Quotes About Church

The perfect church service would be the one we were almost unaware of our attention would have been on God. But every novelty prevents this. It fixes our attention on the service itself and thinking about worship is a different thing than worshipping ... 'Tis mad idolatry that makes the service greater than the god.

A missional church is one where the whole membership is involved in some aspect of mission, so that mission is not a function of the church but its essential nature.

The church is probably the world's largest civic society organization—present in virtually every nation and every community, and having an immense impact on how people think. If the church can harness this influence to inspire people to care more for creation and to act upon this care, then the world will be a very different place.

Men are doubtful and skeptical about the Church they suspect and dislike the clergy they are impatient of theological systems but for Jesus Christ, as he stand out to view in the sacred pages, as they dimly realize him in their own best selves, as they catch faint traces of him in the lives of his saints, they have no other sentiments than those of respect and affection.

Where God's Word is, there is God Himself, there God's Spirit is at work, there God establishes His covenant, there He plants His church.

It is, moreover, of the greatest importance for every believer, particularly for the dogmatician, to know which Scriptural truths, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, have been brought to universal recognition in the church of Christ. By this process, after all, the church is kept from immediately mistaking a private opinion for the truth of God.

In case a dogma is not based on divine authority, it is wrong to call it by that name, and it should not have a place in the faith of the church.

The church's holiness must not be sacrificed for its catholicity, and the church's catholicity may not be surrendered in favor of its holiness. For in denying either, we lose both. Both attributes by nature characterize the one Christian church.

Therefore, Calvin ascribes a tremendous value to the official proclamation of the word, but he does not make the officeholder the "owner" of the word and Spirit.

Truth is the silliest thing under the sun. Try to get a living by the Truth and go to the Soup Societies. Heavens! Let any clergyman try to preach the Truth from its very stronghold, the pulpit, and they would ride him out of his church on his own pulpit bannister.

It causes the world great indignation that the question of God and his revelation could be taken so seriously, as seriously as it was taken by the teachers and synods of the ancient church, and by Lutherans, Reformed, and Catholics in the century of the Reformation.

where there is a people which no longer has a future, there the church still has a future, because the future of the church is the future of Jesus Christ.

We recognize far too seldom that religious and confirmation instruction and the Sunday school can in no way give what previous generations knew from home through Bible reading and what was learned from pious parents. Today the need of the hour for the Lutheran Church is to become a teaching church again.

The "apostolic church" is a poor church. It has no marvelous new revelations, no knowledge of higher worlds, no possibility of proving its faith by reason. It lives from the witness of a few men who were neither religious geniuses, nor ethical heroes, nor original thinkers. The only authority for the unverifiable things they said was that Jesus Christ had sent them and that they were witnesses of His resurrection.

The essence of a church confession lies, first of all, in the fact that it bears witness to objective truths. These, like the incarnation or the resurrection of Christ, cannot be derived from subjective experiences and are independent of all subjective opinions. Second, it belongs to the nature of such a confession that it is the creed of the church, that it is confessed not only by an I but by a we.

God's forgiving grace may bring the erring sinner into the church triumphant, where there is no more untruth. On the other hand, this door will be shut to many a one who has done battle for the truth in perfect orthodoxy, but has forgotten that he too was only a poor sinner who lives only by forgiving grace.

Wherever the means of grace are rightly administered, there God fulfills His promise that the Word will not return empty, there faith is created, there is the church, the congregation of saints, of justified sinners.

Before the war an apple tree had stood behind the church. It was an apple tree that ate its own apples.

A lie is no less a lie because it is a thousand years old. Your undivided church has liked nothing better than persecuting its own members, burning them and hacking them apart when they stood by their own conscience, slashing their bellies open and feeding their guts to dogs.

Tell me, why do you think I do this?" The king sounds curious. "Out of lust? Is that what you think?" Kill a cardinal? Divide your country? Split the church? 'Seems extravagant,' Chapuys murmurs.

My conscience holds with the majority, which makes me know it does not speak false. "Against Henry's kingdom, I have all the kingdoms of Christendom. Against each one of your bishops, I have a hundred saints. Against your one parliament, I have all the general councils of the church, stretching back for a thousand years.

The Revolution is your bride," he said. "As the Church is the Bride of Christ.

he leaves the church, Henry puts on his hat. It is a big hat, a new hat. And in that hat there is a feather.

The New Testament reveals the present age as a parenthesis in the prophetic program during which the Church is called out from among the Gentiles, a stranger and pilgrim body, belonging to the kingdom of God, but in no sense identical with the kingdom of heaven.