Church Quotes - Page 98

The church that doesn't want to grow is saying to the world, "go to hell."

You must match your music to the kind of people God wants your church to reach.... The music you use 'positions' your church in your community. It defines who you are.... It will determine the kind of people you attract, the kind of people you keep, and the kind of people you lose.

Defend the church. Defend the family. Defend the non-profit community. Defend them against a government that wants to weaken them.

The church has gotten it wrong a few times on science, and I think that we probably are better off leaving science to the scientists and focusing on what we do - what we're really good at, which is - which is theology and morality.

Music truely has to all other arts the same relation as religion to the church.

We don't have much wisdom about the second half when things really open up and end up looking a lot more progressive. In my own Catholic church, for example, we're sort of circling the wagons today by thinking that more moral strictures, more exclusionary rules on this or that, that that's going to do for the first half of life. I don't think it really does.

the twelve or fifteen millions in the British Empire, who, while they possess no electoral rights, are yet persuaded they are freemen, and who are mystified into the notion that they are not political bondmen, by that great juggle of the ' English Constitution ' a thing of monopolies, and Church-craft, and sinecures, armorial hocus-pocus, primogeniture, and pageantry!

The theater is the 'church' and when I'm on that stage I am the Priest/Pastor, it is a pure spiritual journey for me.

I do think in the present state of both the Church and society we have a long way to go toward accepting and loving others that look or act differently than we do.

Yet through history gays have always dominated religious life and churches.

The churches that are most obviously democratic are most obviously given to race prejudice. I mean the churches that have absolute congregational control.

The separation of church and state is necessary partly because if religion is good then the state shouldn't interfere with the religious vision or with the religious prophet.

Whenever a church does anything for its own group, it has that right.

There must be a realm of truth beyond political competence, that's why there must be a separation of churches, but if religion is bad and a bad religion is one that gives an ultimate sanctity to some particular cause.

Religion mustn't interfere with the state - so one of the basic Democratic principles as we know it in America is the separation of church and state.

Where there is real love one wants to go to church first.

For me, when I grew up playing music, I played music in church and people were shouting and having a big time, and church wasn't something where it was subdued. If you played something, you brought it to church with you.

There's been a false and negative distinction that's been made between joy and happiness. Unfortunately, the message we send to those both inside and outside the church is, "Seeking happiness is superficial and shallow. Go out and get it in the world, but you won't find happiness in God." But all people seek happiness, and because they do, we're basically telling them, "Stop seeking what God Himself wired you to seek." What we should be saying is, "Seek your happiness in the right place - in God Himself."

Unless we learn how to humbly tell each other our giving stories, our churches will not learn to give.

When the government tries to invade the church to enforce its own opinion on [gay] marriage, that's when it's time to resist.

If I should go out of church whenever I hear a false sentiment, I could never stay there five minutes.

The Church seems to totter to its fall, almost all life extinct. On this occasion, any complaisance would be criminal which told you, whose hope and commission it is to preach the faith of Christ, that the faith of Christ is preached.

A man of good sense but of little faith, whose compassion seemed to lead him to church as often as he went there, said to me; 'that he liked to have concerts, and fairs, and churches, and other public amusements go on.

Go into one of our cool churches, and begin to count the words that might be spared, and in most places the entire sermon will go.

When I walk up the piazza of Santa Croce I feel as if it were not a Florentine nor an European church but a church built by and for the human race.