Church Quotes

Closing one’s eyes when praying doesn’t increase the odds of the prayer being answered. It merely decreases the odds of being distracted.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

What's to rationalize? You mean you shouldn't pray if you haven't got your s--t together? This is another fairly common misconception of faith, which is that people who go to church, or people who pray, or people who talk about their religion must be, somehow more pious or ethically rigorous or have more morally cleansed lifestyle. The high correlation is supposed to be between faith and your search, the depth of your search, your willingness to try, your willingness to admit error, your hope and belief in the ultimate meaning and value of that search.' - Timothy Shriver

~ J. Randy Taraborrelli

Where a people prays, there is the hurch; and where the church is; there is never loneliness.

~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

True prayer is done in secret, but this does not rule out the fellowship of prayer altogether, however clearly we may be aware of its dangers. In the last resort it is immaterial whether we pray in the open street or in the secrecy of our chambers, whether briefly or lenghtily, in the Litany of the Church, or with the sigh of one who knows not what he should pray for. True prayer does not depend either on the individual or the whole body of the faithful, but solely upon the knowledge that our Heavenly Father knows our needs.

~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

If God be near a church, it must pray. And if he be not there, one of the first tokens of his absence will be a slothfulness in prayer.

~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Error is human,perfection is divine!You are not God! Your mistake is normal.So forgive yourself.

~ Paul Gitwaza

No church or synagogue pew can produce a higher awareness of God than sitting at the base of a tree and observing His creation.

~ Donald L. Hicks

A friend of mine commented yesterday that she has experienced similar insights that I talked about that all enlightened Masters and founders of religion are actually talking about the same ocean, the same invisible life source, the same God. She also said that she worked in a Christan environment at the time that she received these insights, and when she tried to share these insights with the Christians she was accused of being impure and of being associated with the Devil. Christians hold on to the idea that Jesus was the only son of God, without realizing that we are all son's and daughter's of God. By holding on to the idea that Jesus is the only son of God, they do not either to realize that all enlightened Masters are talking about the same God. Jesus did not talk about faith, he talked about trust. He talked about discovering a trust in yourself and in relationship to God. Jesus said that the kingdom of God is within you. In Christianity, the church has become the intermediate between man and God, and people who claim that they have found a direct relationship to God are accused of blasphemy. The Christan church has become a barrier between man and God, and anyone who has declared that he has found a direct relationship to God are immediately banned by the church, for example Master Eckhart and Franciskus of Assisi. I have always had a deep love for Jesus, but it is not the picture of Jesus that the Christian church presents. I was a disciple of Jesus in a former life, and was thrown to the lions in Colosseum in Rome as one of the early Christians. Jesus had many more disciples than the twelve disciples mentioned in The Bible. In this life, I resigned my automatic membership in the church as soon as I could think for myself when I was 15 years old. I was also disgusted with an organization that said that they preached love and which has murdered more people than Hitler. My experience with these rare and precious insights are that they expand our consciousness of reality. They are gradual initiations into reality. They may fade away, but we will never be the same again after receiving them. They will also come more and more, the more committment we have to our spiritual growth.

~ Swami Dhyan Giten

I am being a minister of light and a destroyer of ignorance and I shall never keep quiet until this horrendous mountain is pulled down in my country, in the church of Christ and in my continent.

~ Sunday Adelaja

Instead of the church in Africa to be a place for eradicating darkness by beaming out light, she has unfortunately become the den of robbers as Jesus put it.

~ Sunday Adelaja

We claim to have the light in the Church yet we want to lock ourselves within the four walls of that same Church.

~ Sunday Adelaja

Instead it is the Church hierarchy that is rather teaching congregation to be afraid of darkness, instead of teaching them to go with light to overcome darkness.

~ Sunday Adelaja

If I see darkness in the Church I bring light to it.

~ Sunday Adelaja

Friends, the light has come to the earth. We now have no right any longer to be in any form of darkness, especially in the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ.

~ Sunday Adelaja

We ourselves are behaving in the Church as if we are afraid of the light, it should not be so.

~ Sunday Adelaja

Live your life in such a way that when a video coverage is taken of you either in light or in the darkness, it can receive an applause when it is shown in your chapel for everyone to view!

~ Israelmore Ayivor

Why at the beginning of things is there always light? Dorrigo Evans' earliest memories were of sun flooding a church hall in which he sat with his mother and grandmother. A wooden church hall. Blinding light and him toddling back and forth, in and out of its transcendent welcome, into the arms of women. Women who loved him. Like entering the sea and returning to the beach. Over and over.

~ Richard Flanagan

Don't make prayer a consistent battle, but rather constantly pray against life's battles.

~ Anthony Liccione

Many in the church have turned their back on serious study, and have embraced an anti-intellectualism which refuses to learn anything from scholarship at all lest it corrupt their pure faith. It is time to end this standoff, and to reestablish a hermeneutic of trust (itself a sign of the gospel!) in place of the hermeneutic of suspicion which the church has so disastrously borrowed from the postmodern world.

~ N.t. Wright

Just as a father hates cancer, because of what it does to his child, so God hates divorce, because of what it does to His children.

~ Kyle Idleman

Just like the way you date in relationship and become convinced before you give a partner your heart, you got to date your PASTOR to know he can be your MENTOR before you give him your ears! Test the Spirits...and don't be a religious fanatic!

~ Israelmore Ayivor

You (Millennials) are the generation most afraid of real community because it inevitably limits freedom and choice. Get over your fear.

~ Timothy J. Keller

Often the truth is in front of your face, but your eyes and heart are so full of lies that you can't see it.

~ Shannon L. Alder

Cultivating spiritual intimacy is essential for leaders to live a vibrant missional life.

~ Gary Rohrmayer

Hypocrisy versus authenticity among men is not always so black and white, and as is righteousness, humility is often self-proclaimed. The Church is most definitely supposed to be a hospital for the spiritually, emotionally, mentally, and physically sick, hurting, and broken individual, yet ironically, many of its critics are those who ran away and permanently denounced its members after they visited and felt that they were sneezed on.

~ Criss Jami

Remember that churches would be empty ruins without the sinners who transform them into places of life, love and worship.

~ Rev. Kellen Roggenbuck

Awakening involves mind training. Step back and pay attention to the thoughts that come into awareness. Feel your desire for healing. Preferences are judgments, and as the mind yields to the nonjudgmental Perspective of the Holy Spirit, the Awakening is obvious. Observe that as long as appetites seem to exist there are the ego defenses of indulgence and repression. Neither is better or worse than the other, for they are the same illusion. The miracle offers a real alternative and when one is consistently miracle-minded, defenses are no longer needed.

~ David Hoffmeister

Perhaps one of the most powerful things the contemporary church could do is to confess our sins to the world, the humbly get on our knees and repent for the terrible things we have done in the name of God.

~ Shane Claiborne

Go to church to learn about forgiveness; come back to become a forgiver! Go to church and learn about kindness; come back to become a kind person! If things go like that, you will be a true image of Christ after going to church only 10 times on 10 Sundays!

~ Israelmore Ayivor

The worst tragedy of sin isn't that it produced bad behavior, but that it produced the idea that bad behavior is strong enough to deflect love.

~ D.r. Silva

Remembering that only a few years ago men, women, and even children, were imprisoned, tortured and burned, for having expressed in an exceedingly mild and gentle way, the ideas entertained by me, I congratulate myself that calumny is now the pulpit's last resort. The old instruments of torture are kept only to gratify curiosity; the chains are rusting away, and the demolition of time has allowed even the dungeons of the Inquisition to be visited by light. The church, impotent and malicious, regrets, not the abuse, but the loss of her power, and seeks to hold by falsehood what she gained by cruelty and force, by fire and fear. Christianity cannot live in peace with any other form of faith. If that religion be true, there is but one savior, one inspired book, and but one little narrow grass-grown path that leads to heaven. Such a religion is necessarily uncompromising, unreasoning, aggressive and insolent. Christianity has held all other creeds and forms in infinite contempt, divided the world into enemies and friends, and verified the awful declaration of its founder—a declaration that wet with blood the sword he came to bring, and made the horizon of a thousand years lurid with the fagots' flames.

~ Robert G. Ingersoll

I am convinced it is, then our churches are filled with believers who are hurting, to one degree or another, whether visible or unseen. Some come every Sunday clinging to a thread of hope that somehow the church will be the body of Christ that supports them, offers a word of hope, and helps them find a way to walk through the storm with God instead of without God.

~ Glenn Pemberton

Christ did to the Jewish orthodoxy, what Buddha did to the Hindu orthodoxy.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Whether in the name of Just War, Witch-Hunt or the Inquisition, at various points of history for various poppycock reasons the cross had been the weapon of mass destruction in the hands of the orthodox church.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Think of the good that Christ imparted on the society. And think of the great evil that has been done through fanaticism over one damn phrase “salvation through Christ, the Son of God.

~ Abhijit Naskar

It’s time that Christianity should be redefined by the world based upon the original teachings of Jesus, instead of the Old and New Testaments which have been interpreted, reinterpreted and distorted by all the Ecumenical Councils, i.e. the Church Councils.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Religion, as it is generally taught all over the world, is said to be based upon faith and belief, and, in most cases, consists only of different sets of theories, and that is the reason why we find all religions quarreling with one another. These theories, again, are based upon belief. One man says there is a Supreme Being sitting above the clouds governing the whole universe, and he asks me to believe that solely on the authority of his assertion. But if you actually attempt to realize what Christ realized, the entire structure of the Church would collapse.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Mother Nature gave Jesus, the Son of Nature the biological elements to see things that nobody else could, or rather nobody else would. And you are the child of Nature as well. As such you have all the powers within you, just like Jesus, to rise above the laws of the society that tend to bind your conscience with textual mysticism and fanaticism.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Jesus recognized that God within him and became Christ - so did Siddhartha Gautama and became Buddha - so did I - and so can you.

~ Abhijit Naskar

If we ask a random orthodox religious person, what is the best religion, he or she would proudly claim his or her own religion to be the best. A Christian would say Christianity is the best, a Muslim would say Islam is the best, a Jewish would say Judaism is the best and a Hindu would say Hinduism is the best. It takes a lot of mental exercise to get rid of such biases.

~ Abhijit Naskar