c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Liturgy is the means that the church uses to keep baptized Christians in living touch with the entire living holy community as it participates formationally in Holy Scripture. I want to use the word 'liturgy' to refer to this intent and practice of the church insofar as it pulls everything in and out of the sanctuary into a life of worship, situates everything past and present coherently as participation in the revelation written for us in Scripture. Instead of limiting liturgy to the ordering of the community in discrete acts of worship, I want to use it in this large and comprehensive way, the centuries-deep and continents-wide community, spread out in space and time, as Christians participate in actions initiated and formed by the words in this book - our entire existence understood liturgically, that is connectedly in the context of the three personal Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and furnished with the text of the Holy Scripture.
— Eugene H. Peterson, Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading
The Church's obsession with sexual restrictions is and always has been wrong wrong wrong. Wrong to be contemptuous of naïve young women like Philomena and me. Wrong to ignore the men involved in creating "illegitimate" children. Wrong to demonize gays while knowing full well how many men and women of the Church are gay. Wrong to excuse and hide criminal priests, transferring them to new, unsuspecting parishes. Wrong to think that forbidding consensual human sexuality is more important than Christ's message of compassion and forgiveness.
— Ann Medlock
Baptism is one of those more effective rites that come in with the new covenant. The fact that baptism takes the place of the multiple, complicated cleansing rites of stoicheic order is itself a sign that salvation has come to the world. And the fact that baptism does the miraculous work of binding diverse flesh into one body means that baptism is one of the rites that effects the social salvation of humanity.
— Peter Leithart
The task of liturgy is to order the life of the holy community following the text of Holy Scripture. It consists of two movements. First it gets us into the sanctuary, the place of adoration and attention, listening and receiving and believing before God. There is a lot involved, all the parts of our lives ordered to all aspects of the revelation of God in Jesus.Then it gets us out of the sanctuary into the world into places of obeying and loving ordering our lives as living sacrifices in the world to the glory of God. There is a lot involved, all the parts of our lives out on the street participating in the work of salvation.
— Eugene H. Peterson, Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading
It is useful to reflect that the word 'liturgy' did not originate in church or worship settings. In the Greek world it referred to publish service, what a citizen did for the community. As the church used the word in relation to worship, ti kept this 'public service' quality - working for the community on behalf of or following orders from God. As we worship God, revealed personally as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in our Holy Scriptures, we are not doing something apart form or away from the non-Scripture=reading world; we do it for the world - bringing all creation and all history before God, presenting our bodies and all the beauties and needs of humankind before God in praise and intercession, penetrating and serving the world for whom Christ died in the strong name of the Trinity.
— Eugene H. Peterson, Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading
Liturgy puts us to work along with all the others who have been and are being put to work in the world by and with Jesus following our spiritually-forming text. Liturgy keeps us in touch with all the action that has been and is being generated by the Spirit as given witness in the biblical text. Liturgy prevents the narrative form of Scripture from being reduced to private individualized consumption.Understood this way, 'liturgical' has little to do with choreography in the chancel or an aesthetics of the sublime. It is obedient, participatory, listening to Holy Scripture in the company of the holy community through time (our two-thousand years of responding to this text) and in space (our friends in christ all over the world). High-church Anglicans, revivalistic Baptists, hands-in-the-air praising charismatics, and Quakers sitting in a bare room in silence are all required to read and live this text liturgically, participating in the holy community's reading of Holy Scripture. there is nothing 'churchy' or elitist about it; it is a vast and dramatic 'story-ing,' making sure that we are taking our place in the story and letting everyone else have their parts in the story also, making sure that we don't leave anything or anyone out of the story. Without sufficient liturgical support and structure we are very apt to edit the story down to fit our individual tastes and predispositions.
— Eugene H. Peterson, Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading
Because people understand that the diocese is trying to help the members of that group feel more connected to their church, the church they belong to by virtue of their baptism.
— James Martin, Building a Bridge: How the Catholic Church and the LGBT Community Can Enter into a Relationship of Respect, Compassion, and Sensitivity
FIRST AMENDMENT No one shall give a damn about your religion. Freedom of speech doesn’t mean you can say whatever you want about prayer and God and rules and gays, and everyone else has to take it. It means you can say whatever you want about all that, but I can then say back to you, “Your church is a cult, and all the women in it are fat.” So suck it up, Brother Daryl.
— Trae Crowder, The Liberal Redneck Manifesto: Draggin' Dixie Outta the Dark
The departure of the church-going element had induced a more humanitarian atmosphere.
— Dorothy L. Sayers, Clouds of Witness
[re: I Corinthians 15:34,58] "The present life of the church, in other words, is not about "soul-making," the attempt to produce or train disembodied beings for a future disembodied life. It is about working with fully human beings who will be reembodied at the last, after the model of the Messiah.
— N.T. Wright, The Challenge of Easter
I no longer belong to your ways. My religion is love. Every heart is my church.
— David Paul Kirkpatrick
I walked down the empty Broad to breakfast, as I often did on Sundays, at a tea-shop opposite Balliol. The air was full of bells from the surrounding spires and the sun, casting long shadows across the open spaces, dispelled the fears of night. The tea-shop was hushed as a library; a few solitary men in bedroom slippers from Balliol and Trinity looked up as I entered, then turned back to their Sunday newspapers. I ate my scrambled eggs and bitter marmalade with the zest which in youth follows a restless night. I lit a cigarette and sat on, while one by one the Balliol and Trinity men paid their bills and shuffled away, slip-slop, across the street to their colleges. It was nearly eleven when I left, and during my walk I heard the change-ringing cease and, all over the town, give place to the single chime which warned the city that service was about to start.
— Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder
As we open up our church meetings to God's power, they will not always follow a predetermined schedule or order. Who can outline what God might have in mind?
— Jim Cymbala, Spirit Rising: Tapping into the Power of the Holy Spirit
You don't get to turn someone's sanctuary into an unsafe space.
— Darnell Lamont Walker
I don't know what God intends, or what qualifies Him to forgive me,' Sobran said
— Elizabeth Knox, The Vintner's Luck
Invisible Christians in the world are only visible in church on Sunday.
— Alin Sav
The church can only defend its own space by fighting, not for space, but for the salvation of the world. Otherwise the church becomes a "religious society" that fights in its own interest and thus has ceased to be the church of God in the world.
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics
The Church, like the monarchy, was a valuable bastion of defense against the dangerous alliance of atheistical philosophy with political radicalism. The Bible taught the poorer orders that their lowly path had been allotted to them by the hand of God, and the Church was there to make quite certain they understood that.
— C.S. Harris, When Gods Die
Any church that emphasizes on miracles is simply telling His members that they don’t need to qualify but depend on the supernatural power.
— Sunday Adelaja
We have compromised the integrity of the church if we only emphasise on miracles.
— Sunday Adelaja
Any church that is overly emphasizing the role of miracles is encouraging his members to be indolent.
— Sunday Adelaja
Any church that over emphasises miracles is encouraging laziness.
— Sunday Adelaja
The church that emphasises on miracles are indirectly preaching that merit does not mater.
— Sunday Adelaja
There is error in a church when miracles are made the only thing.
— Sunday Adelaja
The church must integrate into the environment
— Sunday Adelaja
Why is the church failing so miserably in impacting the nations of the earth?
— Sunday Adelaja
However it—or the kind of extreme individualistic epistemology it embraces—can lead historians to an overly skeptical approach particularly to those sources that were intended to recount and inform events of the past, that is, testimony in this restricted sense. Particularly in Gospels scholarship there is an attitude abroad that approaches the sources with fundamental skepticism, rather than trust, and therefore requires that anything the sources claim be accepted only if historians can independently verify it…..
— Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony
Equally, it does not mean that Christian beliefs cause more distortion than other ideological beliefs. This emerged with particular clarity in engaging with the opinion that Jesus did not exist. This view is demonstrably false. It is fuelled by a regrettable form of atheist prejudice, which holds all the main primary sources, and Christian people, in contempt. This is not merely worse than the American Jesus Seminar, it is no better than Christian fundamentalism. It simply has different prejudices.
— Maurice Casey, Jesus of Nazareth: An independent historian's account of his life and teaching
A man can do a lot of damage in the church. When someone comes here, he's got his guard up. But in church a man's wide open.
— John Steinbeck, East of Eden
We are members of the Church of Christ
— Sunday Adelaja
Pastors are over-extended taking care of a few hundred sheep in their church
— Sunday Adelaja
The church must be involved in all the seven spheres of life extending the virtues and principles of the kingdom of God
— Sunday Adelaja
God designed the church to facilitate the increase of his kingdom
— Sunday Adelaja
The church today has reduced the Christians to a level that has made them to be too weak to make anything happen.
— Sunday Adelaja
When the kingdom leaves the church, the church stops living for herself
— Sunday Adelaja
Some goes to church to seek prosperity
— Sunday Adelaja
The end-time church will be a worshipper of God alone
— Sunday Adelaja
Does the church offer answers for the complexions of 21st century problems?
— Sunday Adelaja
To be successful, you must leave the church walls behind and go out
— Sunday Adelaja
God’s promise is to save the church and all who loves him
— Sunday Adelaja
The church must be involved in all seven spheres of life
— Sunday Adelaja
The church’s main task is to fuel having a fulfilled destiny
— Sunday Adelaja
The church is to help its members mature in Christ’s calling
— Sunday Adelaja
In this current generation, the church is not prospering in its mandate to extend kingdom principles throughout culture
— Sunday Adelaja
What I think we as the church lack, though, is a place to talk about how things really are right now. In our desire to be an inspiration to one another we often veil what is true, because what is true is not always inspirational. It's not easy to watch or personally experience a marriage on the verge of divorce, or a child battling cancer, or a betrayal of the worst kind, or dreams lost in the dust, or overwhelming feelings of despair or emptiness. But these things are real. And hurting believers whose lives are in tatters need real help. If we were able to put aside our need for approval long enough to be authentic, then, surely, we would be living as the church.
— Sheila Walsh, Loved Back to Life: How I Found the Courage to Live Free
God wants the church to become an authority to bring order, righteousness and purity to the country
— Sunday Adelaja
The church is called to activate the position of the believers in saving the nation for God’s glory
— Sunday Adelaja
The church should become a place of regeneration and reformation
— Sunday Adelaja
God allows problem to come so that the church can discover and declare Her position
— Sunday Adelaja
The redemption of a country depends on the position of the church
— Sunday Adelaja
If the church doesn’t start fighting corruption, it will keep flourishing in the country
— Sunday Adelaja
The church’s task is to open people’s eyes so that they can see that there is nothing higher than God
— Sunday Adelaja
Representatives of the churches should help guide people in resolving their crisis
— Sunday Adelaja
The church must become a breeding ground for deliverers
— Sunday Adelaja
The church is called by God to become God’s agent of deliverance in every nation
— Sunday Adelaja
For church buildings not to be enough is to build and equip church members to send them out
— Sunday Adelaja
Not to have a confused church is to teach paramount importance of the truth
— Sunday Adelaja
For irrelevancy to be cancelled in the church, let kingdom priority and pursuit be restored
— Sunday Adelaja
Cooperate expression of your church life means a lot
— Sunday Adelaja
The Church was the one institution whose mission depended on galvanizing attention; and through its daily and weekly offices, as well as its sometimes central role in education, that is exactly what it managed to do. At the dawn of the attention industries, then, religion was still, in a very real sense, the incumbent operation, the only large-scale human endeavor designed to capture attention and use it.
— Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads
Malus: 'You look like a person with doubts.'Zoe: 'I wonder sometimes if any of this is real - or is it just a business, selling hope to people who can't afford it?'Malus: 'Clever people have been asking that question since the iron age, Zoe. The answer remains the same.'Zoe: 'And... ?'Malus: 'Business is good.'(A dialogue regarding the Church between a demon and a human.)
— Terry Moore, Rachel Rising, Volume 3: Cemetery Songs
Behavior speaks... When you need money, the church tells you to pray. When the church needs money, they pass around a basket.
— Steve Maraboli
There is a Marian "style" to the Church's work of evangelization. Whenever we look to Mary, we come to believe once again in the revolutionary nature of love and tenderness. in her we see that humility and tenderness ar enot virtues of the weak but of the strong, who need not treat others poorly in order to feel important themselves. Contemplating Mary, we realize that she who praised God for "bringing down the mighty from their thrones" and "sending the rich away empty" (Luke 1:52-53) is also the one who brings a homely warmth to our pursuit of justice. She is also the one who carefully keeps "all these things, pondering them in heart" (Luke 2:19).Mary is able to recognize the traces of God's Spirit in events great and small. She constantly contemplates the mystery of God in our world, in human history, and in our daily lives. She is the woman of prayer and work in Nazareth, and she is also Our Lady of Help, who sets out from her town "with haste" (Luke 1:39) to be of service to others. This interplay of justice and tenderness, of contemplation and concern for others, is what makes the ecclesial community look to Mary as a model of evangelization.
— Pope Francis, The Church of Mercy
Those of us who are concerned about the 'church-less Christian' phenomenon ... must first look at ourselves and ask to what degree *we* have contributed to the conditions that tempt some to hit eject on the local church.
— Scott Sauls, Jesus Outside the Lines: A Way Forward for Those Who Are Tired of Taking Sides
The true Church of Jesus Christ will never be overwhelmed by the world. The waters may swirl around us, but the Lord has promised to build His Church and keep it strong until He returns. One thing must be avoided at all costs. We must not let the world seep into the Church. When we let the world dilute our Gospel and water down our values, we'll disappear from sight. Let's keep the Church holy - and wholly committed to Scripture.  The chief danger of the Church today is that it's trying to get on the same side as the world, instead of trying to turn the world upside down.
— A.B. Simpson
Training is an active, dynamic process lived out daily in all areas of life- not a rote exercise in memorizing verses and going to church every week.
— Craig Groeschel, Weird: Because Normal Isn't Working
Jesus has not promised to build your ministry
—  he has promised to build his church.
Will we let ourselves become a Church that calls and welcomes sinners with open arms, that gives courage and hope, or are we a Church closed in on herself? Are we a Church where the love of God dwells, where one cares for the other, where one prays for the other?A final question: what can I, a weak fragile sinner, do? God says to you, Do not be afraid of holiness; do not be afraid to aim high, to let yourself be loved and purified by God; do not be afraid to let yourself be guided by the Holy Spirit. Let us be infected by the holiness of God. Every Christian is called to sanctity...; and sanctity does not consist especially in doing extraordinary things, but in allowing God to act. It is the meeting of our weakness with the strength of his grace, it is saving faith in his action that allows us to live in charity, to do everything with joy and humility, for the glory of God and as a service to our neighbor.
— Pope Francis, The Church of Mercy
The church should be the most innovative organization on the planet. We should be the first ones to be experimenting with new technology, ideas, and strategies. Sadly we've given our innovation away to places like Apple and our creativity to places like Disney.
— Braden Pedersen, 30-Second Theology: By Braden Pedersen
For the Church, the option for the poor is primarily a theological category rather than a cultural, sociological, political, or philosophical one. God shows the poor "his first mercy." This divine preference has consequences for the faith life of all Christians, because we are called to have "this mind...which was in Jesus Christ" (Phil. 2:5). Inspired by this, the Church has made an option for the poor, which is understood as a "special form of primacy in the exercise of Christian charity, to which the whole tradition of the Church bears witness." This option - as Benedict XVI has taught - "is implicit in our Christian faith in a God who became poor for us, so as to enrich us with his poverty." This is why I want a Church that is poor and for the poor. They have much to teach us. Not only do they share in the sensus fidei, but in their difficulties they know the suffering Christ. We need to let ourselves be evangelized by them. The new evangelization is an invitation to acknowledge the saving power at work in their lives and to put them at the center of the Church's pilgrim way. We are called to find Christ in them, to lend our voice to their causes, but also to be their friends, to listen to them, to speak for them, and to embrace the mysterious wisdom that God wishes to share with us through them.
— Pope Francis, The Church of Mercy
The light of love proper to faith can illumine the question of our own time-concerning truth. Truth, nowadays, is often reduced to the subjective authenticity of the individual, valid only to the life of the individual. A common truth intimidates us, for we identify it with the intransigent demands of totalitarian systems. But if truth is a truth of love, if it is a truth disclosed in personal encounter with the Other and with others, then it can be set free from its enclosure in individuals and become part of the common good. As a truth of love, it is not one that can be imposed by force; it is not a truth that stifles the individual. Since it is born of love, it can penetrate to the heart, to the personal core of each man and woman. Clearly, then, faith is not intransigent but grows in respectful coexistences with others. One who believes may not be presumptuous; on the contrary, truth leads to humility, because believers know that, rather than ourselves possessing truth, it is truth that embraces and possesses us. Far from making us inflexible, the security of faith sets us on a journey; it enables witness and dialogue with all.
— Pope Francis, The Church of Mercy
A Black church that isn't inherently revolutionary is irrelevant.
— Darnell Lamont Walker
As religious leaders, we are called to be true "people of dialogue," to cooperate in building peace not as intermediaries but as authentic mediators. Intermediaries seek to give everyone a discount ultimately in order to gain something for themselves. However, the mediator is one who retains nothing for himself but rather spends himself generously until he is consumed, knowing that the only gain is peace. Each one of us is called to be an artisan of peace, by uniting and not dividing, by extinguishing hatred and not holding on to it, by opening paths to dialogue and not by constructing new walls! Let us dialogue and meet one another in order to establish a culture of dialogue in the world, a culture of encounter.
— Pope Francis, The Church of Mercy
Don't ever marry a person you don't truly love. Don't believe what people often say, that the love will develop in future.Those whose love develop in future are very few. If after a period of time you've been dating and the love doesn't seem to grow, I strongly advise you have to re-think.
— Prince Akwarandu
We cannot become starched Christians, those overeducated Christians who speak of theological matters as they calmly sip their tea. No! We must become courageous Christians and go in search of the people who are the very flesh of Christ! ... This is the [issue]: the flesh of Christ, touching the flesh of Christ, taking upon ourselves this suffering for the poor.
— Pope Francis, The Church of Mercy
He warned that any church that ignored reality would not survive to enjoy the divine.
— Dan Brown, Angels & Demons
The Dutch Reformed Church was the state church of the apartheid regime and a fervent supporter of apartheid; it inspired and condoned rape, abduction and murder.
— Dauglas Dauglas, Roses in the Rainbow
Anybody body can be a Church goer, but there is a difference of "GOD" being in them then they being in the WORLD.
— Henry Johnson Jr
Going to the extreme of inviting and welcoming people into your church in order to hear you condemn them or to know from your policy that you condemn them is not much better than bullying.
— Christina Engela
It has been a great source of sadness to me to see two schools of thought within the evangelical church over many decades. Those who come glorying in manifestations of power sometimes seem dismissive of those whom they regard as “cold theologians.” I once heard a man speaking at a large conference say that theology was the enemy of the church and if only we could abandon doctrinal perspectives, the church would be a happier place. What tragic nonsense! We also see and hear those who love theological insight and savour the doctrines of Scripture expressing equally dismissive remarks about Christians who are enjoying God’s power, as though they were mere children preoccupied with experience. How I long for a recovery of true biblical Christianity where the apostle Paul, who wrote the book of Romans, also raised the dead! It seems that profound theology and great signs and wonders happily cohabited in Paul’s life and ministry.
— Terry Virgo, A People Prepared
The renewal of the Church will come from a new type of monasticism which only has in common with the old an uncompromising allegiance to the Sermon on the Mount. It is high time people banded together to do this.
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer
When did we, as Christ followers, start to think that the church exists for us? When did we forget that we are the church? And that we're here for the world?
— Craig Groeschel, Dare to Drop the Pose: Ten Things Christians Think but Are Afraid to Say
In both roles, as journalist and as organizer, I'd learn that it's possible to fall in love with a revolution—then doubt it, fight with it, lose faith in it, and return with a sense of humor and a harder, lasting love. I would have to learn the same thing about church when I was much older, and it would be no easier.
— Sara  Miles, Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion
Sometimes I cannot say much about why I go to church other than what people who go to the gym say: I always feel better once I'm there; I feel better after; it is always good for me, not good in a take-your-vitamins way, in a chidingly moralistic way, but in a palpable way.
— Lauren F. Winner, Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis
Mary was able to turn a stable into a home for Jesus, with poor swaddling clothes and an abundance of love. She is the handmaid of the Father who sings his praises. She is the friend who is ever concerned that wine not be lacking in our lives. She is the woman whose heart was pierced by a sword and who understands all our pain.
— Pope Francis, The Church of Mercy
Having your own church doesn't make you a good guy. It only makes you tax-exempt.
— Lisa Kleypas, Rainshadow Road
We would like a church that again asserts that God, not nations, rules the world, that the boundaries of God's kingdom transcend those of Caesar, and that the main political task of the church is the formation of people who see clearly the cost of discipleship and are willing to pay the price.
— Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony
...you belong here, and it’s time you realize it. No one put a Scarlet A on your chest. This church is for human beings, not saints and angels.
— Tiffany Reisz, Something Nice
Sundays normally were hell. Or just the church pat of it, actually. It wasn't that I was afraid of God, or had anything against Him. It was just that having to be there for two to four hours made me cross, hateful, and blasphemous. Plus it seemed to me that the regulars, the good God-fearing folks, who didn't have diddly-squat, liked to pretend they had a lot to flaunt -- whereas the ones that had a whole lot showed up on holidays and funerals, in fancy cars and dressed to kill, all made possible by money they didn't tithe away every week. That's where Sunday-based faith got you -- broke and with a sore butt!
— Shawn Stewart Ruff, Finlater
The temple is a place of beauty, it is a place of revelation, it is a place of peace. It is the house of the Lord. It is holy unto the Lord. It should be holy unto us.
— Howard W. Hunter
The church is not to be judged by how useful we are as a "supportive institution" and our clergy as members of a "helping profession". The church has its own reason for being, hid within its own mandate and not found in the world. We are not chartered by the Emperor.
— Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony
I want you, Elaine. I want your mind, your soul, your body. I want you as my mate. I offer you my soul—right now. Right here. Take it all—take everything I am,” he murmured, his lips grazing the corner of her mouth. “…and I’ll even let you keep your clothes on.” She looked up at him, gasping at his boldness. In that instance, Ian’s lips slanted across hers in a consuming, mind-numbing, heart-stopping kiss. She moaned against his mouth, drinking in his groan before pulling back, chest heaving. “We’re in church, Ian,” she panted. “God can hear us.” His lips curled into a small, knowing smile. “I’m counting on that, love.
— R. W. Patterson
It is better to go skiing and think of God, than go to church and think of sport.
— Fridtjof Nansen
I was raised in church, Gray. If you'd asked me during my wildest phases if I was a Christian, I'd have told you I was. But there was a disconnect there.You're judging me.No, I'm calling it like it is, unlike most of the people you know, who would all agree with you if you said the sky is red.
— Becky Wade, Her One and Only
Jim devoted ten days largely to prayer to make sure that this was indeed what God intended for him. He was given new assurance, and wrote to his parents of his intention to go to Ecuador. Understandably, they, with others who knew Jim well, wondered if perhaps his ministry might not be more effective in the United States, where so many know so little of the Bible's really message He replied: "I dare not stay home while Quiches perish. What if the well-filled church in the homeland needs stirring? They have the Scriptures Moses, and the prophets, and a whole lot more. Their condemnation is written on their bank books and in the dust on their Bible covers.
— Elisabeth Elliot, Through Gates of Splendor
Dear God, if one day I lose my hope and purpose, give me confidence that your destiny is better than anything I ever dreamed.
— Daniel Friday Danzor
Out here, the open night is my church, the trees are my congregation, the stars are my angels and the moon is the only god that I know.
— A.P. Sweet, dead, but dreaming
Your trials equal the power of God that works in you. If your battles are intense, then what God has deposited in you is deep.
— Paul Gitwaza
One came out of the church with a kind of comfortable and satisfied feeling that something had been done that needed to be done, and that was all I knew about it.
— Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain
This cat is looking at me with judgment.”“He’s not,” said Jules. “That’s just his face.”“You look at me the same way,” Mark said, glancing at Julian. “Judgy face.
— Cassandra Clare, Lady Midnight
Sometimes the church talks about singleness as if it were similar to being chosen for Hufflepuff by the Magic Sorting Hat in Harry Potter. The good news is that you still are at Hogwarts, but the bad news is that pretty much everyone else there will avoid you and make it clear they feel sad for you and would never, ever want to be you.
— Sammy Rhodes, This Is Awkward: How Life's Uncomfortable Moments Open the Door to Intimacy and Connection
If I came to your town and asked any person on the street, “Which church should I go to if I want to get involved in helping the poor or homeless in this community?” would your church be the first one mentioned? Make this identity your goal.
— Dillon Burroughs, Faith Acts: A Provocative Call to Live What You Believe
Then I told myself that as I never gave the Church a thought when I was feeling happy, I could hardly expect it to do anything for me when I wasn't. You can't get insurance money without paying in premiums.
— Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle
We don’t ask any people to throw away any good they have got; we only ask them to come and get more. What if all the world should embrace this Gospel? They would then see eye to eye, and the blessings of God would be poured out upon the people, which is the desire of my whole soul.
— Joseph Smith Jr.
According to the historian William H. McNeil, European churches did not have pews until sometime in the eighteenth century. People stood or milled around, creating a very different dynamic than we find in today's churches, where people are expected to spend most of their time sitting.
— Barbara Ehrenreich
Church may be primarily for believers, but the gospel is for all people.
— Dillon Burroughs, Faith Acts: A Provocative Call to Live What You Believe
Christ is pre-requisite for "Church".
— WD Furioso
If we are serious about climbing to higher ground, we will be found in church every Sunday—attending all of our meetings, partaking of the sacrament, participating in Sunday School, and contributing to the spirit found in Relief Society, Primary, and priesthood meetings.
— Robert L. Millet
Church comforts the lonely, those who've lost, those who grieve. It is a weekly ritual that never changes, never goes away. You can go to mass anywhere around the world -- Waseca, North Dakota, Poland, Ireland -- and the only difference would be the language. Church provides us something to cling to, the rope line tied from the barn to the house during a blizzard. No matter what swirls around you, you cannot become lost.
— Rachael Hanel, We'll Be the Last Ones to Let You Down: Memoir of a Gravedigger's Daughter
Beauty salons, like churches, are places where people tend to unburden themselves and bare their souls.
— Sarah Weeks, Honey
Our “ministry” should be an overflowing of our lives, an overflowing of our walk with Jesus Christ! We aren’t our ministry, it’s an byproduct of our relationship with Jesus Christ!
— Joe Joe Dawson
Here is where most preachers make their mistake. They are afraid that by preaching the gospel too clearly, it will be their fault if people lapse into sin. They imagine that the gospel is food for the carnal-minded. True enough, to many the gospel does become the smell of death unto death, but that is not the fault of the Gospel. That happens only because men do not accept -do not believe-the Gospel. Faith is not merely thinking, "I believe." Your whole heart must be seized by the gospel and come to rest in it. When that happens, you are transformed and cannot help but love and serve God.
— C.F.W. Walther, Law & Gospel: How to Read and Apply the Bible: A Reader's Edition
The holy stone looked for all the world like a small iron pineapple, its surface divided into squares by deep grooves, a tarnished silver-steel handle or lever held tight to the side. In ancient times the pineapple was ever the symbol of welcome, though the church used the objects in a different way. Apparently, each theological student of good family and destined for high office was given one on beginning their training and forbidden from pulling the lever on pain of excommunication. A test of obedience they called it. A test of curiosity I called it. Clearly the church wanted bishops who lacked the imagination for exploration and questioning.
— Mark Lawrence, The Liar's Key
The Church has no reason to exist except for the advancement of His Kingdom into areasit has never been before!
— John Willis Zumwalt, Passion for the Heart of God
One can be an orthodox Church in every way: great structure, good theology, excellent sermons and teaching, lots of giving; but if the Great commission is not taught and obeyed, it is a heretical church.
— John Willis Zumwalt, Passion for the Heart of God
Lenin held that religion was a simply product of social oppression and economic exploitation. 'The social oppression of toiling masses, their apparent complete helplessness before the blind forces of capitalism ... that is the deepest contemporary root of religion'. Theoretically it followed from this that the elimination of social and economic evils should lead to the disappearance of religious belief. In practice, however, the party has never shown any confidence that this would happen: it has not felt able to concede the churches toleration, and let them decline of their own accord. On the contrary, from the beginning it has aimed at the destruction of the churches and the forcible secularization of believers. With the exemption of the years 1941-53, that has remained the case ever since.
— Geoffrey Hosking, The First Socialist Society: A History of the Soviet Union from Within
Go is the first part of the word Gospel.It should be the watchword of every true follower of Christ.It should be emblazoned on the banners of the church.
— Billy Graham
That's what lay behind the feud under way in the Republic: a battle between different noble family factions in a fight for power. Serving this side or the other was of no interest to Mathias. But the consequences of a Venice under the Pope's direct control weren't at all to his liking. His beloved books would be burned by ignorant, avid priests. Men like Malachia would win.It was the same old struggle. The same fight Gheorg had chosen, the same fight that might take him to Wittenberg. But he wouldn't clear the way for Alexander VI. With what little strength he possessed, even though he was nothing more than a pawn of a chessboard, that extended farther then he could see, Mathias would help those in power smash what had all the makings of a major plot, one designed to overturn the government in power in La Serenissima. And these thoughts allowed the monk to find the first answer to the many question with which he still felt burdened.He and the Borgias did NOT share the same Church.
— Riccardo Bruni, The Lion and the Rose
In their churches the Protestants taught believers to go out of the four walls of the church to demonstrate their love for God by how they serve fellow humans
— Sunday Adelaja
God is trying to tell us that there is a shift taking place in the body of Christ especially in the way we do church
— Sunday Adelaja
A clarion call to the 7000 remnants who are yet to bow their knees to Baal, to arise and come out of the wilderness to take charge of the guard that would lead their Nations and church to the promise land
— Sunday Adelaja
We are not even going to throw the challenge of changing a whole generation before the modern day church. This generation of believers don’t even know what that means
— Sunday Adelaja
Whenever God allows a mass blindness to cover his church, it is not out of stupidity, it is out of divine providence
— Sunday Adelaja
Contemporary Christian church would normally think that things are impossible
— Sunday Adelaja
Most people that I know who go to church actually go there to twist the arms of God so that he can get all the discomfort away from them.
— Sunday Adelaja
The secret of real prosperity in the church is to teach God’s people principles of economic empowerment
— Sunday Adelaja
If colleges are going to justify themselves, they are going to have to thrive at those things that require physical proximity. That includes moral and spiritual development. Very few of us cultivate our souls as hermits. We do it through small groups and relationships and in social contexts.
— David Brooks
But wait ooo ....Alcohol(Outings & Fashion), Women/Men, Money, Thats all about it.you call this fun ? These don't satisfy ME and you both know how you feel when you are alone. IT STINKSJESUS SATISFIES, NOT CHURCH.
— Mary Tornyenyor
The gospel that has been preached in our churches has not been fair to the African continent. It has left us in a beggarly state, waiting on God for things we could produce by and for ourselves.
— Sunday Adelaja
I recommend getting yourself out from under any ministry that PREACHES LAW or a MIXTURE OF LAW AND GRACE, and instead listening to or reading anything you can find to reinforce the GRACE MESSAGE.
— Paul Silway
Go to church and get directions so you won’t get lost.
— Elizabeth B. Knaus, 5 Miles Round Trip: For Exercise and Quiet Inspiration
However grand our sacramental downsittings and updressings may be, they remain only and precisely sacraments: real presences, under particular signs, of the happier order that faith can discover under any and all signs. They're a bit like the church. As long as we see them as an earnest of the kingdom, they're all right; when we put on airs and act as if they were the kingdom itself, they look just silly.
— Robert Farrar Capon
Spirituality is more about whether or not we can sleep at night than about whether or not we go to church. It is about being integrated or falling apart, about being within community or being lonely, about being in harmony with Mother Earth or being alienated from her.
— Ronald Rolheiser, The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality
We have come to love darkness in the church rather than finding God in creation.
— Sunday Adelaja
Money does not go only to those who go to church, it goes to those who know and comply with the laws of money
— Sunday Adelaja
Church must lead all other spheres of influence.We find people from all the mountains there.The church leaders must be able to mentor them
— Paul Gitwaza
Church leaders may get disappointed in ministry if they do not know God’s time.
— Sunday Adelaja
Do you think God truly meant for us to keep Him locked in the church? Is He our Sunday pocket watch we only pull out for weddings and funerals and church services? He wishes for us to think about Him wherever we are. And a voice singing His praises at a ball is far less irreverent than a stone-cold heart sitting in a pew on Sunday morning.
— Hayden Wand, Hidden Pearls
We have created Black, White, Asian, and other racial Churches; but we fail to understand that there is only one Church and one Gospel.It is the Church and Gospel of Jesus Christ. John 1:12
— Felix Wantang, God's Blueprint of the Holy Bible
Love is a career with its own stages, rewards, and failures . . . a vocation as concrete as a calling in the Church, worth giving a lifetime to.
— Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance
We are the choice elected fewLet all the rest be damnedThere is room enough in hell for youWe won’t have heaven crammed!
— Roland H. Bainton
She was a church open only for him, with services in full operation twenty-four hours a day.
— James Purdy, Cabot Wright Begins
If you want to have a well-ordered church, then you have to become well-ordered yourself.
— Sunday Adelaja
Another purpose for speaking in tongues is the edification of the church.
— Sunday Adelaja
Only the church can provide people with quality fellowship
— Sunday Adelaja
The church doesn’t belong to the pastor
—  it belongs to Jesus Christ.
People should see genuine, authentic love in the church
— Sunday Adelaja
But just as quantity wins respect and honour for a church, it is quality that provides a church with safety and protection.
— Sunday Adelaja
You have to work at having quality in your church, because people that are influential in your city may be God’s instruments for resolving all kinds of problems that will most surely come up in the future.
— Sunday Adelaja
The person who has no deputies or assistants has no future.
— Sunday Adelaja
The church is God's remnant in a country, able to change the life of the nation
— Sunday Adelaja
The church needs to raise up the Moses’ and last days deliverers.
— Sunday Adelaja
The civil involvement of the church is a spiritual tactic aim at defeating the forces of darkness.
— Sunday Adelaja
A church that does not provoke any crisis, preach a gospel that does not unsettle, proclaim a word of Godthat does not get under anyone's skin or a word of God that does not touch the real sin of the society in whichit is being proclaimed: what kind of gospel is that?
— Oscar A. Romero
The Church has an excellent appetite. She has swallowed whole countries and the questionHas never risen of indigestion. Only the Church . . . can take Ill-gotten goods without stomach-ache!
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust: First Part
To consume the best for yourself and give the crumbs to God is blasphemy. A heart that truly worships is a heart that gives its best to God in time and substance. A heart that truly worships God gives generously to the causes of God---causes that God cares deeply about. I have to wonder whether someday we may wake up to discover that all our incestous spending on ourselves and our frantic construction of excessively luxurious places of worship---even as we ignore, for the most part, the hurting and the deprived of the world---filled God's heart with pain.
— Ravi Zacharias, The Grand Weaver: How God Shapes Us Through the Events of Our Lives
It will have to be Jem. He's impossible to hate. Even that devil cat likes him.
— Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Prince
God (mentally on my knees), if I can just get through this night, I'll come to church. On Christmas. Every fifteen years. For the next fifteen years. So once.
— K.F. Germaine, Devious Minds
There has been a rediscovery of the meaning of baptism as entrance and integration into the Church, of "ecclesiological" significance. But ecclesiology, unless it is given its true cosmic perspective ("for the life of the world"), unless it is understood as the christian form of "cosmology," is always ecclesiolatry, the Church considered as a "being in itself" and not the new relation of god, man and the world.
— Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy
My choices, it seemed, were to be branded a sinner and live my life alone; to abandon my faith, the one thing I held most dear in the entire world; or to lie to everyone, pretend I was straight, and forget about it all.
— Justin Lee, Torn: Rescuing the Gospel from the Gays-vs.-Christians Debate
Unfortunately, some churches are now so worried about being arrogant and unbending like certain other Christians that they fail to stand for anything at all. They hang question marks over all the major doctrines of the faith or throw them out entirely. Bit by bit, they lose the things that set them apart as Christians.
— Justin Lee, Torn: Rescuing the Gospel from the Gays-vs.-Christians Debate
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 the cup of her doctrine and then showing the person of Christ in with the veil of concocted and diseased doctrines.
— Ajay Chandan
Dost thou renounce Satan, and all his Angels, and all his works, and all his services, and all his pride?" ...The first act of the Christian life is a renunciation, a challenge. No one can be Christ's until he has, first, faced evil, and then become ready to fight it. How far is this spirit from the way in which we often proclaim, or to use a more modern term, "sell" Christianity today! ... How could we then speak of "fight" when the very set-up of our churches must, by definition, convey the idea of softness, comfort, peace? ... One does not see very well where and how "fight" would fit into the weekly bulletin of a suburban parish, among all kings of counseling sessions, bake sales, and "young adult" get-togethers. ..."Dost thou unite thyself unto Christ?
— Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy
God's truth!' one side shouts.'More loving!' comes the response.'God's truth!''More loving!''God's truth!''More loving!'But there shouldn't be a clash between 'God's truth' and 'More loving.' In the Bible, Truth and Love are two sides of the same coin. You can't have one without the other. God's Truth is all about God's Love for us and the Love we ought to have for one another. We are being untrue to that Truth if we treat people unlovingly. And we are missing out on the full extent of that Love if we try to divorce it from Ultimate Truth.
— Justin Lee, Torn: Rescuing the Gospel from the Gays-vs.-Christians Debate
Missional leaders understand the power of connecting relationally in their community through personal networking.
— Gary Rohrmayer
God makes his gospel attractive through people…that is the point of the gospel
—  it is trans-formative in nature.