Quotes About Church

Jesus—the Jesus we might discover if we really looked!—is larger, more disturbing, more urgent than we—than the church!—had ever imagined.

The church belongs at the very heart of the world, to be the place of prayer and holiness at the point where the world is in pain—not to be a somewhat "religious" version of the world, on the one hand, or a detached, heavenly minded enclave, on the other. It

An over-authoritarian church, paying no attention to experience, solves the problem by paving the garden with concrete. An over-experiential church solves the (real or imagined) problem of concrete (rigid and "judgmental" forms of faith) by letting anything and everything grow unchecked, sometimes labeling concrete as "law" and so celebrating any and every weed as "grace.

One of the quiet scandals of much modern church life is the poor quality of public reading of scripture. This applies as much, if not more, in churches that think of themselves as 'biblical' as in the so-called 'mainstream' denominations

The church must, in short, learn from Jesus before Pilate how to speak the truth to power rather than for power or merely against power.

the church has unhesitatingly privileged the creed and let the canon fend for itself—

The church is never more at risk than when it sees itself merely as the solution bearer and forgets that every day it must say, "Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner," and allow that confession to work its way into genuine humility even as it stands boldly before the world and its crazy empires.

Anyone who supposes that, because a church has officially renounced some doctrine, nobody thereafter will hold to it, has little experience of real church life.

Actually, the public reading of scripture in the course of the church's worship is not about 'teaching'; it's not there to impart information. It is part of the worship and praise of God; it is a way, a central way, a more central way even than the best hymns and worship songs, of praising God for his mighty

My fourth starting-point towards a fresh approach is to insist on some kind of lectio continua, both personally and publicly. There are, to be sure, many times and occasions when we need to choose special readings to suit a particular moment or challenge. But the church's staple diet ought to be to work through the books of the Bible on a more or less continuous loop.

More satisfactory by far, at the level of history, is to say with Gerhard Lohfink that Jesus did not intend to found a church because there already was one, namely the people of Israel itself. Jesus' intention was therefore to reform Israel, not to found a different community altogether.

Mission, in its widest as well as its more focused senses, is what the church is there for.

What, in particular, might it mean to say that 'as Jesus was to Israel, so the Church should be for the world'?

The idea that "suffering is good for you, therefore you need to put up with the conditions we are laying upon you" is at best callous and patronizing. At worst it is unpardonable and abusive. Jesus himself, warning that suffering was bound to come, pronounced a solemn woe on the person through whom it came (Matt. 18:7). Life will throw quite enough problems at us without the church adding more while telling us sanctimoniously that it's good for us.

One might even state it as an axiom: when the church leaves out bits of its core teaching, heretics will pick them up, turn them into something new, and use them to spread doubt and unbelief.

Heaven's rule, God's rule, is thus to be put into practice in the world, resulting in salvation in both the present and the future, a salvation that is both for humans and, through saved humans, for the wider world. This is the solid basis for the mission of the church.

The mission of the church must therefore include, at a structural level, the recognition that our present space, time, and matter are all subject not to rejection but to redemption.

re: I Corinthians 15:34,58] "The present life of the church, in other words, is not about "soul-making," the attempt to produce or train disembodied beings for a future disembodied life. It is about working with fully human beings who will be reembodied at the last, after the model of the Messiah.

In following this vocation, we will thereby be doing what Jesus told his followers in John 16: in the power of the Spirit, we will be holding the world to account. Just as the Jesus-followers were showing the officials of the Roman empire that there was a different way to run society, so there will be signs of God's kingdom that can emerge from the creative, healing, restorative work of church members today.

Theology, after all, was made for the sake of the church, not the church for theology.

But in scripture itself God's purpose is not just to save human beings, but to renew the whole world. This is the unfinished story in which readers of scripture are invited to become actors in their own right. "The authority of scripture" is thus a sub-branch of several other theological topics: the mission of the church, the work of the Spirit

the ultimate future hope and the way it is anticipated in the present, and of course the nature of the church. Failure to pay attention to all of these in discussing how scripture functions is part of the problem, as we can see when people, hearing the word "scripture," instantly think of a rule-book—and then, according to taste, either assume that all the rules are to be followed without question or assume that they can all now be broken.

Without God's Spirit, there is nothing we can do that will count for God's kingdom. Without God's Spirit, the church simply can't be the church.

Stay in church, stay in prayer, stay in the Word, and stay in fellowship with other believers.