Quotes About Church

When the worship of God turns into a "worship experience," we have derailed as the body of Christ.

When church is less like a family and more like an enterprise, its leaders act less like pastors and more like commanders. This puts everyone in danger—the leaders and the people. Spiritual abuse thrives where pastors are untouchable and people are commodities. No one intends this, but absolute power corrupts in every human environment.

If Jesus is the heart of the church, people are the lifeblood. There is a reason He created community and told us to practice grace and love and camaraderie and presence. People soften the edges and fill in the gaps. Friends make up some of the best parts of the whole story.

Beth couldn't fight anymore. Her whole body wanted simply to stop. She'd die here in Thomas's little church, not ten yards from the churchyard where Thomas lay. She thought she heard the lectern door squeak, and she saw Thomas standing by it in the white cassock she'd darned so often. His dark hair was gray at the temples, his kind eyes so blue. "Be brave, my Beth," she thought he said." It's almost over.

There is only one kind of man who carries two shotguns into church. That's a man who doesn't turn the other cheek.

that renunciation of human closeness, of our deepest instincts: is it, in the end, simply too much to ask? Good men-sound, healthy men-can't make the sacrifice, or don't want to; has Holy Mother settled for the unsound and unhealthy? Has the Church, ever pragmatic, made do with what is left?

However, if you're navigating the tension between your Bible and your life, or Jesus' ancient ideas and the modern wayward church, or God's kingdom on earth and reality, then welcome. Sometimes it's better to wade through murky waters with a fellow explorer than with an authority. Questions can still be investigated with another learner instead of with one who has only answers.

It's not magic; it's hard work by vested people who share a vision for God's kingdom in their city. An influential church is nothing more than a bunch of believers who get in the game and live on mission.

This is the mission we are all called to as believers, the noble task of the church. It's not enough to be theologically brilliant without the heart of a missionary. It's sometimes intangible work planted in the messy soil of relationships instead of the cleaner territory of theology.

Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the church's prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Oh, priceless scholarship, what would we do without you? Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God. Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament.

This is my high calling: to live on mission as an adopted daughter of Jesus. If people around me aren't moved by my Christ or my church, then I must be doing a miserable job of representing them both.

church-planting team is representative of the culture, not a group of paid professionals or full-time ministers.

My grandmother always taught me, 'If you don't have a home, family, and church, you don't have anything.'

Like a stripped and lifeless trunk the Oriental church produces no theologians, thinkers, or savants.

The old church tower and garden wall Are black with autumn rain And dreary winds foreboding call The darkness down again

The grey church looked greyer, and the lonely church looked lonelier.

All day had been flooding with rain; we could not go to church, so Joseph must needs get up a congregation in the garret; and, while Hindley and his wife were basked downstairs before a fire … Heathcliff, myself and the unhappy plough-boy were commanded to take out Prayer-books and mount - we were ranged in a row, on a sack of corn, groaning and shivering, and hoping that Joseph would shiver too, so that he might give us a short homily for his own sake. A vain idea!

Some keep the Sabbath going to church, I keep it staying at home, with a bobolink for a chorister, and an orchard for a dome.

When I hoped I feared, Since I hoped I dared; Everywhere alone As a church remain; Spectre cannot harm, Serpent cannot charm; He deposes doom, Who hath suffered him.

Come with me this morning to the church within our hearts, where the bells are always ringing, and the preacher whose name is love — shall intercede for us!

When we speak of authority at present we usually have in mind governmental authority. Actually, social order is most firm when imposed and maintained by the limited authorities of family, school, church, job, neighborhood and so on. In 1848 the Spaniard Donoso-Cortés predicted that "when religious discipline ceases to exist there cannot be enough of government; all despotisms will not be sufficient." This holds true to some extent of the other minor authorities.

The Church is seen as a secular organization - a real-estate conglomerate, a powerful lobby for the oppression of women - which has little or nothing to do with spiritual transcendence. It will doubtless seek to ban this book. Less than two hundred and fifty years ago, it would have burned the author.

The church degraded woman by destroying her self-respect and teaching her to feel consciousness of guilt in the very fact of her existence. To this day, an open, confident look upon a woman's face is deprecated as evil. Death by torture was the method of the church for the repression of woman's intellect, knowledge being held as evil and dangerous in her hands.

What up to that point could have been viewed as an internal rebellion within the Church now became a schism in which two rival faiths confronted each other in open hostility.