Quotes About Church

So a working definition of missional church is a community of God's people that defines itself, and organizes its life around, its real purpose of being an agent of God's mission to the world. In

The first apostles of Christ were in the eyes of the world "unlearned and ignorant" men: it was not until the Church had endured a persecution and had grown largely in numbers that Christ called a learned man to be His apostle.31

Being the church that Jesus intended means that we must participate in God's eternal purposes for his world. Renewal means more than reinventing ourselves; it means rediscovering the primal power of the Spirit and the gospel already present in the life of the church—reconnecting with this purpose and recovering the forgotten ways. This purpose and potential have always been there, but individuals and communities have largely lost touch with them.

It was C. S. Lewis who observed that there exists in every church something that sooner or later works against the very purpose for which it came into existence. So we must strive very hard, by the grace of God to keep the church focused on the mission that Christ originally gave to it.11

Whether we choose it or not, almost all expressions of church in the West are implicitly vulnerable to nondiscipleship, professionalized ministry, spiritual passivity, and consumerism. The problem is rooted in the profoundly nonmissional assumptions of the system itself.

A missional church is a church that must live the dialectic. It must stay in the journey.

It smelled big, smelled like morning in a church hall where a jumble sale was going on, the air a weak infusion in which stale, damp coats steeped with the crumbling fresh pinkness of homemade coconut ice, the sneeze-provoking pages of old children's annuals and the sour metal lick of cast-off Dinky cars.

But perhaps when you were too obedient, and did not do openly what others did, and were quiet in church and hard-working at school, then some unknown rebellion brewed in you, doing harm to you, though how I do not understand.

He went out of the door, and she watched him through the little window, walking slowly to the door of the church. Then she sat down at his table, and put her head on it, and was silent, with the patient suffering of black women, with the suffering of oxen, with the suffering of any that are mute.

Art is History's nostalgia, it prefers a thatched roof to a concrete factory, and the huge church above a bleached village.

A People's History is not a nostalgia trip. In these pages I hope it is clear that no period of church history is superior to another. Rather, each time unfolds on its own historical merits, as Christians struggle to enact Jesus's command to love God and neighbor in a unique human context.

doubting their faith, and those just hanging on is that church or Christianity has failed them, wounded them, betrayed them, or maybe just bored them—and they do not want to

On Sunday we didn't work at all. That was the Lord's Day. As soon as we heard the drum beating, we knew it was time for church. We met at the house of Captain Myles Standish, the military leader of the colony. Then we lined up by threes and marched to church. Everybody in town was expected to go (even if they weren't church members), and the service lasted all morning. Then after lunch (which they called dinner) we went back for three more hours!

and it was the Church after 1559 which established 'Communion' as the norm. There's a nice little doctoral project awaiting someone to trace out how 'Communion' won the battle against 'Lord's Supper'; I would make a preliminary guess that it was not until 1662.

The preservation of the cathedral tradition had huge significance for the future of Anglicanism, and it may be Queen Elizabeth's chief original contribution to her Church.

We know of the tensions between the first Church in Jerusalem and Churches in which Paul of Tarsus became the prominent teacher .. The Jerusalem Church remained closer to the parent Judaism than other Churches did, that secondary grouping of other Churches revered the ministry and then the memory of Paul, who suffered the potential handicap of never having met the lord in his public ministry unlike his contemporaries in the Jerusalem leadership who included relatives of the lord.

J.R. Dupuche, 'Sufism and Hesychasm', in B. Neil, G. D. Dunn and L. Cross (eds.), Prayer and Spirituality in the Early Church III: Liturgy and Life (Strathfield, NSW, 2003), 335–43.

Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church.

Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our church. We are fighting today for costly grace.

So many people come to church with a genuine desire to hear what we have to say, yet they are always going back home with the uncomfortable feeling that we are making it too difficult for them to come to Jesus.

The early morning belongs to the Church of the risen Christ. At the break of light it remembers the morning on which death and sin lay prostrate in defeat and new life and salvation were given to mankind

It is God's earth out of which man is taken. From it he has his body. His body belongs to his essential being. Man's body is not his prison, his shell his exterior, but man himself. Man does not "have" a body; he does not "have" a soul; rather he "is" body and soul. Man in the beginning is really his body. He is one. He is his body, as Christ is completely his body, as the Church is the body of Christ

They get married, but their marriage will look quite different from marriage as the world understands it. Christian marriage will be undertaken "in the Lord" (I Cor. 7.39). It will be sanctified in the service of the Body of Christ and in the discipline of prayer and self-control (I Cor. 7.5). It will be a parable of the self-sacrificing love of Christ for his Church. It will even be itself a part of the Body of Christ, a Church in miniature (Eph. 5.32).

To make a start, it should give away all its property to those in need. The clergy must live solely on the free-will offerings of their congregations, or possibly engage in some secular calling. The church must share in the secular problems of ordinary human life, not dominating, but helping and serving.