Quotes About Congregation

Donald Coggan's wisdom: "When true preaching takes place, the main actor is not the preacher, nor the congregation, but the Holy Spirit."15

If anybody is left behind in a congregation of a thousand, the preacher has not preached well.

Long ago I learned that more than half of any pastor's congregation come to church broken and in the grip of some life issue that is eating at their wellbeing.

The Bible was perfectly clear on this point: 'Woman shall be silent in the congregation.' What was there to discuss? Women had no business being members of the clergy.

Notice that the unchurched show little interest in attending a church known for the quality of its worship music or even the quality of its sermons. Millions of churchless adults are very sensitive to the balance between teaching and street-level ministry; they fear getting connected to a congregation that is all talk and no action.

The local church is not part of the church but is the church in its local expression.

The church was an eschatological congregation, not because it had experienced the blessings of the messianic age but because it was the people designated for the future eschatological age.

It is obvious that there is no uniform pattern of government in Acts. The form of leadership was an historical development in which the apostles, elders, and the congregation shared.

The local congregation is not part of the church; the universal church is not thought of as the sum and total of its parts; rather, the local congregation is the church in its local expression.

Whenever God erects a house of prayer The devil always builds a chapel there; And 'twill be found, upon examination, The latter has the largest congregation.

Yet perhaps the pale-faced congregation was almost as fearful a sight to the minister as his black veil to them.

In his house," intoned the congregation, "He shall return, that dead lies dreaming.

Not that she's happy with Bob. Iris still hasn't forgiven him for unintentionally massacring most of her congregation, cocking up a very important summoning which might have shaved four years off the critical path to the New Management, and always being late with his timesheets.

As the Athenians to the Pnyx, the antique Romans to the Campus Martius, or our Nordic ancestors to the All-Thing, so the folk of Tilling flocked to the High Street for extempore parliament.

There were irreconcilable differences among the congregations in town, but members from all of them merged solidly on the necessity of this action: Do what you have to. Neither the Convent nor the women in it can continue.

If God's words determine reality, then of all the things a pastor does, speaking the words of God to the congregation is the most important.

In every country it is the priest who is conservative, for two reasons — because it is his bread and because he can only move with the people. All priests are not strong. If the people say, "Preach two thousand gods," the priests will do it. They are the servants of the congregation who pay them. God does not pay them. So blame yourselves before blaming the priests. You can only get the government and the religion and the priesthood you deserve, and no better.

Right, by tomorrow morning everyone will have congregated in Le Havre and you can all pile in the car and come back out here together, said Tristan in a rapid monotone, as if needing to rationalize being along with me overnight as nothing more than a matter of logistics. DEAR READER: It was not a matter of logistics.

I would say that grace is startling," Jean told me as he began retelling the story of how he wound up as pastor of Lagniappe Presbyterian Church, a growing congregation that meets in a glorified metal hangar in Bay St. Louis. "It's just startling. It isn't supposed to work. This wasn't supposed to work.

The harmony and unity in a church will never exceed the harmony and unity in the homes represented in the congregation.

You can see the goldenrod, that most tenacious and pernicious and beauteous of all New England flora, bowing away from the wind like a great and silent congregation.

Therefore, when I faced a congregation, it began to take all the strength I had not to stammer, not to curse, not to tell them to throw away their Bibles and get off their knees and go home and organize, for example, a rent strike.

that if] you created the right type of corporate community, the right type of autonomous congregation, genius would flower.

A group is as healthy as its 'social contract' is clear; a congregation as faithful as its covenant is mutually understood; a pastor as effective as the pastor's and people's commitment to trust and integrity is honored, guarded, and fulfilled.