Church Quotes
997 quotes
"Clary felt suddenly annoyed. "When the self-congratulatory part of the evening is over, maybe we could get back to saving my best friend from being exsanguinated to death?""Exsanguinated,"said Jace, impressed. "That's a big word.""And you're a big-""Tsk tsk,"he interupted. "No swearing in church."
"It takes three to make love, not two: you, your spouse, and God. Without God people only succeed in bringing out the worst in one another. Lovers who have nothing else to do but love each other soon find there is nothing else. Without a central loyalty life is unfinished."
"Before the NSA there was the Catholic Church. What is confessional if not a place to gather secrets? No wonder the church had all the power."
"At church, during communion, they give out free wine. Whoa! Talk about a great place to drink and meet women."
"Did those nice church ladies come by again?"He nodded. "I asked them if a man died and then the woman remarried, and then the three of them met in heaven, would it be a sin for them to have a threesome, since they were all married in God's eye. And they decided they were late to be somewhere else."
"I’m such an alcoholic that I go to church just for communion."
"The story goes that a public sinner was excommunicated and forbidden entry to the church. He took his woes to God. 'They won't let me in, Lord, because I am a sinner.''What are you complaining about?' said God. 'They won't let Me in either."
"If you live today, you breath in nihilism ... it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now."
"Prayer will make a man cease from sin, or sin will entice a man to cease from prayer."
"Those who would renegotiate the boundaries between church and state must therefore answer a difficult question: why would we trade a system that has served us so well for one that has served others so poorly?"
"It’s been said that men think only about sex and food. And some men, like my uncle Lester, think about sex with food. Needless to say the church has ordered him to cease bringing his own food to the potlucks."
"The world can no longer be left to mere diplomats, politicians, and business leaders. They have done the best they could, no doubt. But this is an age for spiritual heroes- a time for men and women to be heroic in their faith and in spiritual character and power. The greatest danger to the Christian church today is that of pitching its message too low."
"The church is not a theological classroom. It is a conversion, confession, repentance, reconciliation, forgiveness and sanctification center, where flawed people place their faith in Christ, gather to know and love him better, and learn to love others as he designed."
"Teenagers who do not go to church are adored by God, but they don't get to meet some of the people who love God back."
"It is wonderful how much time good people spend fighting the devil. If they would only expend the same amount of energy loving their fellow men, the devil would die in his own tracks of ennui."
"Then the singing enveloped me. It was furry and resonant, coming from everyone's very heart. There was no sense of performance or judgment, only that the music was breath and food."
"Why are those who are notoriously undisciplined and unmoral also most contemptuous of religion and morality? They are trying to solace their own unhappy lives by pulling the happy down to their own abysmal depths."
"The operation of the Church is entirely set up for the sinner; which creates much misunderstanding among the smug.”(August 9, 1955)"
"Hide yourself in God, so when a man wants to find you he will have to go there first."
"Two or three angelsCame near to the earth.They saw a fat church.Little black streams of peopleCame and went in continually.And the angels were puzzledTo know why the people went thus,And why they stayed so long within."
"There is no one true church, no one chosen people."
"Those who aren't following Jesus aren't his followers. It's that simple. Followers follow, and those who don't follow aren't followers. To follow Jesus means to follow Jesus into a society where justice rules, where love shapes everything. To follow Jesus means to take up his dream and work for it."
"Whose little boy are you?"
"It's time we capture our imaginations for Christ"
"I’ve often wondered why the Protestant Reformation took place in Germany, rather than in Poland. Then I realize that Luther had to nail his 95 theses to the church door, and the Poles didn’t know how to operate a hammer."
"When you are growing up there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully: the church, which belongs to God, and the public library, which belongs to you. The public library is a great equaliser."
"If the universe does consist of a battle between the devil and God, the final analysis should conclude that religion would have been the devil’s most brilliant move and science, God’s."
"Bombs have kill-radiuses; churches should have love-radiuses--anyone within twenty miles of a church should know it."
"The problem that we are facing in the church today is that we have so many Christians who have made a decision to believe in Jesus but not a commitment to follow Him. We have people who are planning to, meaning to, trying to, wanting to, going to, we just don't have people who are doing it."
"Moving forward implies MOTION when in all actuality it may be simply standing STILL and seeing the salvation of the Lord."
"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."
"The top 10% of the people who are most creative, constructive and thoughtful, do not have much to do with churches. To them the canons of reason come first, making faith secondary and questionable."
"... challenge the church to do better, be more of who Christ wants us to be ..."
"People are not being reached in the context of the body of Christ--they're like newborn babies being left on a doorstep somewhere to feed and care for themselves."
"Sometimes we can focus so much on nothing that we make it a big something of nothing"
"The first obligation for every church is to teach their members the value of hard work."
"Isn't it funny how the memories you cherish before a breakup can become your worst enemies afterwards? The thoughts you loved to think about, the memories you wanted to hold up to the light and view from every angle--it suddenly seems a lot safer to lock them in a box, far from the light of day and throw away the key. It's not an act of bitterness. It's an act if self-preservation. It's not always a bad idea to stay behind the window and look out at life instead, is it?"
"He'd gone to church for forty years and was only getting worse. It seemed like this should tell God something."
"Christ Jesus is the Church."
"Church was doing what he often did when dropped - lying on his back with all four legs in the air, pretending to be dead in order to induce guilt in his owners."
"The church must suffer for speaking the truth, for pointing out sin, for uprooting sin. No one wants to have a sore spot touched, and therefore a society with so many sores twitches when someone has the courage to touch it and say: “You have to treat that. You have to get rid of that. Believe in Christ. Be converted."
"When we struggle for human rights, for freedom, for dignity, when we feel that it is a ministry of the church to concern itself for those who are hungry, for those who have no schools, for those who are deprived, we are not departing from God’s promise. He comes to free us from sin, and the church knows that sin’s consequences are all such injustices and abuses. The church knows it is saving the world when it undertakes to speak also of such things."
"On the subject of who is to blame for our disunity - “The easy conclusion- thatthe devil is at work trying to destroy the church- is true, but itʼs not the whole story. Ofcourse the enemy is at work doing that. But closer examination shows that much ofthe blame falls squarely on the shoulders of the church itself-on believers in god-andhow our own devilish deeds have alienated other followers of God. Sadly, weʼve donethe devilʼs work for him."
"God has always been about the business of shattering expectations, and in our culture, the standards of leadership are extroverted. It perfectly follows the biblical trend that God would choose the unexpected and the culturally "unfit" - like introverts - to lead his church for the sake of greater glory."
Adam S. McHugh, Introverts in the Church: Finding Our Place in an Extroverted Culture
"Tough times don't define you, they refine you. "
Carlos A. Rodriguez, Designed For Inheritance: A Discovery of Sonship
"The Lord doesn't want anybody in His house who has to be dragged there."
"God doesn't act like the Church. No, instead, the Church must act like God."
"Dysfunction comes when we intertwine the church and God and view them as one."
"The whole world is a theatre for the display of the divine goodness, wisdom, justice, and power, but the Church is the orchestra, as it were—the most conspicuous part of it; and the nearer the approaches are that God makes to us, the more intimate and condescending the communication of his benefits, the more attentively are we called to consider them."
"An entire nation shook under the power of one man’s [MLK’s] dream! Now if one dream can do that for our nation, imagine what a dream can do for the Church."
Showing 50 of 997 quotes