Quotes About Church

The Church is holy, although there are sinners within her. Those who sin, but who cleanse themselves with true repentance, do not keep the Church from being holy. But unrepentant sinners are cut off, whether visibly by Church authority, or invisible by the judgement of God, from the body of the Church. And so in this regard the Church remains holy.

I'd signed up not just for Christianity but the established Church of England. That has a particular history and I think we rather lost it in the 19th Century, we became so much part of empire and colonialism, the language of the Church Of England still reflects that Victorian time. As the 20th Century developed, not surprisingly people left the church and I can see the church's role in losing people.

Exporting Church employees to Latin America masks a universal and unconscious fear of a new Church. North and South American authorities, differently motivated but equally fearful, become accomplices in maintaining a clerical and irrelevant Church. Sacralizing employees and property, this Church becomes progressively more blind to the possibilities of Sacralizing person and community.

The church has contributed nothing to civilization. It has progressed somewhat, and it has become a little more decent, in reflection of the movements of civilization that have taken place outside of the church and usually in the face of the strong opposition of the church. But the church has always resisted the process of civilization. It has struggled to the last ditch, by fair means and foul, to preserve as long as it could the vestiges of ancient and medieval theology, with all the puerile moralities and harsh customs and medieval styles of belief.

Religion is so focused on family. These days, for many people, being gay is also focused on family. The Mormon Church is especially focused on family, and I'd have hoped, therefore, that the Mormon Church would especially have celebrated how all of these people who might have been lonely and suicidal and childless are now able to lead this other life. I would have thought it would be a cause for immense celebration. Instead it has been, obviously, a cause of great concern to the Church and its leadership.

The Reformed Church was identified with the old all-white government of South Africa and its apartheid policy. The Roman Catholic Church was closely identified with the Franco and Salazar dictatorships in Spain and Portugal. . . . More recently, . . . the Serbian Orthodox Church has come to be identified with the policies of Serbia (Yugoslavia).

My childhood was limited to mostly gospel music. We didn't have, like, a lot of records in our house, you know. It was like my grandparents who raised me. They were pretty old-fashioned in their religious ways, so it was like church, church, church, school, school, school.

It is true that traditional Christianity is losing some of its appeal among Americans, but that is a religious, not political, matter. It is worth remembering that the Jeffersonian 'wall of separation' between church and state has always been intended to protect the church from the state as much as the state from the church.

It is Peter himself that He says, 'You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church.' Where Peter is, there is the Church. And where the Church, no death is there, but life eternal.

The adoration of Jesus in the Most Blessed Sacrament is the end of the Church Militant, just as adoration of God in His glory is the end of the Church Triumphant. A holy rivalry, a concert of prayer, a harmony of divine service should exist between the heavenly court and the Eucharistic court here below, between the adorer and his mother the Church.

There was the strangest combination of church influence against me. Baker is a Campbellite; and therefore, as I suppose with few exceptions, got all of that Church. My wife had some relations in the Presbyterian churches, and some in the Episcopal churches; and therefore, wherever it would tell, I was set down as either one or the other, while it was everywhere contended that no Christian ought to vote for me because I belonged to no Church, and was suspected of being a Deist and had talked of fighting a duel.

Thoughtful men, with hearts craving the truth, have come to seek in the Catholic Church the road which leads with surety to eternal life. They have understood that they could not cleave to Jesus Christ as the Head of the Church if they did not belong to the Body of Jesus Christ which is the Church. Nor could they ever hope to possess in all its purity the faith of Jesus Christ if they were to reject its legitimate teaching authority entrusted to Peter and his successors.

I thought it was a really good contrast to have a really sweet, sincere, church girl sitting next to the church lady who seemed kind of, you know, over the top.

Before my grandpa built his own church, we went to the neighboring town, and it was a white community. You know, up north, mostly middle European people and Indians, Chippewa Indians. We were welcome to that church, but once we got in, they didn't know what to do with us.

The Roman Catholic Church is for saints and sinners alone - for respectable people, the Anglican Church will do.

The church arises only from the gospel. And a distorted church usually coincides with a distorted gospel.

I do object to the sensationalism or even the voyeurism of doing things in church or out of church.

Many people take exception to me and say that I'm doing black magic and things they can't do at church. But I'm doing magic that started their church.

It is simultaneously the blessing and the curse of the reflective Christian that believers are called to live out their faith in the church. No institution has accomplished so much for good in the world; none has fallen so short of its calling! The church is God-ordained, God-inspired, but accomplishes its work through human beings subject to every possible failing.

A father of the church said that property was theft, many centuries before Proudhon was born. Bourdaloue reaffirmed it. Montesquieu was the inventor of national workshops and of the theory that the state owed every man a living. Nay, was not the church herself the first organized democracy?

As a Fundamentalist I had discovered while I was in college that it is possible to dismiss the entire Church as having gone off the rails by about AD 95. That is, we, with our open Bibles, knew better than did old Ignatius or Clement, who had been taught by the very apostles themselves, just what the Church is and what it should look like.

If your church loves the way you do church more than your children, it loves the wrong thing.

...the only thing that makes the Church endurable is that it is somehow the body of Christ and that on this we are fed. It seems to be a fact that you have to suffer as much from the Church as for it but if you believe in the divinity of Christ, you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it.

We are constantly straining to devise new methods, new plans, new organizations to advance the Church and secure enlargement and efficiency for the gospel. This trend of the day has a tendency to lose sight of the man or sink the man in the plan or organization. God's plan is to make much of the man, far more of him than of anything else. Men are God's method. The Church is looking for better methods; God is looking for better men.

And also those to whom these commandments were given, might have power to lay the foundation of this church, and to bring it forth out of obscurity and out of darkness, the only true and living church upon the face of the whole earth.

An authentically eucharistic Church is a missionary Church... Truly, nothing is more beautiful than to know Christ and to make him known to others.

Dear young people, the Church depends on you! She needs your lively faith, your creative charity and the energy of your hope. Your presence renews, rejuvenates and gives new energy to the Church.

My mother and grandmother had me in church, and I was the kid that played in church. But pastor was telling me something totally different that there was a God. He knit me together in my mother's womb. He made me special. He wanted to have a personal relationship with me.

Economics is like a church, and it fulfills the same function the church had fulfilled for centuries: the justification of the status quo.

I started doing the nursery and then prepared 89 hours to teach 2 to 4-year- olds.nd during this time working in this church and going to a little country church, I met Randy [White].

What makes a church great in the eyes of God? Participation, proclamation, preservation, and propagation. Every church ought to exhibit all four.

A missional church is a church that must live the dialectic. It must stay in the journey.

The current version of... separation of church and state says you can be salt, and you can be light, but only inside the four walls of the church.

The church is the bride of Christ. The kingdom will be the eternal celebration of the wedding of Christ and the church. We will enjoy rapturous celebration as the bride of Christ in the eternal kingdom.

The Church has always advised against birth control and that is the only position the Church can take in view of our beliefs with respect to the eternity of the marriage covenant and the purpose of this divine relationship.

The Independent or Congregational theory includes two principles; first, that the governing and executive power in the Church is in the brotherhood; and secondly, that the Church organization is complete in each worshipping assembly, which is independent of every other.

I know married Catholics in a second union who go to church, who go to church once or twice a year and say I want communion, as if joining in Communion were an award. It's a work towards integration, all doors are open, but we cannot say, 'from here on they can have communion.'

I hear people say all the time, "I'm not really religious, but I consider myself spiritual." I definitely have always been spiritual, being raised by my grandmother on that little acre in Mississippi, indoctrinated, born into the church and the ways of the church.

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.

The invasion of the Church by the world is a menace to the extension of Christ's Kingdom. In all ages conformity to the world by Christians has resulted in lack of spiritual life and a consequent lack of spiritual vision and enterprise. A secularized or self-centered Church can never evangelize the world.

A few years ago, the liberal churches complained that the Calvinistic church denied to them the name of Christian. I think the complaint was confession; a religious church would not complain.

The fact is that there is a profound spiritual hunger in the western world which, for a variety of reasons, its church is no longer able to assuage. So a book which suggests that there is a spiritual significance to the Christian story but that this has been suppressed by the church undoubtedly appeals to those who are anxious to square this circle.

The North American Church is at a critical juncture. The gospel of grace is being confused and compromised by silence, seduction, and outright subversion. The vitality of the faith is being jeopardized. The lying slogans of the fixers who carry religion like a sword of judgment pile up with impunity. Let ragamuffins everywhere gather as a confessing Church to cry out in protest. Revoke the licenses of religious leaders who falsify the idea of God. Sentence them to three years in solitude with the Bible as their only companion.

We, the women and men of the Church, we are in the middle of a love story: each of us is a link in this chain of love. And if we do not understand this, we have understood nothing of what the Church is.

An Episcopalian divine once told the Pope that the only difference between their denominations was that "the Church of Rome is infallible and the Church of England is never in the wrong."

For a Christian to be a Christian, he must first be a sinner. Being a sinner is a prerequisite for being a church member. The Christian church is one of the few organizations in the world that requires a public acknowledgement of sin as a condition for membership.

If the church would only be the church- if Christians would only be Christians- nothing could halt our onward march.

I was in my dad's church, his Baptist church, and I think the first song I ever performed was 'Jesus Be a Fence Around Me.'