Quotes About Church

To reject Christ because the church has sin of this sort in it is like rejecting hospitals because they are full of sick people.

And this filmmaker has the most extraordinary epiphany! He realizes that there is as much merit in trying to ease people's suffering for a moment as there is in "focusing" on it. To ease someone's pain through a distracting, silly, joyous laugh is his lesson. I know there is suffering, so to escape it for a second is truly powerful. That is one church I am staying loyal to. The Church of Laughing.

God helps watchmen by pointing out what needs to be seen and heard to aid the growth and health of a church.

Church attendance is as vital to a disciple as a transfusion of rich, healthy blood to a sick man.

The difference between listening to a radio sermon and going to church...is almost like the difference between calling your girl on the phone and spending an evening with her.

It is a thoroughly anti-Christian doctrine that the Spirit of God, and therefore the life and governing power of the Church, resides in the ministry, to the exclusion of the people.

The real ecumenical crisis today is not between Catholics and Protestants but between traditional and experimental forms of church life.

Inconsistency on the part of pastors and the faithful between what they say and what they do, between word and manner of life, is undermining the church's credibility.

If the church is to be faithful it must be formed andordered from the inside of its experience and confession and not by borrowing from sources extenal to its own life.

Lutheranism restricted itself to an exclusively ecclesiastical and theological character, while Calvinism put its impress in and outside the church upon every aspect of human life.

The nearer to the church, the further from God.

I've been singing all my life. I've always wanted this. I sang in church, in school plays, and my parents gave me vocal lessons. My parents always said this was destined for me.

The eleven o'clock hour on Sunday is the most segregated hour in American life.

I believe in the separation of church and state, absolutely. But I don't believe in the separation of public life from our values, our basic values, and for many of us, our religious values.

True zeal is connected with a holy life. It is remarkable how often the greatest zealots for God, the Church, and sound doctrine (as they regard it), have been unholy and even immoral in their lives.

I don't go to church much anymore, but Methodist values still wind me up and send me ticking into my daily life.

Life is too short and hell is too hot to just play church.

The only difference between the Church of Rome and the Church of England, Franklin joked, is that the former is infallible while the latter is never in the wrong.

Before the revival began, a scant one in ten Americans were church members; by the time it ended, that ratio had risen to eight in ten.

Father-in-law comes to stay, goes to local church and returns saying he will spend the rest of his life translating New English Bible back into English.

Without a passion to disciple believers to Christlikeness through the ministries of the church, the church will focus merely on perpetuating its programs, and the sheep will grow sickly and unfruitful.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon, the great British pulpiteer, had said in a sermon almost exactly a hundred years before: The condition of the church may be very accurately gauged by its prayer meetings. So is the prayer meeting a grace-ometer, and from it we may judge of the amount of divine working among a people. If God be near a church, it must pray. And if he be not there, one of the first tokens of his absence will be a slothfulness in prayer.1

Instead of trying to bring men and women to Christ in the biblical way, we are consumed with the unbiblical concept of "church growth." The Bible does not say we should aim at numbers but rather urges us faithfully to proclaim God's message in the boldness of the Holy Spirit. This will build God's church God's way.

In the church today, we are falling prey to the appeal of "New!" The old truths of the gospel don't seem spectacular enough. We're restless for the latest, greatest, newest teaching or technique. We pastors in particular seem to search for a shortcut or some dynamic new strategy that will fire up our churches.