Quotes About Church

Then alone, of all church gatherings, is there something of that peace which is the promise and the end of the Church. The mind and the heart purged then, if it is ever to be; the week and its whatever disasters finished and summed and expiated by the stern and formal fury of the morning service; the next week and its whatever disasters not yet born, the heart quiet now for a little while beneath the cool soft blowing of faith and hope.

When we saw her again her hair was cut short, making her look like a girl, with a vague resemblance to those angels in colored church windows—sort of tragic and serene.

They'd started out as a church, or in a church, not liking anyone being gay or getting abortions or using birth control. Protesting military funerals, which was a thing. Basically they were just assholes, though, and took it as the measure of God's satisfaction with them that everybody else thought they were assholes.

I had never met the Roman Catholuc Church outside of a history book. To come across it living, so to speak, was like finding a diplodocus.

Whenever the Church has imagined that it had a claim upon God which others did not have, it is already fallen away from grace.

The challenge of Jesus is the political dilemma of how to be faithful to a strange community, which is shaped by a story of how God is with us. In this chapter we will challenge the assumption, so prevalent at least since Constantine, that the church is judged politically by how well or ill the church's presence in the world works to the advantage of the world.

Just let the Pope tell us that our Western middle-class need for uninhibited sexual self-expression is less important to him and the church than the poor of Latin America, and some of our brightest academic ethicists shall attempt to relegate him to the domain of those who are out of it, behind the times.

The loss of Christendom gives us a joyous opportunity to reclaim the freedom to proclaim the gospel in a way in which we cannot when the main social task of the church is to serve as one among many helpful props for the state.

In 1517, Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to a church door in Wittenberg, Germany, setting off an upheaval that eventually split Christendom in two. Luther accused religious officials of being more concerned with money and power than saving souls, and challenged the Church to reform itself.

Behold, into how great impiety that lawless one has proceeded, by inculcating adultery and murder at the same time! And withal, after such audacious acts, they, lost to all shame, attempt to call themselves a Catholic Church!

By Tertullian's time, the catholic (universal) church was recognized as a collection of any churches that had an affection for each other based on a shared theology passed down from apostolic times.

Theater owners told horror stories of church ladies and civic reformers, many brandishing crucifixes as if to ward off vampires, barging into their offices and demanding they never again show Arbuckle's films.

Yet Arbuckle's fate didn't rest with the entire public. It was decided in white, middle-class drawing rooms where the Federation of Women's Clubs took their votes, and in church halls where ministers whipped their flocks into outrages over Hollywood.

Thus in Prussia the Hohenzollern King was the head of the Church. In no country with the exception of Czarist Russia did the clergy become by tradition so completely servile to the political authority of the State.

The National Reich Church of Germany categorically claims the exclusive right and the exclusive power to control all churches within the borders of the Reich: it declares these to be national churches of the German Reich.

It had the side-to-side proportions of a small sitting room, but its floor was way below. Absurdly deep. Steps angled down. It was a shaft of roomness, shelved with books. Ladders dangled from the stacks. As the church's holdings grew, Billy thought, horizontal constraints required generations of kraken worshippers to dig for their library.

In North Pittman is a particularly striking theology. There, one church memorably teaches that if all the trains were to be still, together, for one moment, if there were no rails percussing the iron road, all human life would wink instantly out. Because such noises are the snoring, the sleep-breathing of a railsea world, & it is the rails that dream us. We do not dream the rails.

Storytellers are a threat. They threaten all champions of control, they frighten usurpers of the right-to-freedom of the human spirit -- in state, in church or mosque, in party congress, in the university or wherever.

Priestley, a brilliant man with an astonishing variety of talents, did not lack for career options. He was employed as a minister for a Dissenting church in Leeds, England. ("Dissenting" meant that it was not affiliated with the Church of England, the state-sanctioned religion.) But

The church was stuffed with mourners, of course. No one from work - I tried to keep my life and my magazine separate - but otherwise everybody Andrew and I knew was there. It was disorientating, like having the entire contents of one's address book dressed in black and exported into pews in non alphabetical order.

Jesus paid much too high a price for us to just come together, do church, then sit back and do nothing. I want to keep burning bright for Jesus. I want to see the saints arise and come into a revelation of who we are in Him and who He is in us. I long to see the Church awaken to the present reality of the power of the Holy Spirit, so that together we will see cities, your nation,

I realized that no one can ever take anything from the Lord for granted, not the prosperity of the Church, not its vast army of missionaries, not its beautiful meeting houses and temples, nor the wealth and comfort he may enjoy. If apathy or complacency or unrighteousness reigns in the heart of a Saint, the gospel will be stripped away and given to another, more responsible steward.

A pastor can teach you on TV, but he can't pastor you on TV. There's so much to gain by belonging to a church.

We need to follow the example set for us by the people of God in Acts, who shared all that they had--a striking portrait of the church getting on her feet and discovering her unique identity. One of the church's shining features was her focus on sharing with anyone who had a need. It was as if Jesus had told them, 'I will provide everything that you need; the only obstacle is that some of you will have too much and others will not have enough. I'm counting on you to sort it out.