Quotes About Church

I yearn for a grace-abounding church that rewards rather than punishes honesty, and that, in Jesus' words, exists for the sinners and not the righteous, the sick and not the healthy.

According to Barna surveys, 61 percent of today's youth had been churched at one point during their teen years but are now spiritually disengaged.

persons with AIDS, and they hear a very clear message from the church: "You get no sympathy from me. You deserve your suffering as God's punishment. Keep away." I cannot think of a more terrifying disease than AIDS, or one that provokes a less compassionate response.

what about grace? How rare to find a church competing to "out-grace" its rivals.

Jimmy Carter taught a Sunday school class throughout his presidency, winning the grudging respect of reporters who had once questioned his religious talk as a political ploy. Even so, he lost many Christians' votes to Ronald Reagan, the only U.S. president to have been divorced and who rarely attended church and gave little to charity, mainly because Reagan supported many of the favorite causes of the religious Right.

The church works best as a force of resistance, a counterbalance to the consuming power of the state.

somehow throughout history the church has managed to gain a reputation for its ungrace. As a little English girl prayed, "O God, make the bad people good, and the good people nice.

Unfortunately, most of my secular friends would agree with Bill Gates, who considers religion a waste of time: "There's a lot more I could be doing on Sunday morning," he told an interviewer. They view the church not as a change agent that can affect all of society but as a place where like-minded people go to feel better about themselves.

A church that lives by power dies by power.

It has taken me years to distill the Gospel out of the subculture in which I first encountered it. Sadly, many of my friends gave up on the effort, never getting to Jesus because the pettiness of the church blocked the way.

The message of this book has the power to reform the church, one relationship at a time.

see the confusion of politics and religion as one of the greatest barriers to grace. C. S. Lewis once said that almost all crimes of Christian history have come about when religion is confused with politics. Politics, which always runs by the rules of ungrace, allures us to trade away grace for power, a temptation the church has often been unable to resist.

A similar cycle has recurred throughout church history. Christians present an attractive counterculture until they become the dominant culture. Then they divert from their mission, join the power structure, and in the process turn society against them. Rejected, they retreat into a minority subculture, only to start the cycle all over again.

Church is a place where I can say, unashamedly, I don't need to sin. I need another sinner.

Sadly, Jesus' followers tend to take the reverse approach. Some churches gradually lower the ideals, accommodating moral standards to a changing culture. Others raise the bar of grace so that needy people feel unwelcome: "We don't want that kind of person in our church." Either way we fail to communicate the spectacular good news that everyone fails and yet a gracious God offers forgiveness to all.

Where is God when it hurts? I have often asked. The answer is another question, Where is the church when it hurts?

He added a chilling remark, "As a gay man, I've found it's easier for me to get sex on the streets than to get a hug in church.

The church marched into his heart. Williams never abandon Anglicanism; he pushed at its borders.

The baby should always be saved in preference to the mother. That is the advice of the Holy Church, you know that. I was only reminding women of their duty. There is no need to make everything so personal, Margaret. You make everything into your own tragedy.

Sometimes they accuse her in Latin and she looks at them, baffled by a language that she has only ever heard spoken in church, in the Mass that she loves. How could these very sounds, these familiar beloved tones, so solemn and musical to her, now be the voice of accusation ?

Nowhere in the Bible does it say that marriage is a sacrament," Anne replies. "It was not God who joined us together. The priest says it was; but this is not true. This is the word of the church, not the Bible. Our wedding, like every wedding, was an act of man, not of God. It was not a holy sacrament.

who could deny the Pope when he held the keys of heaven in his hand?

Now to Him who is able to do exceeding abundantly beyond all that we ask or think, according to the power that works within us, to Him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations forever and ever. Amen.

Satan will first attempt to destroy the power of the Papacy and bring about the downfall of the Church through heresies, schisms and persecutions that must surely follow. Failing in this, he will then attack the Church from without. For this purpose he will raise up Antichrist and his prophet to lead the faithful into error and destroy those who remain steadfast.