Church Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

God wants the church to become an authority to bring order, righteousness and purity to the country

~ Sunday Adelaja

If the church doesn’t start fighting corruption, it will keep flourishing in the country

~ Sunday Adelaja

For irrelevancy to be cancelled in the church, let kingdom priority and pursuit be restored

~ 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

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

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

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

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

Jesus has not promised to build your ministry, he has promised to build his church.

~ Rick Warren

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 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

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 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

A Black church that isn't inherently revolutionary is irrelevant.

~ Darnell Lamont Walker

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

He warned that any church that ignored reality would not survive to enjoy the divine.

~ Dan Brown

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

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

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

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

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

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

Having your own church doesn't make you a good guy. It only makes you tax-exempt.

~ Lisa Kleypas

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

...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