Church Quotes
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Community has become a buzzword in the church in recent years. Overbusy individuals hope they can cram it into their overstuffed schedules like their membership to a health and fitness club which they never have time to use. Churches hope they can conjure it with candles, programs, or training videos. Anabaptists know that community is far more costly than that: one cannot add it to anything, rather one must begin with it in order to enter it, practice it, and preserve it. They realize that community involves proximity, and that proximity involves land, and that our ties to one another can never be separated from our ties to the land, the watershed, the local economy in which we live. They have an instinct about the deep ties between community and sexuality, community and freedom, community and economics. I suspect that Anabaptists know more than they know that they know in this regard, and I hope we all can learn from them before they forget.
Brian D. McLaren
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When we get christened or married or die, we drift naturally in the direction of the church. And in moments of crisis, when our spiritual Tom-Tom is no longer telling us what to do, we find ourselves scrabbling at the vicarage door.
Tom Hollander
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The truth is that most mission work is carried out where the church already exists Only small percentages are working where the church is non-existent.
George Verwer
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With so much effort being poured into church growth, so much press being given to the benefits of faith, and so much flexing of religious muscle in the public square, the poor in spirit have no one but Jesus to call them blessed anymore.
Barbara Brown Taylor
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I lived across from a Catholic church for 15 years that I never went into. And then I got married to my wife and - you know, and now we're going in there every other day baptizing a kid.
Jim Gaffigan
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Pope Benedict XVI's resignation is big on buzz but is not the stunning surprise claimed by many pundits. It is rather a further example of the German theology professor's style that informed his years as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, his term as pope, and the formation of his legacy to the church.
Eugene Kennedy
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If the presence of God is in the church, the church will draw the world in. If the presence of God is not in the church, the world will draw the church out.
Charles Grandison Finney
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The democratic world has come to a dead end; likewise, the communist world has come to a dead end. But the Unification Church is just beginning!
Sun Myung Moon
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Similarly, some biblical views of women are superior to others. And so the apostle Paul’s attitude about women is that they could be and should be leaders of the Christian communities—as evidenced by the fact that in his own communities there were women who were church organizers, deacons, and even apostles (Romans 16). That attitude is much better than the one inserted by a later scribe into Paul’s letter of 1 Corinthians, which claims women should always be silent in the church (1 Corinthians 14:35–36), or the one forged under Paul’s name in the letter of 1 Timothy, which insists that women remain silent, submissive, and pregnant (1 Timothy 2:11–15).
Bart Ehrman
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If we are to live with our feet on the ground, in touch with reality, we must help one another accept the fact that we who are christian are heirs to a body-despising, woman-fearing, sexually repressive religious tradition. If we are to continue as members of the church, we must challenge and transform it at the root. What is required is more than simply a "reformation." I am speaking of revolutionary transformation. Nothing less will do.
Carter Heyward
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Keeping a new church outwardly focused from the beginning is much easier than trying to refocus an inwardly concerned church.
Nelson Searcy
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Blasphemy and sedition meaning the truth about Church and State.
George Bernard Shaw
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My church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, puts Jesus Christ at the focal point. It's the focus of everything. What I really hope is that people of faith in this country can come together in this election to ensure we elect a president who's going to do what's required to protect this basic principle of our country.
Evan McMullin
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Churches we build only by our own efforts and not in the strength of the Spirit will quickly collapse when we don't push and prod people along.
Francis Chan
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I used to tell people when I preached at a church, 'If you want a great sermon, be a great audience.'
Michael Eric Dyson
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The First Amendment has erected a wall between church and state. That wall must be kept high and impregnable. We could not approve the slightest breach.
Hugo Black
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I believe that the devil has destroyed many good books of the church, as, aforetime, he killed and crushed many holy persons, the memory of whom has now passed away; but the Bible he was fain to leave subsisting.
Martin Luther
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Fathers, yours is an eternal calling from which you are never released. Callings in the Church, as important as they are, by their very nature are only for a period of time, and then an appropriate release takes place. But a father's calling is eternal, and its importance transcends time. It is a calling for both time and eternity.
Ezra Taft Benson
