Best 3954 quotes in «church quotes» category

I had never met the Roman Catholuc Church outside of a history book. To come across it living, so to speak, was like finding a diplodocus.

I have concluded that the more we seek the Lord, with a passion for His worthiness, the more we are gripped with our neediness. Adoration cultivates desperation.

I have heard of certain persons who have been in the habit of hearing a favorite minister, and when they go to another place, they say, "I cannot hear anybody after my own minister; I shall stay at home and read a sermon." Please remember the passage, "Not forsaking the assembling of yourselves together, as the manner of some is." Let me also entreat you not to be so foolishly partial as to deprive your soul of its food.... If you are not content to learn here a little and there a little, you will soon be half starved, and then you will be glad to get back again to the despised minister and pick up what his field will yield you.... Go and glean where the Lord has opened the gate for you. Why the text alone is worth the journey; do not miss it.

-"I have kept the faith, Planchard." -"Then you are the only man who has" Planchard said, "and it is an heretical faith." -"They crucified Christ for heresy" Vexille said, "so to be named a heretic is to be one with Him.

I have no doubt that ignorance is the biggest obstacle facing the church of the lord Jesus Christ in this age

I have not learned a single lesson, been inspired or impacted by another person’s life void of negative experiences.

I have no objection to instruments of music in our worship, provided they are neither seen nor heard.

I hope the day will never come when the church abandons the “class meeting” and the prayer service . . .The old-fashioned “testimony” meeting should be revived, for through this medium we can share with others our faith and triumphs as well as our needs and mistakes.

I hope the likes, comments, retweets, money, hate, love, suffering, fame, pain and your education wont make you to deny God one day. Matthew 10:33

I left that church with rich and royal hatred of the priest as a person, and a loathing for the church as an institution, and I vowed that I would never go inside a church again. [Eugene V. Debs, describing his teenage reaction to a hellfire lecture by a priest]

I liked the idea of loving people just to love them, not to get them to come to church.

I'll always remember being called by my mother who beckoned me to look at the screen where a young man was being tortured by the church. Bag over his head, rolling on the ground, crying, suffocating, vomiting while the congression continues yelling chants, “God will save you!” treating him like the devil's child. It was the first time I’ve ever doubted God. First time I’ve ever heard the terms ‘Gays, and ‘Queers.’ I went through a lot in my childhood, but this was the first I’ve ever been so traumatized. My mom tells me they deserved it and the church tries to justify their actions as if it was the most intelligent excuse in the world. At 12 years old, I knew only one thing. I would never be like them.

I long for a church that understands the dangers of entertainment and sees it for what is is: a lion crouching at the evangelical door, ready to devour us. We need a culture of evangelism that never sacrifices to the idolatry of entertainment, but serves up the rich fare found the gospel of Christ.

I long for the Church to be more truly itself, and for me this involves changing its stance on war, sex, investment and many other difficult matters. I believe in all conscience that my questions and my disagreements are all of God. Yet I must also learn to live in and attend to the reality of the Church as it is, to do the prosaic things that can be and must be done now and to work at my relations now with the people who will not listen to me or those like me—because what God asks of me is not to live in the ideal future but to live with honesty and attentiveness in the present, i.e., to be at home. "What if the project in question is myself, and not some larger social question such as war? At the end of the day, it is the central concern for most of us. We long to change and to grow, and we are rightly suspicious of those who are pleased with the way they are and cannot seem to conceive of changing any further. Yet the torture of trying to push away and overcome what we currently are or have been, the bitter self-contempt of knowing what we lack, the postponement of joy and peace because we cannot love ourselves now—these are not the building blocks for effective change. We constantly try to start from somewhere other than where we are. Truthful living involves being at home with ourselves, not complacently but patiently, recognizing that what we are today, at this moment, is sufficiently loved and valued by God to be the material with which he will work, and that the longed-for transformation will not come by refusing the love and the value that is simply there in the present moment. "So we come back, by a longish detour, to the point to which Mark's narrative brought us: the contemplative enterprise of being where we are and refusing the lure of a fantasized future more compliant to our will, more satisfying in the image of ourselves that it permits. Living in the truth, in the sense in which John's Gospel gives it, involves the same sober attention to what is there—to the body, the chair, the floor, the voice we hear, the face we see—with all the unsatisfactoriness that this brings. Yet this is what it means to live in that kingdom where Jesus rules, the kingdom that has no frontiers to be defended. Our immersion in the present moment which is God's delivers the world to us—and that world is not the perfect and fully achieved thing we might imagine, but the divided and difficult world we actually inhabit. Only, by the grace of this living in the truth, we are able to say to it at least an echo of the 'yes' that God says, to accept as God accepts.

I looked up at the wall. My bachelor's degree had been in History. Films like Back to the Future and Quantum Leap had been some of my favorite programs. Could time travel really be possible? This seemed too unreal.

I love Religion it's the cheapest place to buy Guilt, Fear,Sin and Doubt

I made the fearful decision to head to Sydney, Australia, to study the Bible. My calling, my wife, Laura, my church, my passion—all were behind the scariest door of all time. Since that day, this remains exactly true: Fear never leaves. But the way we handle it can always change.

In addition to the transience of their members, churches themselves face a crisis of hypermobility. Many churches have put down only shallow roots in their neighborhood, or no roots at all. We’ve all heard the question, “If our church suddenly moved to a new location fifteen miles away, would anyone in our neighborhood notice we were gone?” But what if we asked ourselves this question: “If our church was magically lifted off the ground and moved to a location fifteen miles away, would we notice the difference?” Western churches have become so disentangled from their own places that this question could be a cold, hard look in the mirror for many faith communities.

I'm half way to Heaven and half way to Hell with each breath I take in this mortal shell.

I'm not particularly in favor of doctrine or creed, ordination, the elevation of holy texts, the institution of church, or, for that matter, Christianity. Like most religions, it has irreconcilable shortcomings and an unforgivable history. What I do favor is the attempt to make sense of things by living within a story. The Christian story, for good or ill, is my inheritance.

Impossible situations TEST you and PROVE Him

In a Church, user experience is the ultimate marketing and branding strategy. The experience is the product that leads to faith.

In a system of full capitalism, there should be (but, historically, has not yet been) a complete separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church.

I'm a spiritual person, she said. "I believe in Allah, you know, though I don't always call It 'Allah' and I pray the way I want to pray. Sometimes I just look out at the stars and this love-fear thing comes over me, you know? And sometimes I might sit in a Christian church listening to them talk about Isa with a book of Hafiz in my hands instead of the hymnal. And you know what, Yusef? Sometimes, every once in a while, I get out my old rug and I pray like Muhammad prayed. I never learned the shit in Arabic and my knees are uncovered, but if Allah has a problem with that then what kind of Allah do we believe in?

I must admit, that I have learned more from my negative experiences than I have ever learned from my positive one.

In a number of workshops, I have asked people whether they have had one or more experiences that they would identify as an experience of God and, if so, to share them in small groups. On average, 80 percent of the participants identify one or more and are eager to talk about them. They also frequently report that they had never before been asked that question in a church setting or given an opportunity to talk about it.

In a team setting, leadership is shared by a community of people, which counters the tendency for pastors to form congregations in their own images.

In brief, where the Scripture is silent, the church is my text; where that speaks, 'tis but my comment; where there is a joint silence of both, I borrow not the rules of my religion from Rome or Geneva, but the dictates of my own reason.

In both roles, as journalist and as organizer, I'd learn that it's possible to fall in love with a revolution—then doubt it, fight with it, lose faith in it, and return with a sense of humor and a harder, lasting love. I would have to learn the same thing about church when I was much older, and it would be no easier.

In confession the break-through to community takes place. Sin demands to have a man by himself. It withdraws him from the community. The more isolated a person is, the more destructive will be the power of sin over him, and the more deeply he becomes involved in it, the more disastrous is his isolation. Sin wants to remain unknown. It shuns the light. In the darkness of the unexpressed it poisons the whole being of a person. This can happen even in the midst of a pious community. In confession the light of the Gospel breaks into the darkness and seclusion of the heart. The sin must be brought into the light. The unexpressed must be openly spoken and acknowledged. All that is secret and hidden is made manifest. It is a hard struggle until the sin is openly admitted. But God breaks gates of brass and bars of iron (Ps. 107: 16).

In big ways and small, I knew exactly how selfish a war could make me, and I saw all around me how fear and need drove other people to terrible betrayals. Yet over and over, I also saw how war created a community, a people, and how that community was nourished by gestures of sharing. It was sharing that didn't depend on personal intimacy, and a community that didn't depend on everyone's being friends; it foreshadowed what I would come to understand as church, at its best.

Indeed, if their wristbands asked them the question: “What-Would-Jesus-Buy”—well now, that could very well revolutionize the Christian church in America.

In conversation we are sustained by the wisdom of those who have gone before us. We are also empowered to discern how we will face the challenges of both the present and the future. Reading is essential to this conversational way of life, as we often cannot literally converse with our forbears or with those who are following similar vocations in other places. We read as a way of listening to the wisdom of others. The conversation continues as we reply to this wisdom both internally and externally. Internally, we reply as we grapple to make sense of this wisdom in our own context. Externally, we reply to our reading as we discuss it with our church or work community.

In fact, even Tillich's socialism was accommodationist because it continued the Constantinian strategy: The way to make the church radical is by identifying the church with secular "radicals", that is, socialists.

In fact, the Bible tells us that the union of man and woman in marriage points to the climatic final scene - when Christ returns for His church, the bride He died to save (Ephesians 5:31-32).

In my prayer journey I’ve been motived by many lesser aspirations like guilt, approval before others and even a ego-driven desire for church growth. Of course, a passion for revival can even trigger more prayers. Yet, in the long run, we must remember that there is a difference between seeking revival from God vs. seeking God for revival.

In our desire to make Christ known and to increase the influence of the church, we are many times prone to think that Christians and the church can be made popular with the unbelieving world. This is a grave mistake on the part of the church.

In one opinion, the house in which you stay, the church you attend and the town in which you reside may not determine the size of your dreams, but they can influence the rate of maturity of what you have planted.

In other words, if sometimes worship is boring or rote or less than meaningful: you’re doing it right.

I no longer belong to your ways. My religion is love. Every heart is my church.

In order for us to become the Bride of Christ, we must stop being so divided. We must start coming together. We must be places of refuge for the nonbelievers and start being places they want to come. That doesn't mean that we will always agree on everything, but we must start pursuing unity.

In order to get some help in your love walk, all you have to do is ask God to let you see these people through His eyes.

In our love for our church and our holy regard for those who lead us in the things of God, we forget the nature of humanity. We are not surprised by the evil pressing in from without, but we are blind to the potential for wickedness that slumbers in our own souls. We forget that humans are a combination of greatness and grief, of righteous might and disgusting sin. In our sentimentality about our church and those we love in it, we forget to stand guard against the natural failings of humanity. We turn off our deflector shields and cast aside our filters and begin to ignore the signals our inner radar may be sending.

In previous centuries, the Church was the great controller, dictating morality, stifling free expression and posing as conservator of all great art and music. Instead we have TV, doing just as good a job at dictating fashions, thoughts, attitudes, objectives as did the Church, using many of the same techniques but doing it so palatably that no one notices. Instead of ‘sins’ to keep people in line, we have fears of being judged unacceptable by our peers (by not wearing the right shoes, not drinking the right kind of beer, or wearing the wrong kind of deodorant). Coupled with that fear is imposed insecurity concerning our own identities. All answers and solutions to these fears come through the television, and only through television. Only through exposure to TV can the new sins of alienation and ostracism be absolved.

In serving others, the church will save itself from becoming nothing more than a spiritualized 501c3 not-for-profit, self-centered corporation, organized for the benefit of donor tax exemption. Serving others will remind us of our identity and call us out from this self-absorbed, selfish world to be the people of God on a journey following his Son, Jesus.

Instead of the church in Africa to be a place for eradicating darkness by beaming out light, she has unfortunately become the den of robbers as Jesus put it.

Instead of the church’s lessons helping women to participate in loving, mutual relationships, they perpetuate singleness and unfulfilled partnerships because the men in our lives desire confident women who are able to play with the possibilities of sexual engagement.

Instead it is the Church hierarchy that is rather teaching congregation to be afraid of darkness, instead of teaching them to go with light to overcome darkness.

Intellectualism is a poor master over passion

Integrity is this sense of being true to self, true to G ~ d, and true to community. We were exploring where we were not in truth in those three areas. It’s not about permission to have sex with whomever we want. It is about the challenge of owning our truths with our faith, our G ~ d, and our community.