Quotes About Church

Does Christianity merely mean we must forfeit our Sunday mornings to church attendance, or does being a Christian noticeably improve our lives?

If people in your community are not responding to the gospel as they did in New Testament times, one possible reason is that they do not see God in what you are doing as a church.

Sometimes we see problems in our church. Such occasions are not opportunities to criticize or to leave, but to let Christ use our lives to be a part of His solution. If you are presently in a church that is suffering difficulties, could it be that Christ added you to your congregation for such a time as this?

Christian men who are not yet called into formal church office should never complain that they have nothing to do. We all have much to do in our own hearts and lives, and the requirement for well-qualified men to serve as leaders in the church is always urgent and vital.

A number of bishops and deacons therefore handed over Bibles and chalices to the authorities as ordered. Later, many of them would be called "traitors" after the Latin word for handers-over, traditores, and the Church would split bitterly over the question of their authority to perform their priestly functions.

Much of the church rapidly lost the Reformers' consciousness of the noetic effects of sin, the impact of fallen human nature in darkening the unregenerate mind. Later theologians readily forgot that sin generates an unconscious drive to construct systems of understanding the world which suppress the knowledge of the real God, systems which deform and distort the facts and theories they incorporate.

The key to successful missionary work is a close relationship between the missionaries and the members. Creating an environment in working with members that will bring more into the Church.

Despite leading a 'disordered' life, Greene had a surprising effect on Catholics. Hovering on the edges of the church, his old friend Edith Sitwell, who converted some years later, wrote to him in 1945: 'I said before, but I repeat it, what a great priest you would have made. But you are better as you are.'12 She felt that he understood sin and redemption in a way the clergy did not.

The third Hoel photographer keeps on taking pictures, just as he keeps going to church long after deciding that the entire faithful world has been duped by fairy tales. His pointless photographic ritual gives Frank Jr.'s life a blind purpose that even farming cannot give. It's a monthly exercise in noticing a thing worth no notice at all, a creature as steadfast and reticent as life.

Church practice has been more influenced by Plato than by Jesus. We invariably prefer the universal synthesis, the answer that settles all the dust and resolves every question even when it is not entirely true over the mercy and grace of God.

As G. K. Chesterton once wrote, Your religion is not the church you belong to, but the cosmos you live inside of. Once we know that the entire physical world around us, all of creation, is both the hiding place and the revelation place for God, this world becomes home, safe, enchanted, offering grace to any who look deeply. I call that kind of deep and calm seeing "contemplation.

God did not just start talking to us with the Bible or the church or the prophets. Do we really think that God had nothing at all to say for 13.7 billion years, and started speaking only in the latest nanosecond of geological time? Did all history prior to our sacred texts provide no basis for truth or authority? Of course not. The radiance of the Divine Presence has been glowing and expanding since the beginning of time, before there were any human eyes to see or know about it.

People are always trying to build temples and churches for God. And what is God trying to do? He is trying to build us into a temple, a living temple, a temple of the Holy Spirit, as St. Paul says (1 Corinthians 3:16-17).

It really works very well, but the trouble is that it feels so godly that much, if not most, religion is a belonging system more than a search for intimacy with God. Jesus was not into tribal religion, groupthink, and loyalty tests. Much of the institutional church is into them, however, and always has been. It works too well to call it into question. It holds us together and that feels like salvation, even if it is a very deteriorated form.

In fact, I would say what makes so much religion so innocuous, ineffective, and even unexciting is that there has seldom been a concrete "decision to turn our lives over to the care of God," even in many people who go to church, temple, or mosque. I have been in religious circles all my life and usually find willfulness run rampant in monasteries, convents, chancery offices, and among priests and prelates, ordinary laity, and at church meetings.

Scholars say that ceremonies normally confirm and celebrate the status quo and deny the shadow side of things (think of a Fourth of July parade), whereas true ritual offers an alternative universe, where the shadow is named (think of a true Eucharist). In the church, I am afraid we mostly have ceremonies.

Comfortable people tend to see the church as a quaint antique shop where they can worship old things as substitutes for eternal things.

Both Catholics and Protestants have failed our people by mystifying the very notion of mysticism. The word itself has become relegated to a "misty" and distant realm that implies it is only available to very few and something not to be trusted, much less attractive or desirable. For me, the word "mysticism" simply means experiential knowledge of spiritual things, as opposed to book knowledge, secondhand knowledge, or even church knowledge.

For all who have tried to know Jesus without Christ, many of the core church teachings offered a disembodied Christ without any truly human Jesus, which was the norm for centuries in doctrine and in art. Art is the giveaway of what people really believe at any one time.

Church" in any form should be a "laboratory for resurrection

Both the church's practice and its Platonic pronouncements create tragic gaps for any person with an operative head and a beating heart. But remember, even a little bit of God is well worth loving, and even a little bit of truth and love goes a long way.

In a certain but real sense, the church itself is the first cross that Jesus is crucified on, as we limit, mangle, and try to control the always too big message. All the churches seem to crucify Jesus again and again by their inability to receive his whole body, but they often resurrect him too. I am without doubt a microcosm of this universal church.

Of course, to be honest and consistent, one must ask if "church family" is not also a family that one has to eventually "hate" in this very same way, and with the same scandal involved as hating the natural family.

but we are the Body of Christ. "Christ" is not Jesus