Best 3954 quotes in «church quotes» category

The entity God created to traffic His transcendence has fallen far from its mission when it chooses instead to traffic what can be found on any street corner or at the local mall. You may ask, "But how has the church done that?" * By offering secularists what they find mildly interesting and calling it church. *By submitting to self-help sermons where encounter with God is not even on the agenda. * By letting the horizontal excellence of the show stand in for Vertical impact. *By substituting the surprise or shock of superficial entertainment for the supernatural. Church was designed to deliver what we were created to long for. Church must again be about a Vertical encounter that interrupts and alters everything.

The fact is, it is selfish for a church to not want to grow. A church that says, “We’ve got enough people, we’ve got a nice fellowship. Our church is just the right size. We just need to focus on the members we already have.” That church is, in reality, actually saying, “The rest of the world can go to hell. We don’t care.

The fact that you have a large sum of money in your wallet does not remove your responsibility from you before God to be involved in a ministry in the body of Christ

The faithful have no dread of using the traditional language of the church. Terms like incarnation and resurrection need to be explained, not avoided.

The fact that you don't feel Him [God] holding you doesn't change the fact that He still is.

The fiercest storm is taking place in some of our churches—the unbelief and disobedience of God’s Word.

The first obligation for every church is to teach their members the value of hard work.

The full Christian experience, however, is not an individual experience which may be isolated from all else; it is, unconditionally, an experience within the context of the Church. It is 'a personal history which is imbedded in the greater history of the Church - a spiritual becoming which is incarnate and is lived within the Church's own process of becoming. It is the effort to develop what has been given, to discover what is hidden, the effort to attain to oneself by attaining, though the Church and within her, to the mystery of Christ, the Saviour'.

The future of the Church is in the hands of wisdom

The glorious presence of God is with us. Let us rise in mighty strength to build the nation.

The goal of the church is to bring the kingdom answers to the people

The Gospel is the good news, not the grouse news. Preaching is not beating, it´s informing in a christlike way.

The governments and their policies have failed, the church is the last hope of the common man, I value a church that is a home for all.

The heart of the Christian gospel is a person, not a church or a system of doctrinal interpretation.

The higher Christian churches...come at God with an unwarranted air of professionalism, with authority and pomp, as though they knew what they were doing, as though people in themselves were an appropriate set of creatures to have dealings with God. I often think of the set pieces of liturgy as certain words which people have successfully addressed to God without their getting killed. In the high churches they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a strand of scaffolding who have long since forgotten the danger. If God were to blast such a congregation to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it any minute.

The history of the church seems to indicate to us two positions as true, with reference to this matter,—viz. lst, That assurance of salvation has been enjoyed more fully and more generally by men who were called to difficult and arduous labours in the cause of Christ, than by ordinary believers in general; and 2dly, That this assurance, as enjoyed by such persons, has been frequently traceable to special circumstances connected with the manner of their conversion as its immediate or proximate cause. So it certainly was with the Reformers.

The holiest place on Earth, is not a temple or a church, but our relationship to one another.

The Holy Spirit never draws attention to Himself. He always points to and reveals Jesus.

The kingdom of God works in all spheres of culture, whether church, family, education, government, arts, business, or media. It is time to stop operating under the mindset that these spheres ought to be separated into secular and Christian, hoarding all the ‘sanctified spheres’ into the church, thereby leaving the world struggling in a vacuum of death. When we suck all the living water into the church, the world is left to die of thirst.

The lampstand was position strategically to do one things: cast its light on the table and on the bread that represented God's provision and presence. For generations the lampstand of the tabernacle stood to highlight the object that best represented God's goodness and provision, the same object that Jesus would one day use to symbolize His own body. (Jesus compares church to a lampstand in Revelation- a strong reminder of the church's responsibility). Everything about these churches 0 their teaching, practices, and work-- was challenged for one reason in Revelation: They were losing their effectiveness as God's light to their communities.

The holy stone looked for all the world like a small iron pineapple, its surface divided into squares by deep grooves, a tarnished silver-steel handle or lever held tight to the side. In ancient times the pineapple was ever the symbol of welcome, though the church used the objects in a different way. Apparently, each theological student of good family and destined for high office was given one on beginning their training and forbidden from pulling the lever on pain of excommunication. A test of obedience they called it. A test of curiosity I called it. Clearly the church wanted bishops who lacked the imagination for exploration and questioning.

...the institutional church, which exists to serve the people of God, is never to be confused with the church as mystery - the Christ-centered, biblically faithful, tender, and compassionate cloud of witnesses who walk the talk.

The Latin Cross is not inappropriate for a church that composed itself entirely of men, for in several early societies the Latin Cross was a primary phallic symbol.

The Lord did not design the church to cater to people’s needs—the Lord breathed life into the church to proclaim His truths.

The light of love proper to faith can illumine the question of our own time-concerning truth. Truth, nowadays, is often reduced to the subjective authenticity of the individual, valid only to the life of the individual. A common truth intimidates us, for we identify it with the intransigent demands of totalitarian systems. But if truth is a truth of love, if it is a truth disclosed in personal encounter with the Other and with others, then it can be set free from its enclosure in individuals and become part of the common good. As a truth of love, it is not one that can be imposed by force; it is not a truth that stifles the individual. Since it is born of love, it can penetrate to the heart, to the personal core of each man and woman. Clearly, then, faith is not intransigent but grows in respectful coexistences with others. One who believes may not be presumptuous; on the contrary, truth leads to humility, because believers know that, rather than ourselves possessing truth, it is truth that embraces and possesses us. Far from making us inflexible, the security of faith sets us on a journey; it enables witness and dialogue with all.

The liturgy is the place where we wait for Jesus to show up. We don't have to do much. The liturgy is not an act of will. It is not a series of activities designed to attain a spiritual mental state. We do not have to apply will pressure. To be sure, like basketball or football, it is something that requires a lot of practice--its rhythms do not come naturally except to those who have been rehearsing them for years. On some Sundays the soul will indeed battle to even pay attention. In the normal course of worship, we do not have to conjure up feelings or a devotional mood; we are not required to perform the liturgy flawlessly. Such anxious effort... blind us to what is really going on. We do have to show up, and we cannot leave early. But if we will dwell there, remain in place, wait patiently, Jesus will show up.

The loss of connection between churches and neighborhoods creates a corresponding loss of localized imagination and creates an addictive-like dependence on acontextual experts who scan the physical and spiritual horizon for 'success.

[The Lord's Supper teaches that] Rituals are good, and they are instituted and used by God to 'connect' his people with him. We learn through ritual that the church is not just made up of individuals, but is a corporate body. It is not just about personal salvation, but a group of people, the people of God, who are bound to one another and to the faithful through the generations. (page 263)

The main purpose of a church is to bring relevance to people and make sure everyone discovers their calling

The mandate of the church is to promote kingdom expansion throughout the earth

The ministry found in the corners of one's life should match the ministry that is put on display.

The mission of the church is to make the world a holy place.

The momentum carried us out of the church and into the streets where true Christianity belongs.

The moment we care for anything deeply, the world - that is, all the other miscellaneous interests - becomes our enemy. Christians showed it when they talked of keeping one's self "unspotted from the world;" but lovers talk of it just as much when they talk of the "world well lost." Astronomically speaking, I understand that England is situated on the world; similarly, I suppose that the Church was a part of the world, and even the lovers inhabitants of that orb. But they all felt a certain truth - the truth that the moment you love anything the world becomes your foe.

The more conscious directors are of the life of the Christian community and the more knowledgeable they are about the experienced relationships of that community with God and with all reality, the more helpful they are likely to be to directees. But their authority arises basically from the fact that they share in the faith-life of the Christian community as it experiences its dialogue with God. This makes the director first of all a brother or a sister of the directee and provides the basic ingredient for the informal, nonhierarchic - "just two people talking" - but creative atmosphere that seems to characterize helpful direction today.

The more I read, {the Bible] the more Paul sounds like a stroke victim, who never taught a thing that Jesus taught, and only quotes him once, in Acts, wrongly, and the 12 are constantly chastising him for his teachings.

The more we have of Jesus, the greater the love we have; the greater the love, the greater the sacrifice; the greater the sacrifice, the more we become like Jesus; the more we become like Jesus, the more successful our local churches become.

The more you read the Bible, the more transform your life will be.

The most carefully crafted language in our culture tends to be poetry. And poetry at its finest moments subverts our best attempts at hiding from reality... The poetry of liturgy has just this power. The liturgy contains words that have been shaped and crafted over the centuries. It is formal speech. It is public poetry. As such it reaches into us to reveal not only the unnamed reality of our lives but the God who created us... But even when the words of the liturgy are not literally biblical words, the words, like all truthful words, work on us over time, like a steady, unrelenting stream slowly reshapes the banks of a river. The words do something to us even when we're not paying attention.

The most important condition necessary for our success is to have a sincere love for God

The most frustrating thing about our doctrine in the modern church is that the unbelievers who have never been to church, the agnostics, those who are out rightly atheist, don’t have to fight with whether they are supposed to dominate the earth or not, they just go ahead and do it

Then I told myself that as I never gave the Church a thought when I was feeling happy, I could hardly expect it to do anything for me when I wasn't. You can't get insurance money without paying in premiums.

The nails did not kill Him... It was the needs that did.

The number of people who have fled the church because it is too patient or compassionate is negligible; the number who have fled because they find it too unforgiving is tragic.

The number of people who believe in religious teachings far outweighs that of those who practice them.

The obvious definition of a monarchy seems to be that of a state, in which a single person, by whatsoever name he may be distinguished, is entrusted with the execution of the laws, the management of the revenue, and the command of the army. But, unless public liberty is protected by intrepid and vigilant guardians, the authority of so formidable a magistrate will soon degenerate into despotism. The influence of the clergy, in an age of superstition, might be usefully employed to assert the rights of mankind; but so intimate is the connection between the throne and the altar, that the banner of the church has very seldom been seen on the side of the people. A martial nobility and stubborn commons, possessed of arms, tenacious of property, and collected into constitutional assemblies, form the only balance capable of preserving a free constitution against enterprises of an aspiring prince.

The original Christians regarded the deposit of faith, as finally inseparable from the very living substance of the Gospel in the saving event of Christ crucified, risen and glorified, but as once and for all entrusted to the church through its apostolic foundation in Christ, informing, structuring and quickening its life and faith and mission as the body of Christ in the world... While the deposit of faith was replete with the truth as it is in Jesus, embodying kerygmatic, didactic and theological content, but its very nature it could not be resolved into a system of truths or set of normative doctrines and formulated beliefs, for the truths and doctrines and beliefs entailed could not be abstracted from the embodied form which they were given in Christ in the apostolic foundation of the church without loss of their real substance. Nevertheless in this embodied form "the faith once for all delivered to the saints" constituted the regulative basis for all explicit formulation of Christian truth, doctrine and belief in the deepening understanding of the church and its regular instruction of catechumens and the faithful. app is

The only group large enough to handle," the world's biggest, "problems is the network of millions of local churches around the world. We have the widest distribution, largest group of volunteers, local credibility, the promises of God, the power of the Holy Spirit, and the inevitability of history.

The organist was almost at the end of the anthem’s long introduction, and as the crescendo increases the cathedral began to glitter before my eyes until I felt as if every stone in the building was vibrating in anticipation of the sweeping sword of sound from the Choir. The note exploded in our midst, and at that moment I knew our creator had touched not only me but all of us, just as Harriet had touched that sculpture with a loving hand long ago, and in that touch I sensed the indestructible fidelity, the indescribable devotion and the inexhaustible energy of the creator as he shaped his creation, bringing life out of dead matter, wresting form continually from chaos. Nothing was ever lost, Harriet had said, and nothing was ever wasted because always, when the work was finally completed, every article of the created process, seen or unseen, kept or discarded, broken or mended – EVERYTHING was justified, glorified and redeemed.

The period of the history of the church from the apostolic age till the present day is usually considered under three great divisions— the ancient, the mediaeval, and the modern.