Church Quotes - Page 117

I hope ["reanimated the papacy"] means that the new interest in the pope evokes a new interest in the Church's teaching, of which the pope is the custodian.

We're used to institutional-maintenance Catholicism, in which the institution ticks along by its own inertia and people are "born" into the Church. Francis knows that is over and done with: "Kept" Catholicism, whether "kept" by legal establishment or by cultural habit, has no future.

[Pope Francis] comes to that conviction [of family crisis] as a pastor, not as Brad Wilcox or Charles Murray. So he wants to challenge the Church to find pastoral responses to that crisis that meet real human needs.

That's what the liveliest parts of the world Church today - ranging from the booming Church in Africa to FOCUS missionaries on American campuses - are living: a Catholicism that has discovered that it doesn't have a mission, it is a mission.

The Germans now seem the primary example of this [institutional-maintenance type] - which is another reason to scratch the head at their seeming determination to force the whole Church to adopt the Catholic Lite approach that has, in a bizarre inversion, emptied German churches of congregants while vastly expanding the German Church's bureaucracies.

Baptists have long upheld the ideal of a free church in a free state. And from the beginning, they believed that forcing a person to worship against his will violated the principles of both Christianity and civility.

To accept with unquestioning faith, or to refuse to reconsider any particular view held by the Church in the past, is as unreasonable as it is unsafe. The faith of the Church is a progressive affair.

The main thing a childhood in the Church did for me, I think, was set up the universe as a moral system. Once you've seen it that way, it always seems that way.

The danger comes in, in my opinion, when you believe someone because they're the leader of your church and supposedly they have an ear to God without examining what they're doing.

The older we get and the longer we labor in the Church the more there is that we can do. There is no need for any person in this Church to have an empty hand or an empty heart.

One of the most violent attacks on the Church in the Soviet Union was under Kruschev when, during a period of economic and political liberalization, he attacked the Church to demonstrate to old Party members that he hadn't lost it.

Don't aim to plant churches. Aim to plant a church that will plant many other churches.

If both Church and fairy-tale belong to humanity, they may occasionally cross circles, without injury to either.

Some make a conscience of spitting in the Church, yet robbe the Altar.

No Church-yard is so handsom, that a man would desire straight to bee buried there. [No churchyard is so handsome that a man would desire straight to be buried there.]

Nothing lasts but the Church.

Though you see a Church-man ill, yet continue in the Church still.

There's this morbid side to the way many represent Christianity today, where you don't smile, because it's too serious, and you can't expect to see God - that kind of stuff. If there is God, we must see Him, and I don't believe in the idea you find in most churches, where they say, "No, you're not going to see Him. He's way up above you. Just believe what we tell you and shut up."

the Press has no band of critics who go the round of the churches and chapels, and are on the watch for a slip or defect in the preacher, to make a 'feature' in their article: the clergy are, practically, the most irresponsible of all talkers.

There's a coffin in the back of the church as the wedding is going on ... Look, I'm a romantic. I like marriage...In the movies.

I'm thinking of buying a church and changing it around: maybe selling crack and having a few whores in the pew.

I am highly susceptible to the force of all truly religious music, especially to the music of my own church, the church of Shelley, Michelangelo, and Beethoven.

Blasphemy and sedition (meaning the truth about Church and State).

I say to you Baptists, "Go on being good Baptists, thinking that you are more right than anybody else." Unless you think it, I have no use for you at all. The Church of England does precisely the same itself.

Donald Trump would never belong to a church that required a ten percent hit. He's too smart.