Quotes About Churches

While the churches, bringing the sweet smell of piety for the soul, came in prancing and farting like brewery horses in bock-beer time, the sister evangelism, with release and joy for the body, crept in silently and grayly, with its head bowed and its face covered.

While the churches, bringing the sweet smell of piety for the soul, came in prancing and farting like brewery horses in bock-beer time, the sister evangelism, with release and joy for the body, crept in silently and grayly, with its head bowed and its face covered. You

Death is easily fooled. If the churches don't work, a filter will do.

Churches that lack accountability structures for leaders (or where leaders have dismantled them) are powerless when things go wrong. Not only are they driving without a seatbelt, they have cut the brakes and may be hurtling towards a cliff.

But who's ever safe? Down below us are the kind of people who walk armed into churches and movie theaters and through libraries, blast fevers into federal buildings, and build bombs out of things they bought cheap at a hardware store. What kind of myth is it, that people like them are keeping the rest of us safe?

Despite much talk in this land about religious freedom, churches and their schools now confront grave difficulties.

Hit don't make no difference what a man perfesses. I been in a heap o' churches. There's the Nazarene Church and the Pentecost and the Holy Rollers and the Baptists and I don't know what-all. I cain't see much difference to nary one of 'em. There's a good to all of 'em and there's a bad.

continued with considerable bitterness into the 1700s. Moreover, the devastating Thirty Years' War (1618–48), which was fought over a confused welter of religious, political, and economic matters, had enervated central European life in general, including the churches.

When they faded and Protestant leaders looked around, they recognized that a situation had come into existence that almost none of them had anticipated. That new situation was the presence of separate Protestant churches in separate parts of Europe.

In i86o the income of the nation's churches and religious voluntary societies came quite close to matching the total receipts of the federal government. Today the ratio of annual federal income to annual religion-related giving is about twenty-five to one.

Their surprise was compounded by the fact that these new churches were separated not only by geography but also by subtle, but important, differences in Christian teaching that almost no one had noticed so long as their attention had been fixed on reforming the whole Western church.

Local churches exist to display God's glory to the nations. We do that by fixing our eyes on the gospel of Jesus Christ, trusting him for salvation, and then loving one another with God's own holiness, unity, and love.

We cannot finally judge the correctness of what we do in evangelism by the immediate response that we see. It is important to understand this truth, because a failure to understand it can distract well-meaning churches into pragmatic, results-oriented endeavors and it can transform pastors into neurotic people-manipulators.

Our churches, too, must recover the centrality of the Word in our worship. Music is a biblically required response to God's Word, but the music God gave us was not given to build our churches upon. A church built on music - of whatever style - is a church built on shifting sands.

May John Newton's prayer for himself be our prayer to God for our churches: "I am not what I ought to be. I am not what I wish to be. I am not what I hope to be. Yet I can truly say, I am not what I once was. By the grace of God I am what I am.

Churches today in the United States—liberal, as well as conservative and fundamentalist ones—seem often today more like a Christendom that is compliant with U.S. imperial designs and its carceral state.

Italy was about churches, Greece it's ruins; but Israel was about surviving and about feeling glad.

To visit Florence without visiting churches and museums would be perverse.

Unfortunately, most of the major denominations still practice segregation in local churches, hospitals, schools, and other church institutions. It is appalling that the most segregated hour of Christian America is eleven o'clock on Sunday morning, the same hour when many are standing to sing: "In Christ There Is No East Nor West."

I would be the last to condemn the thousands of sincere and dedicated people outside the churches who have labored unselfishly through various humanitarian movements to cure the world of social evils, for I would rather a man be a committed humanist than an uncommitted Christian.

How can such a man be chased away in a world full of churches, where there are clans and clans, groups and groups of priests, quacks, gurus, ministers, pastors, rabbis, muftis and other representatives of the cults? Dont they represent mans devotion to the church, dont they serve religion?

I have also seen the sinner's prayer abused. Some conservative churches treat the prayer like a magical incantation that guarantees an individual's salvation.

I am very grateful for churches I know in many parts of the world, mainly the Two Thirds World, which are seeking to live like the first disciples and, like them, are discovering the power of the Holy Spirit who seems only to be available to us when we make ourselves totally available to God

I think it is significant that it is the younger churches with no pretensions to western `sophistication' who look at the Acts, learn from it, and go out in the power of the same Lord expecting him to do equally mighty things through them. That is happening in Latin America, much of Asia, and a great deal of Africa. The Christians in these regions seem to have a facility we have lost for reading the story, learning from it, and applying it.