Church Quotes - Page 74

We can't renew America unless more of us, I mean all of us, are willing to join churches.

The ordinary ministry is that which receives all of its direction from the will of God revealed in the Scriptures and from those means which God has appointed in the church for its continual edification.

The clerical system of church management is exceedingly popular, but the whole thought is foreign to Scripture.

[I]n constitutional adjudication some steps, which when taken were thought to approach 'the verge,' have become the platform for yet further steps. A certain momentum develops in constitutional theory and it can be a 'downhill thrust' easily set in motion but difficult to retard or stop.

Confronted by a Church that has ceased to manifest God's mercy and intimate connection with humankind - that has converted Christ into a grim and joyless adjunct to the policing of bedrooms and marital intercourse - men and women can no longer see themselves as beloved of God, only as impure and reprehensible.

Jesus was a friend of women, the first and practically the last friend women had in the church.

My mother was truly my saving grace, because she would take me to church with her. I would see my mother smiling in the choir, and I wanted to know this God that made her so happy. If I had not had that faith in my life, I don't know where I would be right now.

My job as a pastor and theologian is to tease out the nature and the necessity of the gospel in meticulous ways, in everything I say, in everything I like. I want desperately for the church in America to rediscover the power and the beauty and the nature and the necessity of the gospel.

When we reduce the notion of “calling” to work inside the church, we fail to equip our people to apply their Christian faith to everything they do, everywhere they are.

In America, evangelical churches have often been bastions of conservatism, providing support for the status quo.

Well you say that it's gospel, But I know that it's only church.

The National Catholic Register's coverage of the Church universal, and the Church in our own country, is splendid.

The church is not a museum for pristine saints, but a hospital ward for broken sinners.

The early church was strikingly different from the culture around it in this way - the pagan society was stingy with its money and promiscuous with its body. A pagan gave nobody their money and practically gave everybody their body. And the Christians came along and gave practically nobody their body and they gave practically everybody their money.

Why not admit that the words separation and church do not even appear in the US Constitution, he added. Instead, they do appear in Article 52 of the Constitution of the Soviet Union.

Yet this is trash that the Church imposes upon the world as the Word of God; this is the collection of lies and contradictions called the Holy Bible! This is the rubbish called Revealed Religion!

The Christian church has set up a religion of pomp and revenue in pretended imitation of a person (Jesus) who lived a life of poverty.

Churches should evaluate everything they do to determine how it can be done better.

The doc­trine of the Church should be proven, not announced. There­fore show that the Scrip­tures teach these things.

The longer we are members of the Church, the better we understand the gospel, the more we will be inclined to be peacefully minded. The more diligently we follow the teaching of Christ, the slower we will be to be angry with each other and the quicker we will be to forgive each other.

The traditional churches are having to transition into new methodologies and new ways of reaching people and they are starting to understand that and looking for ways they can increase their relevance to the contemporary society.

How can a bishop marry? How can he flirt? The most he can say is "I will see you in the vestry after service."

Remember that the Unification Church rose, not in freedom, but from a prison, the pit of suffering.

If the world had attended me after World War II, it would have been united within seven years, and there would have been no suffering of the Unification Church and no damage to the democratic world.

In the Church, when we talk about 'the world', we often create an us and them situation and end up planting the seeds of all that we feel wrong with the world in the soil of our own backyard.