directed against it. I had my disagreements, but I dealt with them internally.

I don't believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute. The idea that the church can have no influence or no involvement in the operation of the state is absolutely antithetical to the objectives and vision of our country.

It is very difficult sometimes to keep awake, especially at church, but there is no difficulty at all about sleeping.

Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are! Except, of course, in the Church. But then in the Church they don't think.

That's all, except for the Choir-Boys' Hundred Yards Handicap, for a pewtermug presented by the vicar – open to all whose voices have not broken before the second Sunday in Epiphany.

Bayliss resumed reading. He was one of those readers who, whether their subject be a murder case or funny anecdote, adopt a measured and sepulchral delivery which gives a suggestion of tragedy and horror to whatever they read. At the church he attended, children would turn pale and snuggle up to their mothers when he read.

Guilt's my mainstream," I explained. "The central theme of my life. The Church laid a foundation of pure guilt inside me. They raised a temple in the soft center of a child. Floors were paved with guilt. Statues of saints were carved out of great blocks of it.

tolerated playfulness at church not at all. At every Mass, she wore her game face for a crucifixion as though she were an actual eyewitness to the death of Jesus each time she knelt in her pew.

and the bells kept on tolling, tolling as they gathered

Similarly, a primary objective for Christian educators and a major task of professional pastors, if not the foremost task, should be the wholesale elimination of condemnation and anti-intellectualism from the local church.

Most problems in contemporary churches can be explained by the fact that members have never decided to follow Christ.

How to combine faith with obedience is surely the essential task of the church as it enters the twenty-first century.

The "Western" segment of the church today lives in a bubble of historical illusion about the meaning of discipleship and the gospel. We are dominated by the essentially Enlightenment values that rule American culture: pursuit of happiness, unrestricted freedom of choice, disdain of authority.

I would not be a pastor of a church that did not have a program of Bible memorization in it, because Bible memorization is a fundamental way of filling our minds with what they need. "This book of the law shall not depart out of your mouth" (Joshua 1:8). That's where we need it! In our mouth.

Beyond my immediate context of relationships, the central question my friends and I began asking was quite simple: How could the soul health and transformation available to us become normative in our experience as a church community? While such experience of soul transformation has certainly been normative in seasons throughout history and even today, it is largely absent, or at least rare and idiosyncratic, in many environments where I have served.

We have generated a body of people who consume Christian services and think that that is Christian faith.