Quotes About Church

Furthermore, the initial page, always crucial, passed every test, with its promises and divisions, its portentous opening paragraph like the great door of a church, its exotic setting and strange names, the rolling orchestration of its prose.

We reject the charge of tribalism, particularly from those whose theologies serve to buttress the most nefarious brand of tribalism of all—the omnipotent state. The church is the one political entity in our culture that is global, transnational, transcultural. Tribalism is not the church determined to serve God rather than Caesar. Tribalism is the United States of America, which sets up artificial boundaries and defends them with murderous intensity.

In a community where mobs do not appear to take white prisoners from jail cells to lynch them, who is really responsible for the lynching of a Negro prisoner, the band who actually blew out his brain or those of us in the church who say of Willie Earle and his kind, "RACA"—you're an empty-headed, worthless nigger! (That's about the meaning of the word "Raca" as Jesus used it in the 5th Chapter of Matthew.)

I sat on the steps of my father's church thinking how much I loved the dark. The taste of what it offered sweet on the tongue of my imagination. The delicious burn of trespass on my conscience. I was a sinner. I knew that without a doubt. But I was not alone. And the night was the accomplice of us all.

At the Council of Chalcedon in 451, the main body of the church defined Christ as having two natures, divine and human.

The most striking aspect of the "religious revival" of the 1950s, after all, had been the absence of devotion. Going to church then was more a social than a religious act. In the late sixties faith was expressed by not going to church.

We often charge Men, both in Church and State, with changing their Principles; but the Charge is too hasty; for no Man ever did, or can change his Principles, but by a Birth from above.

The disgrace of the church in the twentieth century is that more zeal is evident among Communists and cultists than among Christians.

Later that day, when Rhoda returned from church, she had her prize tucked under her arm; it was a copy of Elsie Dinsmore, and, going at once to the park, she opened her book and began eagerly to read, as though she hoped to find there an understanding of those puzzling values she saw in others

I guess the lesson to be learned from the [Catholic] church is that while homosexuality is a sin against GOD, molestation and rape, well... they're just sins against a child.

It's impossible to overestimate the importance of reading aloud in the liturgy of the church. In Catholic Christianity of the time, the 'liturgy of the Word' ranked alongside the 'liturgy of the Eucharist' – as indeed it still does. The

I want them to think of being in church as being in the middle of a work of art, a collective witness of fellow human beings, wherever they are and whatever they're up to.

By such means as the inculcating of parental instruction, the institution of classes for the children and young people of each congregation, the Church of Christ must seek to do the duty which she undertook when she received these little ones into the fold of the visible Church. She is not at liberty to make over her duty into the hands of parents, any more than parents are to throw over their responsibility on the Church. The

The family—how much of a nation's happiness and prosperity depends on that institution as a nursery, a school, a society, a sanctuary, a little church, and an emblem of the great family—"the whole family," part of which is in heaven, and part still on earth! There

Organised religion he hated; the church in all its guises for the way it took money from the poor and superstitious to sustain priests, ministers and vicars,

Poverty is not primarily about money. It is about having no idea what to do and/or having no one with whom to do it. The former I called imagination and the latter I called community. To the extent that our neighborhood had imagination and community, we were not poor. But without imagination and community, no money could help us. . . . The role of the local church is to be a community of imagination [for the kingdom].12

What is to be gained if we are so intent in reaching out to the unchurched that we then unchurch the reached?

Evangelicals now stand among those who are on easiest terms with the world, for they have lost their capacity for dissent.

When the Church loses the Word of God it loses the very means by which God does his work. In its absence, therefore, a script is being written, however unwittingly, for the Church's undoing, not in one cataclysmic moment, but in a slow, inexorable slide made up of piece by tiny piece of daily dereliction.

Our world is being shaken to its very foundations. Instead of offering great thoughts about God, the meaning of reality, and the gospel, there are evangelical churches that are offering only little therapeutic nostrums that are sweet but mostly worthless. One even wonders whether some current churchgoers might even be resistant were they to encounter a Christianity that is deep, costly, and demanding.

The evangelical Church today, with some exceptions, is not very inspiring in this regard. It is not being heroic. It is exhibiting too little of the moral splendor that Christ calls it to exhibit. Much of it, instead, is replete with tricks, gadgets, gimmicks, and marketing ploys as it shamelessly adapts itself to our emptied-out, blinded, postmodern world.

am equally at home in an Anglican or Baptist church

The church's one foundation is Jesus Christ her Lord; she is his new creation by water and the Word. From heaven he came and sought her to be his holy bride; with his own blood he bought her, and for her life he died. Samuel J. Stone (1839–1900)

threatened. As late as 1775, townsmen within twenty miles of the sea were urged to carry arms to church lest godless British raiding parties surprise them while at worship. After the service, the men left the meeting first—a regional folkway that continued long after its military origins had been forgotten.