Quotes About Church

I felt that the Church was the Church of the poor,... but at the same time, I felt that it did not set its face against a social order which made so much charity in the present sense of the word necessary. I felt that charity was a word to choke over. Who wanted charity? And it was not just human pride but a strong sense of man's dignity and worth, and what was due to him in justice, that made me resent, rather than feel pround of so mighty a sum total of Catholic institutions.

I don't think God is so jealous about our worship of Him that He will want to separate those who serve His purposes, serve His goodness, because they have read a book, even one written by an atheist, and have been moved, or because they have wanted to be fair all their lives, but have never stepped in a church, from those who have heard God's words in church or read His words in the Bible and become convinced by them.

In one such church in Wilmington, Delaware, the police broke up the meeting by throwing tear-gas bombs through the windows and when the marchers broke out from the church in disorderly fashion, clubbed and arrested those whom they suspected of being the leaders.

I still say a church steeple with a lightning rod on top shows a lack of confidence.

Christ has brought it to pass, that those that the Father had given him, should be brought into the household of God; that he, and his Father, and his people should be as it were one society, one family; that the church should be as it were admitted into the society of the blessed Trinity.156

Most prodigious by far was the growth of the Baptists and the Methodists. Scholars estimate that at the outbreak of the American Revolution there were 494 Baptist congregations in the colonies. By 1795, this number had more than doubled to 1,152, and Baptists were poised to exert an enormous influence on the church of the next century. They proved most powerful in the South and on the ever-expanding frontier,

The hardest people to talk with about Jesus are not the people who are far from God and who know they are far from God. Those people are often eager to hear about Jesus' love and forgiveness. The hardest people to talk with about Jesus are religious people — baptized but not born again, members of an earthly church but not members of Christ by faith.

Jesus uses one of the most powerful pictures in the Bible of his seeking love for lost people. He portrays himself standing at the door of the church or standing at the door of a human heart and knocking. It's unlikely that the entire religious crowd at Laodicea would repent, but Jesus is hopeful that at least one will hear his knock or his voice calling. If anyone responds and opens the door, Jesus will enter that heart and change that life.

It didn't seem to matter that Reagan made his heartfelt endorsements of traditional family values despite being divorced and so alienated from his own children that one of them would write a book about what a rotten father he had been; by the same token, the president's failure to have made regular or even occasional visits to church hardly dimmed his appeal for the resurgent religious right

A creedal church is one in which the words I believe in God the Father Almighty provoke tears of gladness in strong men. A creed muttered in nominal unbelief is oxymoronic. The word creed comes from "credo," I believe. A creedal church believes certain things to be true, and acts as though truth mattered.

Every epistle in the New Testament begins with a reference to grace and peace, and this grace and peace is "from God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ." The Holy Spirit is not mentioned directly, but I believe, following Jonathan Edwards, that this is because the Spirit is the grace and peace. The Church is therefore the place where the Holy Spirit is most in evidence, as He anoints the preaching, as He inhabits the praises of His people, and as He blesses the sacraments.

But believing in the separation of church and state (as we do) does not mean that we believe in the separation of righteousness and state. We do not believe in the separation of morality and state, or the separation of God and state. To believe in the separation of God and state is tantamount to desiring a godless state. And to desire that is to declare war on all humanity.

She wasn't really going to church anywhere, but she remained a contemporary evangelical to the back teeth. She had lost her faith while still managing to hang on to all the platitudes.

Neglect of this truth is pervasive in the modern church. One of the most difficult things for modern men to understand is how they are responsible for their wives. Men come into a marriage pastoral counseling session with the assumption that "She has her problems," and "I have mine," and the counselor is here to help us split the difference. But the husband is responsible for all the problems. This is the case for no other reason than that he is the husband.

No greater indictment of the contemporary church than this can be found: the secular state is operating on all cylinders, and yet for the most part, the Christian pulpit remains a safe place to be.

The church is in the world the way a ship is in the ocean, and that is the way it should be. But bad things start happening when the ocean gets into the ship.

The church has ministers—which was a gift of Jesus Christ Himself from Heaven—and the church also has a professional class, which may or may not be a gift from Heaven.

The unity our nation needs—and we do desperately need it—is not a "group hug" unity, and it is not that kind of unity with a Jesus shine put on it. The message is not "Jesus could help us to like each other better," although that would be a downstream consequence. The message we rather need to hear, and which the church needs to declare, is "Jesus forgives our sins.

And as the history of the church revealed in Acts shows, their central debate was over whether or not the Gentiles had to include their children in the New Covenant by means of circumcision—their debate was not whether the Jewish Christians had to start excluding their children.

The reformation of the church must occur so that there is a reformation of our subculture, and then our subculture will affect the larger polis. Expecting our faith to affect the larger polis when it has not yet changed the average shelf at the local Christian book store is expecting something that is not going to happen.

The church today is dominated by this theology of silly women.

Husbands, the world is watching you. You are to model what the saving looks like. Wives, the world is watching you. You are to model what the salvation looks like. Why is the world not streaming to the rod of Jesse? Why are the nations not turning away from their folly? Is it because the gospel the Church is presenting to them is a gospel that looks too much like our marriages?

The need of the hour is for the Church to help establish a defined counterculture. This requires much more than defined denominational boundaries, or sectarian carve-outs. There needs to be a defined center (the Church), a defined staging area (the kingdom), and a defined mission field (the world).

The Church does not create the truth, the Church supports the truth. And the Church is also described as a pillar, lifting up the truth so that all might see and honor it.