c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
But what might a woman say about church as she? What might a woman say about the church as body and bride? Perhaps she would speak of the way a regular body moves through the world—always changing, never perfect—capable of nurturing life, not simply through the womb, but through hands, feet, eyes, voice, and brain. Every part is sacred. Every part has a function. Perhaps she would speak of impossible expectations and all the time she’s wasted trying to contort herself into the shape of those amorphous silhouettes that flit from magazines and billboards into her mind. Or of this screwed-up notion of purity as a status, as something awarded by men with tests and checklists and the power to give it and take it away. Perhaps she would speak of the surprise of seeing herself—flaws and all—in the mirror on her wedding day. Or of the reality that with new life comes swollen breasts, dry heaves, dirty diapers, snotty noses, late-night arguments, and a whole army of new dangers and fears she never even considered before because life-giving isn’t nearly as glamorous as it sounds, but it’s a thousand times more beautiful. Perhaps she would talk about being underestimated, about surprising people and surprising herself. Or about how there are moments when her own strength startles her, and moments when her weakness—her forgetfulness, her fear, her exhaustion—unnerve her. Maybe she would tell of the time, in the mountains with bare feet on the ground, she stood tall and wise and felt every cell in her body smile in assent as she inhaled and exhaled and in one loud second realized, I’m alive! I’m enfleshed! only to forget it the next. Or maybe she would explain how none of the categories created for her sum her up or capture her essence.
— Rachel Held Evans
The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool. If the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority.
— Martin Luther King Jr.
I therefore used the last ten minutes of our classes to recite with them words from the Bible and verses from hymns, so that they would know them and the words would stay with them throughout their lives. The aim of my teaching was to bring to their hearts and thoughts the great truths of the Gospels so religion would have meaning in their lives and give them the strength to resist the irreligious forces that might assail them. I also tried to awaken in them a love for the Church, and a desire for that hour of spiritual peace to be found in the Sunday service. I taught them to respect traditional doctrines, but at the same time to hold fast to the saying of Paul that where the spirit of Christ is, there is freedom.
— Albert Schweitzer
Competition in spiritual matters brings confusion.
— Kirby Clements
Keep at it! Remember marketing is building a relationship! If you use marketing for a year and stop, you cut off your relationship with the larger community. Then you will have to re-start the relationship all over again. The old adage “it takes six to stick” is proven true over and over again. I realized this in year three of our church plant. I think of the hundreds of people that came to our services that had no connection with me or our people because we were willing to build a sustained relationship with them through marketing.
— Gary Rohrmayer, First Steps for Planting a Missional Church
It is interesting that Jesus encounters a person, personally, forgives him, transforms him adds Him into the Church - the Body of Christ, However today, Church is getting the other way around, she is raising up a believer in Church, feeding him up with the cup of her doctrine and then showing the person of Christ with the veil of concocted and diseased doctrines.
— Ajay Chandan
May our lives and gentle spirit be evident to all that we are members of God's family.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!
The people of God cannot be changed until the outcasts are restored to its body.
— Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
The higher Christian churches...come at God with an unwarranted air of professionalism, with authority and pomp, as though they knew what they were doing, as though people in themselves were an appropriate set of creatures to have dealings with God. I often think of the set pieces of liturgy as certain words which people have successfully addressed to God without their getting killed. In the high churches they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a strand of scaffolding who have long since forgotten the danger. If God were to blast such a congregation to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it any minute.
— Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm
The voice welling up out of this little man is terrific, Harry had noticed it at the house, but here, in the nearly empty church, echoing off the walnut knobs and memorial plaques and high arched rafters, beneath the tall central window of Jesus taking off into the sky with a pack of pastel apostles for a launching pad, the timbre is doubled, richer, with a rounded sorrowful something Rabbit hadn't noticed hitherto, gathering and pressing the straggle of guests into a congregation, subduing any fear that this ceremony might be a farce. Laugh at ministers all you want, they have the words we need to hear, the ones the dead have spoken.
— John Updike, Rabbit Is Rich
Many of the gay Christians I was in conversation with were not demanding wholesale movement to a fully affirming and inclusive stance. There were those who were uncertain of such a stance even for themselves. What they did desire was space, a safe space without judgment, accusation, condemnation, assumption, and rejection. They desired a generous spaciousness to embrace authentic faith while engaging the quest for an honest, godly, and fulfilling life as a gay person.
— Wendy Vanderwal-Gritter, Generous Spaciousness: Responding to Gay Christians in the Church
You're right, Ruth. You did screw up my career. You screwed it up good. Best thing you ever did, matter of fact. But you know something? It's okay. Because if it was between the church and you, there was no contest. Even with al the ups and downs and the craziness and the shit and the maxed-out credit cards, the church never stood a chance. I chose you, Ruth. And I'm glad. There. That's what my so-called career was about. And that's what I should have said to you. And I'm sorry I didn't. I'm sorry, Ruth. I'm sorry.
— K. D. Miller, All Saints
The real church is comprised of a long list of "formers" who collectively work together for world reform.
— Johnnie Dent Jr.
Why does it seem that the church is more interested in people involvement rather than people engagement.
— Todd Stocker
Before I was ordained, when I was working for the council, I thought of the first three months of the year as January, February, March. Now I think of them as Epiphany, Candlemas and Ash Wednesday.
— Adam Smallbone
The most carefully crafted language in our culture tends to be poetry. And poetry at its finest moments subverts our best attempts at hiding from reality...The poetry of liturgy has just this power. The liturgy contains words that have been shaped and crafted over the centuries. It is formal speech. It is public poetry. As such it reaches into us to reveal not only the unnamed reality of our lives but the God who created us...But even when the words of the liturgy are not literally biblical words, the words, like all truthful words, work on us over time, like a steady, unrelenting stream slowly reshapes the banks of a river. The words do something to us even when we're not paying attention.
— Mark Galli, Beyond Smells and Bells: The Wonder and Power of Christian Liturgy
You will go far in the Church.""I have no desire to go far. My only ambition is to be a good priest.""You will be that, of course. Nevertheless, you will go higher. And do you know why?”“Why?”“Because,” said Orselli, “you are not afraid of worldliness. I do not mean that you are worldly. Far from it. But you have a talent for being all things to all men.
— Henry Morton Robinson, The Cardinal
My double drags his coffin, humble slave,I, at least, am real, though changed to flesh.Far-off, I build me a church no hand can shape("Winter Sonnets: III")
— Vyacheslav Ivanov, The Silver Age of Russian Culture: An Anthology
The Christians of today are so unsubmissive to the leadership of the church, this is unbiblical.
— Evangelist Jordan Wells
The Church is the Body of Christ, and as such it is both heavenly and earthly. The Church is the communion of saints, and it includes as members both angels and shepherds - cherubim and seraphim, and you, and me.
— Scott Hahn
If you have ever belonged to such a community, however, you may have discovered that the trouble starts when darkness falls on your life, which can happen in any number of unsurprising ways: you lose your job, your marriage falls apart, your child acts out in some attention getting way, you pray hard for something that does not happen, you begin to doubt some of the things you have been taught about what the Bible says. The first time you speak of these things in a full solar church, you can usually get a hearing. Continue to speak of them and you may be reminded that God will not let you be tested beyond your strength. All that is required of you is to have faith. If you still do not get the message, sooner or later it will be made explicit for you: the darkness is your own fault, because you do not have enough faith.
— Barbara Brown Taylor
The purpose of the local church is not primarily to be one's church home or extended family, though it can be at times. And it is not to survive by obtaining more people for its support base. Its purpose is to invite people to be part of the true mission of the church. Reception into the church is only a threshold to involvement in its mission. The task of the church is not to accumulate attendees. The church is a school for developing agents of the new creation from among those who are the beneficiaries of God's grace.
— Peter L. Steinke
Like the hub of a wheel, the church’s corporate life is an extension of the good news that God was in Christ reconciling the whole world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them.
— Harold L. Senkbeil
The Church, as Jesus seems to be defining it, is the gathering of accepted brokenness. It’s not the gathering of the saved.
— Richard Rohr
A preacher shouldn't preach just to make you feel good. Then it's about the money not about the teach. He should preach the truth because the truth shall set you free.
— Alcurtis Turner
When we consider that so few generations had passed since thechurch left off disemboweling innocent men before the eyes of theirfamilies, burning old women alive in public squares, and torturingscholars to the point of madness for merely speculating about thenature of the stars, it is perhaps little wonder that it failed to thinkanything had gone terribly amiss in Germany during the war years.
— Sam Harris
The way we saw things, it didn’t matter that God had created the heavens and the earth—he did not want us excited about living here. A good fundamentalist worth his weight in guilt was quick to remind any skeptic that the world was going to hell in a handbasket.
— Matthew Paul Turner, Churched: One Kid's Journey Toward God Despite a Holy Mess
Are we letting the world influence the church more than the church is affecting those in the world?
— Betty S. Bender
There's not enough wrong with it to leave and there's just enough wrong with it to stay," Matthew later told me. "Fight to change it.
— Nadia Bolz-Weber, Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint
Somehow we American pastors, without really noticing what was happening, got our vocations redefined in the terms of American careerism. We quit thinking of the parish as a location for pastoral spirituality and started thinking of it as an opportunity for advancement. Tarshish, not Nineveh, was the destination. The moment we did that, we started thinking wrongly, for the vocation of pastor has to do with living out the implications of the word of God in community, not sailing off into the exotic seas of religion in search of fame and fortune.
— Eugene H. Peterson, Under the Unpredictable Plant an Exploration in Vocational Holiness
The Church says that the Earth is flat, but I know that it is round. For I have seen the shadow of the earth on the moon and I have more faith in the Shadow than in the Church.
— Magellan
If your church is not going to support the committed same-sex relationships of LGBT congregants, be honest about that. Bait-and-switch is deceptively un-Christ-like and serves to push gay and transgender believers farther away each time the deception happens.
— Kathy Baldock, Walking the Bridgeless Canyon: Repairing the Breach Between the Church and the LGBT Community
The problem is not a lack of churches, but a lack of true ministers, and believers that really are followers of Christ.
— Evangelist Jordan Wells
There is a long and well-documented tradition of wisdom in the Christian faith that any venture into leadership, whether by laity or clergy, is hazardous. it is necessary that there be leaders, but woe to those who become leaders.
— Eugene H. Peterson, Under the Unpredictable Plant an Exploration in Vocational Holiness
Deception is nowhere more common than in religion. And the persons most easily and damningly deceived are the leaders. Those who deceive others are first themselves deceived, for not many, I think, begin with evil intent. The devil, after all, is a spiritual being. His usual mode of temptation is not an obvious evil but to an apparent good. The commonest forms of devil-inspired worship do not take place furtively at black masses with decapitated cats but flourish under the bright lights of acclaim and glory, in a swirl of organ music.
— Eugene H. Peterson, Under the Unpredictable Plant an Exploration in Vocational Holiness
The mission of the church is to make the world a holy place.
— Mor Ignatius Aphrem II
Pastors enter congregations vocationally in order to embrace the totality of human life in Jesus' name. We are convinced there is no detail, however unpromising, in people's lives in which Christ may not work his will. Pastors agree to stay with the people in their communities week in and week out, year in and year out, to proclaim and guide, encourage and instruct as God work his purposes (gloriously, it will eventually turn out) in the meandering and disturbingly inconstant lives of our congregations.This necessarily means taking seriously, and in faith, the dull routines, the empty boredom, and the unattractive responsibilities that make up much of most people's lives. It means witnessing to the transcendent in the fog and rain. It means living hopefully among people who from time to time get flickering glimpses of the Glory but then live through stretches, sometimes long ones, of unaccountable grayness. Most pastor work takes place in obscurity: deciphering grace in the shadows, searching out meaning in a difficult text, blowing on the embers of a hard-used life. This is hard work and not conspicuously glamorous.
— Eugene H. Peterson, Under the Unpredictable Plant an Exploration in Vocational Holiness
It is time to revive and recover the third article of the Creed; to live corporately and communally in a world of expressive individualism. . . . We need to show how the Holy Spirit calls, gathers, enlightens and sanctifies people one by one through the gospel, and then draws them into communion in his holy church.
— Harold L. Senkbeil
I cried out at the sudden visitation of pain, everyone in a silent church standing in a rustle of suits and dresses to bend back their longest fingernail.
— Eric Sennevoight, The Rocket Garden
If the good news is an invitation to a Jesus way of life and not information about somebody who accomplished something on my behalf, I’m sunk. This is law and no gospel.
— Kevin DeYoung, Why We're Not Emergent
Open-handed generosity and caring for the poor and marginalized as if we were caring for Jesus himself are extensions of our worship.
— C. Christopher Smith, Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus
In addition to the transience of their members, churches themselves face a crisis of hypermobility. Many churches have put down only shallow roots in their neighborhood, or no roots at all. We’ve all heard the question, “If our church suddenly moved to a new location fifteen miles away, would anyone in our neighborhood notice we were gone?” But what if we asked ourselves this question: “If our church was magically lifted off the ground and moved to a location fifteen miles away, would we notice the difference?” Western churches have become so disentangled from their own places that this question could be a cold, hard look in the mirror for many faith communities.
— C. Christopher Smith, Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus
Don't let hard lessons harden your heart.
— Carlos A.  Rodriguez
Most talk of a catholic spirit but it is only till they have been brought into the pale of their own church. This is downright sectarianism, not Catholicism. How can I act consistently, unless I receive and love all the children of God, whom I esteem to be such, of whatever denomination they may be?
— George Whitefield
This is, indeed, an insightful observation. The Archbishop [Joseph L. Berardin] insists that the natural resemblance between Christ and his priests must not stop merely with the fact that they share a common masculinity. Our question is, 'Why must it BEGIN there?' If the faithful cannot see Christ in a male who exemplifies no godlike virtues - humility, gentleness, and self-effacing service - can they not see him in a female who does? Indeed, if the priest acts 'in persona Christi,' not 'in masculinitate Christi,' then 'NATURAL resemblance' between Christ and the priest, it would seem, does not entail PHYSICAL, that is SEXUAL resemblance, but a resemblance which is natural to the SPIRITUAL order with which the worshiping congregation has to do. And in this order there is neither male nor female, even as there is neither Jew nor Greek. We would, therefore, conclude that since the Word was made flesh, as the apostle John has declared him (John 1:14), we rightly heed those who, in the flesh, symbolize his presence as they speak and act in his name. But we see no reason to add to what the apostle said by insisting that the Word was made MALE flesh, for both male and female are equally bearers of the divine image. And since God created humankind in his image, male AND female, we can only conclude that women as well as men should be ordained to the priesthood, because femaleness, like maleness, is a fitting symbol (sacramental sign) of Deity.
— Paul King Jewett, The Ordination of Women: An Essay on the Office of Christian Ministry
Choosing the way of Christ not only means identifying with Christ, however; ‘it also means identifying with the stubborn, recalcitrant, and frequently offensive flock that he calls his own. . . .Yet as flawed as the people of God are, if the Lord is to be our God then his people must be our people too.
— Iain M. Duguid, Esther & Ruth
This [egalitarianism vs complementarianism] is not an issue of chauvinism or discrimination. It is an issue of Biblical interpretation.
— Alan de Jager, The Role of Women in Christianity
I walk into so many places where Christians are gathered and I get all excited, only to find that the fellowship among these Believers is dead! There is no openness, no authenticity.
— Alan de Jager
Whenever a group of people who are designed to primarily unite around one thing try to unite around something else, the result is devastating for all.
— Rob Tims, Southern Fried Faith: How the Bible Belt Confuses Christ and Culture
Dear Church, everyone is broken, stop pretending like you're not.
— Carlos A.  Rodriguez, Designed For Inheritance: A Discovery of Sonship
How to love is the real question. We all know to love and to keep loving more, but man's confusion comes from the differing opinions on how to love. The Church will always be accused of not loving enough by human standards - which should be its motivation to love more - however that is, in many cases, because its focus is and should also be to love on levels of eternal significance. This is the level of love that will inevitably go unnoticed by those who do not believe in eternity.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
This is a paradox of Whitefield's legacy: evangelicalism draws people of different churches while dividing those within the same denomination.
— Melanie Ross, Evangelical versus Liturgical?: Defying a Dichotomy
You can't say asses in church unless you are speaking of donkeys.
— Allan Dare Pearce, Paris in April
We have Gideon because we don't want always to be speaking of our faith in abstract, otherworldly, irrreal, or general terms, to which people may be glad to listen but don't really take note of; because it is good once in a while actually to see faith in action, not just hear what it should be like, but see how it just happens in the midst of someone's life, in the story of a human being. Only here does faith become, for everyone, not just a children's game, but rather something highly dangerous, even terrifying. Here a person is being treated without considerations or conditions or allowances; he has to bow to what is being asked, or he will be broken. This is why the image of a person of faith is so often that of someone who is not beautiful in human terms, not a harmonious picture, but rather that of someone who has been torn to shreds. The picture of someone who has learned to have faith has the peculiar quality of always pointing away from the person's own self, toward the One in whose power, in whose captivity and bondage he or she is. So we have Gideon, because his story is a story of God glorified, of the human being humbled.
— Dean G. Stroud, Preaching in Hitler's Shadow
What if evangelical mega churches became known around the world for things like providing water access for entire countries or fighting to end the AIDS pandemic? Imagine what integrity that would give to the good news we preach, especially the gospel that Jesus declares is good news to the poor.
— Shane Claiborne, The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical
If you life is an example of glorifying God, others won't see your good works and glorify YOU, because they'll know what you are doing is for God's glory.
— Charles R. Swindoll, Rise & Shine: A Wake Up Call
Believe me, once you have tasted worship—the kind of worship that captures your heart and rivets your full attention on the living Lord—nothing less satisfies. Nothing else even comes close. Once you have tasted true worship, you will never want to play church again.
— Charles R. Swindoll, Rise & Shine: A Wake Up Call
If your motive is in any way to promote greatness for yourself, you're in the wrong calling.
— Charles R. Swindoll, Rise & Shine: A Wake Up Call
Sir, I cannot sing. I have no formal training. I do not read music. And I know this is a church - but I play a mean harmonica.
— Matt Weber, Fearing the Stigmata: Humorously Holy Stories of a Young Catholic's Search for a Culturally Relevant Faith
Hence the vocation of the Church of Christ in the world, in political conflict and social strife, is inherently eschatological. The Church is the embassy of the eschaton in the world. The church is the image of what the world is in its essential being. The Church is the trustee of the society which the world, not subjected to the power of death, is to be on that last day when the world is fulfilled in all things in God.
— William Stringfellow, Dissenter in a Great Society: A Christian View of America in Crisis
You telling me God love you, and you ain't never done nothing for him? I mean, not go to church, sing in the choir, feed the preacher and all like that?But if God love me, Celie, I don't have to do all that. Unless I want to. There's a lot of other things I can do that I speck God likes. Like what? I ast. Oh, she say. I can lay back and just admire stuff. Be happy. Have a good time. Well, this sounds like blasphemy sure nuff. She say, Celie, tell the truth, have you ever found God in church? I never did. I just found a bunch of folks hoping for him to show. Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me. And I think all the other folks did too. They come to church to share God, not find God.
— Alice Walker, The Color Purple
Here then are the choices we all face moment by moment: Will we aim to be impressive? Will we expect to be in complete control? Will we ensure that we always come out on top as winners? Or will we be happy for the power of Christ to rest upon us in our endless weakness? 'No man can give at once the impressions that he himself is clever and that Jesus Christ is mighty to save.' Neither can any church.
— Raymond C. Ortlund Jr., The Gospel: How the Church Portrays the Beauty of Christ
Like caterpillars our metamorphosis begins with what comes from our mouth. Caterpillars spin silk cocoons from the mouth. We speak life or death, success or failure. All transformation starts with what comes from our mouth.
— Brandi L. Bates, Red Flags
As long as the focus is on God the style of the music is irrelevant.
— Virginia Smith, Stuck in the Middle
...ask yourself, "Who's getting the glory in this ministry?" You see, if we do ministry OUR way, it won't be for His glory, because our ways are not His ways.
— Charles R. Swindoll, Rise & Shine: A Wake Up Call
Without vision, a church devolves into a lukewarm, aimless organization characterized by infighting, budget grabbing and a dead heart for the lost.
— Todd Stocker
Give me a child until he is seven, thought Tom, and he is forever after mine. When the Fascists say it, they're bums and kidnappers, but when the Church says it, it is known as putting a kid on the right track.
— Grace Metalious, Peyton Place
I long for a church that understands the dangers of entertainment and sees it for what is is: a lion crouching at the evangelical door, ready to devour us. We need a culture of evangelism that never sacrifices to the idolatry of entertainment, but serves up the rich fare found the gospel of Christ.
— J. Mack Stiles, Evangelism: How the Whole Church Speaks of Jesus
There may be no English word as bent and broken by casual misuse, or drained of blood by idealizing admirers and apologists, or grossly caricatured by huckstering detractors, as church.
— Craig Keen, After Crucifixion: The Promise of Theology
When the Holy Father passed away in 2005, Laura, Dad, Bill Clinton, and I flew together to his funeral in Rome. It was the first time an American president had attended the funeral of a pope, let alone brought two of his predecessors.
— George W. Bush, Decision Points
Emotional pain is a terrible thing to endure, but the solution is not anything unbiblical.
— Lois Mowday Rabey
I cannot at the same time accept the glory and give God the glory... Glorifying God means being occupied with and committed to His ways rather than preoccupied with and determined my own way. It is being so thrilled with Him, so devoted to Him, so committed to Him that we cannot get enough of Him!
— Charles R. Swindoll, Rise & Shine: A Wake Up Call
I thought I was looking at a building at first: that it was some kind of tent, as high as a country church, made of grey and pink canvas that flapped in the gusts of storm wind, in that orange sky: a lopsided canvas structure aged by weather and ripped by time. And then it turned and I saw its face...
— Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Referring to the church as a building is like referring to people as two-by-fours.
— Don Everts, Jesus with Dirty Feet: A Down-To-Earth Look at Christianity for the Curious Skeptical
The Church right now has more fashion than passion, is more pathetic than prophetic, is more superficial than supernatural.
— Leonard Ravenhill, Revival God's Way
What would have become of the people five hundred years ago if they had followed strictly the advice of the doctors? They would have all been dead. What would the people have been, if at any age of the world they had followed implicitly the direction of the church? They would have all been idiots. It is a splendid thing that there is always some grand man who will not mind, and who will think for himself. I believe in allowing the children to think for thems
— Robert G. Ingersoll, The Liberty of Man, Woman and Child
Roman Catholicism is a broken and utterly desperate thing, capable only of malignant mischief in our awakening world.
— H.G. Wells, Crux Ansata: An Indictment of the Roman Catholic Church
[The Lord's Supper teaches that] Rituals are good, and they are instituted and used by God to 'connect' his people with him. We learn through ritual that the church is not just made up of individuals, but is a corporate body. It is not just about personal salvation, but a group of people, the people of God, who are bound to one another and to the faithful through the generations. (page 263)
— Peter Enns, Exodus
Luther had passed many a white church in his day, heard them singing their hymns and chanting their "Amens" and seen them gather on a porch or two afterward with their lemonade and piety, but he knew if he ever showed up on their steps, starving or injured, the only response he’d get to a plea for human kindness would be the amen of a shotgun pointed in his face.
— Dennis Lehane, The Given Day
A church service starts and ends with a prayer. A magazine starts and ends with an advert.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Don't just bring people to church
—  bring them to Christ. Churches are filled with church goers but not Christ followers.
We are being called to a new and deeper passion: to those who live under the shadow of the cross and those most in need of compassion. Then we become mothers of God, sisters and brothers of Jesus, the loved disciples born in the blood of the Cross and fed on the Word of God.
— Megan McKenna, The New Stations of the Cross: The Way of the Cross According to Scripture
Hit don’t make no difference what a man perfesses. I been in a heap o’ churches. There’s the Nazarene Church and the Pentecost and the Holy Rollers and the Baptists and I don’t know what-all. I cain’t see much difference to nary one of ‘em. There’s a good to all of ‘em and there’s a bad.
— Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, South Moon Under
You mean the day they stop needing the church," Vittoria challenged, moving toward him. "Doubt is your last shred of control. It is doubt that brings souls to you. Our need to know that life has meaning. Man's insecurity and need for an enlightened soul assuring him everything is part of a master plan. But the church is not the only enlightened soul on the planet! We all seek God in different ways. What are you afraid of? That God will show himself somewhere other than inside these walls? That people will find him in their own lives and leave your antiquated rituals behind? Religions evolve! The mind finds answers, the heart grapples with new truths. My father was on your quest! A parallel path! Why couldn't you see that? God is not some omnipotent authority looking down from above, threatening to throw us into a pit of fire if we disobey. God is the energy that flows through the synapses of our nervous system and the chambers of our hearts! God is in all things!
— Dan Brown, Angels & Demons
It is too easy to call the church political. The nature of fallen people is political. And they happen to make up the church. So the church is innately political. This cannot be helped. But it can be navigated if not always stomached.
— Mea McMahon
The full Christian experience, however, is not an individual experience which may be isolated from all else; it is, unconditionally, an experience within the context of the Church. It is 'a personal history which is imbedded in the greater history of the Church - a spiritual becoming which is incarnate and is lived within the Church's own process of becoming. It is the effort to develop what has been given, to discover what is hidden, the effort to attain to oneself by attaining, though the Church and within her, to the mystery of Christ, the Saviour'.
— Hans Urs von Balthasar
Your church is a baby-house made of blocks.
— Henry David Thoreau, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience
This leaves us with the urgent question: How can we be or become a caring community, a community of people not trying to cover the pain or to avoid it by sophisticated bypasses, but rather share it as the source of healing and new life? It is important to realize that you cannot get a Ph.D. in caring, that caring cannot be delegated by specialists, and that therefore nobody can be excused from caring. Still, in a society like ours, we have a strong tendency to refer to specialists. When someone does not feel well, we quickly think, 'Where can we find a doctor?' When someone is confused, we easily advise him to go to a counselor. And when someone is dying, we quickly call a priest. Even when someone wants to pray we wonder if there is a minister around.
— Henri J.M. Nouwen, Out of Solitude: Three Meditations on the Christian Life
It was Sunday morning, and old people passed me like sad grey waves on their way to church.
— Barbara Comyns, The Vet's Daughter
I left that church with rich and royal hatred of the priest as a person, and a loathing for the church as an institution, and I vowed that I would never go inside a church again.[Eugene V. Debs, describing his teenage reaction to a hellfire lecture by a priest]
— Eugene V. Debs
Now, there are things I like just fine about church, and I don’t just mean making money. The notion of getting together as a community to remind ourselves why we shouldn’t behave like animals is a fucking great idea.
— Nick Offerman, Paddle Your Own Canoe: One Man's Fundamentals for Delicious Living
I have no objection to instruments of music in our worship, provided they are neither seen nor heard.
— John Wesley
The word miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is a monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Church is going to have to recognise that secularisation is not the cause of their decline, it is the result of it.
— Keith Porteous Wood
The ministry found in the corners of one's life should match the ministry that is put on display.
— Alisa Hope Wagner, Eve of Awakening
We do not need them. They would hinder rather than help our praise. Sing unto him. This is the sweetest and best music. No instrument like the human voice. What a degradation to supplant the intelligent song of the whole congregation by the theatrical prettiness of a quartet, bellows, and pipes! We might as well pray by machinery as praise by it.
— Charles Haddon Spurgeon
I am an old man, and I here declare that I never knew them to be productive of any good in the worship of God, and have reason to believe that they are productive of much evil. Music as a science I esteem and admire, but instrumental music in the house of God I abominate and abhor. This is the abuse of music, and I here register my protest against all such corruption of the worship of the author of Christianity.
— Adam Clarke
My attraction to heavy church-goers has more to do with me wanting to see who'd win the fight
—  me or god
If everything is mission, nothing is mission.
— Stephen Neill
Martin Luther called the church building the “Mundhaus” (lit. “mouth house” or "speech house”) because he believed that the Graeco-Roman “pagan lecture” of the sophist entertainers who took over the Catholic church should be the focus of “the service”. Sermons might have been helpful in the later Middle Ages when even many Catholic priests couldn't read. However, modern research has repeatedly proven that lecturing is the worst possible way to educate others because it’s so boring. Might traditional, so-called-inspired preaching still be the best way to communicate God’s Word?” ~ © gfp '42™
— Gary Patton
As a teenager, I began to question the Great Christian Sorting System. My gay friends in high school were kind and funny and loved me, so I suspected that my church had placed them in the wrong category... Injustices in the world needed to be addressed and not ignored. Christians weren't good; people who fought for peace and justice were good. I had been lied to, and in my anger at being lied to about the containers, I left the church. But it turns out, I hadn't actually escaped the sorting system. I had just changed the labels.
— Nadia Bolz-Weber, Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint
So, yeah, my people figured that maybe there's something at the back of it all, a creator, a great spirit, and so we say thank you to it, because it's always good to say thank you. But we never built churches. We didn't need to. The land was the church. The land was the religion. The land was older and wiser than the people who walked on it.
— Neil Gaiman, American Gods
Dear God, save us from The Church!
— Ljupka Cvetanova, The New Land
Music praises God. Music is well or better able to praise him than the building of the church and all its decoration
—  it is the Church's greatest ornament.
When his flock thronged into the midnight service, there was wonder on every face at the newly hung greens and the softly flickering candles on each windowsill. To the simple beauty of the historic church was added fresh, green hope, the lush scent of flowers in winter, and candle flame that cast its flickering shadows over the congregation like a shawl.
— Jan Karon, These High, Green Hills
There are congregations on nearly every corner. I'm not sure we need more churches. What we need is a church. I say one church is better than fifty. I have tried to remove the plural form churches from my vocabulary, training myself to think of the church as Christ did, and as the early Christians did. The metaphors for her are always singular – a body, a bride. I heard one gospel preacher say it like this, as he really wound up and broke a sweat: "We've got to unite ourselves as one body. Because Jesus is coming back, and he's coming back for a bride not a harem.
— Shane Claiborne, The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical
Gnosticism is undeniably pre-Christian, with both Jewish and gentile roots. The wisdom of Solomon already contained Gnostic elements and prototypes for the Jesus of the Gospels...God stops being the Lord of righteous deed and becomes the Good One...A clear pre-Christian Gnosticism can be distilled from the epistles of Paul. Paul is recklessly misunderstood by those who try to read anything Historical Jesus-ish into it. The conversion of Paul in the Acts of the Apostles is a mere forgery from various Tanakh passages... [The epistles] are from Christian mystics of the middle of the second century. Paul is thus the strongest witness against the Historical Jesus hypothesis...John's Gnostic origin is more evident than that of the synoptics. Its acceptance proves that even the Church wasn't concerned with historical facts at all.
— Arthur Drews
Hard by the church stood the public house; so often the two are closely conjoined, honorably sharing both joys and sorrows.
— Jeremias Gotthelf, Die schwarze Spinne
Down through the centuries, the Church has carefully preserved, protected, and defended its Marian teachings, because to give them up would be to give up the gospel.
— Scott Hahn, Hail, Holy Queen: The Mother of God in the Word of God
If Christ is the head of the church and we are the body, lets be disciples who master the noise.
— Eric Samuel Timm, Static Jedi: The Art of Hearing God Through the Noise
The humble were the elect of God. Did not the priests teach so, in their gemmed, kingly robes, from their towering pulpits?
— Tanith Lee, The Book of the Beast
I'll always remember being called by my mother who beckoned me to look at the screen where a young man was being tortured by the church. Bag over his head, rolling on the ground, crying, suffocating, vomiting while the congression continues yelling chants, “God will save you!” treating him like the devil's child.It was the first time I’ve ever doubted God. First time I’ve ever heard the terms ‘Gays, and ‘Queers.’ I went through a lot in my childhood, but this was the first I’ve ever been so traumatized. My mom tells me they deserved it and the church tries to justify their actions as if it was the most intelligent excuse in the world. At 12 years old, I knew only one thing. I would never be like them.
— Merlin
...people who've been hit with the gospel respond naturally with radically changed lives and hearts. The church and the ministries of the church are gospel centered when they flow from hearts that are afire with wonder at the glory and grace of God, revealed in the person of Jesus.
— Daniel Montgomery, Faithmapping: A Gospel Atlas for Your Spiritual Journey
Election has nothing to do with the eternal salvation of individuals but refers instead to God's way of saving nations. It was a major mistake of the Reformation to have decided to follow Augustine in this matter, taking election to refer to grace and salvation. It manages to make bad news out of good news. It casts a deep shadow over the character of God. At it worst, it can lead to awful consequences in terms of pride, arrogance, superiority, and intolerance as the ideology of election takes hold. It causes the church to become, not a sign of the unity of humanity in the love of God, but the sign of favorites in the midst of the enemies of God.
— Clark H. Pinnock, A Wideness in God's Mercy: The Finality of Jesus Christ in a World of Religions
Is the Lord’s Supper only for Christians? Whenever I ask this question I immediately remember the character of those that partook of the Last Supper with Jesus. They were certainly Jews, some better Jews than others, but Jesus shared this meal knowingly even with Judas. Or again consider the Emmaus Road encounter. Jesus shares this meal with those who had given up on his being the One to redeem Israel, who were leaving Jerusalem downcast and disappointed, and who were oblivious to the fact that it was Jesus who was speaking and sharing with them! There has to be a balance in the liturgy to help the congregation make a decision if they themselves are ready to partake of this Meal in a worthy manner (hence the 'ye who do truly and earnestly repent' clause), while at the same time joyfully welcoming all who are willing and ready and able to do so.
— Ben Witherington III, Making a Meal of It: Rethinking the Theology of the Lord's Supper
An institution theoretically devoted to providing comfort to those in need (the church) is in trouble because it has embraced the same pressure cooker we find everywhere else.
— Tullian Tchividjian
Yet people are still showing up to lift their hands after all these years even though the church is flawed and broken and beautiful and has a shameful, ugly side to it that I'll bet it wishes it didn't have and repeatedly tries to hide.Just like me.Just like you.Just like always.
— Max Andrew Dubinsky, An Anthology of Madness
I thought that some of the hymns bespoke the true religion of the place. The people didn't really want to be saints of self-deprivation and hatred of the world. They knew that the world would sooner or later deprive them of all it had given them, but still they liked it. What they came together for was to acknowledge, just by coming, their losses and failures and sorrows, their need for comfort, their faith always needing to be greater, their wish (in spite of all words and acts to the contrary) to love one another and to forgive and be forgiven, their need for one another's help and company and divine gifts, their hope (and experience) of love surpassing death, their gratitude.
— Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow
If every Christian family in the United States would simply commit to pray and ask God if HE wants to use them to bless a child without a family, well, we'd change the world. If we can get the church to think about adoption not in terms of the desires of adults but in terms of the needs of children, I think we'd see on a much grander scale how God sets the lonely in families.
— Kelly Rosati, Wait No More: One Family's Amazing Adoption Journey
Here is a very simple and trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance: If it's not about Christ, it's not Christianity.
— D.R. Silva, It's All About Jesus: What They Never Told You in Church
A piece of paper doesn't make you a pastor any more than making predictions makes you a prophet.
— D.R. Silva, It's All About Jesus: What They Never Told You in Church
We get called dishonoring for pointing out the garbage in the church, yet nobody ever seems to think it's dishonoring that somebody put the garbage there in the first place.
— D.R. Silva
Because sometimes the Church seems like those posed circus tableaus where the curtain lifts and men, white, zinc-oxide, talcum-powder statues, freeze to represent abstract Beauty. Very wonderful. But I hope there will always be room for me to dart about among the statues, don't you, Father Stone?
— Ray Bradbury, The Illustrated Man
Between Monday and Saturday men make an audience. On Sunday, they make a congregation.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
We don’t just show up on stage; we bring along the oil of praise in jars of practice and rehearsal so that when the Lord shows up, our worship shines as the light with which His Church shall welcome Him!
— Gangai Victor, The Worship Kenbook
Somewhere along the line, "Church" became a weekly event rather than a gathering of people who did life together.
— Todd Stocker
A worshipping Church or a prayer group is a magnet that draws the Lord and His people to connect with each other!
— Gangai Victor, The Worship Kenbook
The original Christians regarded the deposit of faith, as finally inseparable from the very living substance of the Gospel in the saving event of Christ crucified, risen and glorified, but as once and for all entrusted to the church through its apostolic foundation in Christ, informing, structuring and quickening its life and faith and mission as the body of Christ in the world... While the deposit of faith was replete with the truth as it is in Jesus, embodying kerygmatic, didactic and theological content, but its very nature it could not be resolved into a system of truths or set of normative doctrines and formulated beliefs, for the truths and doctrines and beliefs entailed could not be abstracted from the embodied form which they were given in Christ in the apostolic foundation of the church without loss of their real substance. Nevertheless in this embodied form "the faith once for all delivered to the saints" constituted the regulative basis for all explicit formulation of Christian truth, doctrine and belief in the deepening understanding of the church and its regular instruction of catechumens and the faithful. app is
— Thomas F. Torrance, Trinitarian Faith: The Evangelical Theology of the Ancient Catholic Faith
The church that weds itself to modernity is already a widow within postmodernity.
— Thomas C. Oden, Requiem: A Lament in Three Movements
Theology is not a private subject for theologians only. Nor is it a private subject for professors. Fortunately, there have always been pastors who have understood more about theology than most professors. Nor is theology a private subject of study for pastors. Fortunately, there have repeatedly been congregation members, and often whole congregations, who have pursued theology energetically while their pastors were theological infants or barbarians. Theology is a matter for the Church.
— Karl Barth