Top 1200 Apostolic Church Quotes & Sayings - Page 4

The Church exists by mission, just as a fire exists by burning. Where there is no mission there is no Church; and where there is neither Church nor mission, there is no faith.

I grew up in the Methodist church. My wife grew up in the Baptist church. And wives get everything they want. So we got married in the Baptist church.

Honest investigation is utterly impossible within the pale of any church, for the reason, that if you think the church is right you will not investigate, and if you think it wrong, the church will investigate you.

Today the separation of church and state in America is used to silence the church. When Christians speak out on issues, the hue and cry from the humanist state and media is that Christians, an all religions, are prohibited from speaking since there is a separation of church and state.

But if the world is watching, we might as well tell the truth. And the truth is, the church doesn't offer a cure. It doesn't offer a quick fix. The church offers death and resurrection. The church offers the messy, inconvenient, gut-wrenching, never-ending work of healing and reconciliation.

At this time of crisis we cannot be concerned solely with ourselves, withdrawing into loneliness, discouragement and a sense of powerlessness in the face of problems. Please do not withdraw into yourselves! This is a danger: we shut ourselves up in the parish, with our friends, within the movement, with the like-minded... but do you know what happens? When the Church becomes closed, she becomes an ailing Church, she falls ill! That is a danger. . . .A Church closed in on herself is the same, a sick Church.

Every true prayer is a prayer of the Church; by means of that prayer the Church prays, since it is the Holy Spirit living in the Church, Who in every single soul 'prays in us with unspeakable groanings'.

There are a still lot of people in today's church who can easily identify the idolatry outside the church and are pretty proud of the fact that they are not like them. And yet, we are far too slow to recognize the idolatry inside the church and more painfully, the idolatry inside our hearts.

I do object to the sensationalism or even the voyeurism of doing things in church or out of church.

I have a church background. I've been playing piano and keyboard and organ all my life in church.

One major difference between Mormons and evangelicals on the subject of revelation is that Latter-day Saints believe that God has appointed modern-day prophets and apostles to receive revelation for Christ's church. All church members may receive revelation appropriate for their particular callings or positions within the church and their families, but never in contradiction to church doctrine or policy. So Mormonism has both a democratic practice of revelation that would resonate with evangelicals, but also an institutional understanding of revelation foreign to evangelicalism.

The church as we know it today seems a million miles from the New Testament church. That may be a great generalization, but I will stand on it. There is a gulf between our average Christianity and the church of New Testament that makes the Grand Canyon look like a cavity in someone's tooth.

Our Christian identity is belonging to a people: the Church. Without the Church we are not Christians.

Most of us come to the church by a means the church does not allow.

The church's final word is not 'church' but the glory of the Father and the Son in the Spirit of liberty

My grandmother went to church, but my mother had been inundated with church and decided that when she had children, she would not push church or God on her children.

If you can get a spiritual connection without going to church, why go to church?.

After my study of today's church, my conclusion is that the church is politely bored with God.

I grew up in the Episcopal Church, went to private school in that church, went to chapel every day.

I know specifically me being somebody who has had most of my experiences within the black church, that's cultural... you gotta put on your church clothes when you got to church...and it's nothing wrong with that - that's absolutely fine! But I think what's happening to a new generation ,the hip hop generation, there's astigmatism, a feeling that I'm unwelcome.

Religion is not the hero of the day, but the zero. In any exposition of the products of brains, the Sunday-School takes the booby prize. . . . Man has asked for truth and the Church has given him miracles. He has asked for knowledge, and the Church has given him theology. He has asked for facts, and the Church has given him the Bible. This foolishness should stop. The Church has nothing to give man that has not been in cold storage for two thousand years. Anything would become stale in that time.

Is this really the church of Christ, or are we just calling it the church because of our traditions and history?

I do not like a high-organized church. I think that as soon as the congregation reaches a level of one hundred or so people, it is time to build a new church. As soon as the congregation gets to the point where you are not on fairly intimate terms with every other person in that church, then you have become a theater where people can attend services. I do not think you can attend a church service. Service is not something which is there to be viewed as if it were a play or a movie.

I really do feel that these people are brothers and sisters in God's family. I am looking to build bridges with the Orthodox Church, looking to build bridges with the Catholic Church, with the Anglican church.

C. Peter Wagner was the Donald McGavran professor of church growth at Fuller. He was considered to be the heir of McGavran, founder of the church growth movement. That movement essentially said, 'Whatever grows a church is good' and needs to be nurtured.

There is a vast difference between an Apostolic life and the solitude of the Carthusians. The latter is truly very holy but is not suited to those whom God has called to the former, which is in itself more excellent.

The Church is composed of people, and people do terrible things and commit sin - it's what the Church has been telling us for two thousand years and continues to tell us, which is why the Church is here and essentially one of the major reasons why people hate it so much.

Probably they had good reason for omitting it. A profane mind might make a jest of an apostle half seas over, and ridicule an apostolic gate-keeper who couldn't keep his head above water.

When I was growing up, I grew up in church--my father was a pastor--so when I was growing up in Trinidad, I'd close all the windows in the church and go in the church every day after school and get a little microphone and pretend all these people were in the pews, and I would sing to them.

Personally, I am a church-going Christian. I love my church, my congregation; it's my favorite place to be.

On day one, the Church wasn't for church people because there weren't any church people.

My childhood was limited to mostly gospel music. We didn't have, like, a lot of records in our house, you know. It was like my grandparents who raised me. They were pretty old-fashioned in their religious ways, so it was like church, church, church, school, school, school.

Church is great, but I found my church here. Hugh Hefner has been nothing but a gentleman.

[T]hese losses of the Church in the past hundred years give us reason to fear in the present misfortune that in another hundred years we may lose the Church entirely in Europe. So, keeping this fear in mind, blessed are those who cooperate in extending the Church elsewhere.

Non-African missionaries, responding generously to the Lord's call with ardent apostolic zeal, came to share the joy of revelation. Following in their footsteps, Africans are today missionaries on other continents.

I was raised in a little church, the Grundy Methodist Church, that was very straight-laced, but I had a friend whose mother spoke in tongues. I was just wild for this family. My own parents were older, and they were so over-protective. I just loved the 'letting go' that would happen when I went to church with my friend.

The world could not long ignore a holy church. The church is not despised because it is holy: it is despised because it is not holy enough. There is not enough difference between the people inside the church and those outside to be impressive. A church in which saints were as common as now they are rare would convict the world, if only by contrast. Sanctity cannot be ignored. Even a little bit is potent. So far from the gates of hell prevailing against it, it hammers on their triple steel.

I refused to teach Sunday school. When Archdeacon Henry Phillips, my last rector, died, I flatly refused again to join any church or sign any church creed. From my 30th year on I have increasingly regarded the church as an institution which defended such evils as slavery, color caste, exploitation of labor and war.

The Church of the Apostles was a Church of the poor; of silver and gold it had none.

If the church says we will not accept you here or that we will expose you if you are stealing the resources of the country or stealing the resources of a private company or other establishment, where you work, then we would not have the type of problem that we have in this country. If only the church does so - just the church.

Church growth strategies are the death gurgle of a church that has lost its way.

I did not grow up in the church. I'm not a church-goer now. I'm a very spiritual person.

In fact, my parents were church people; my father was a deacon in the church.

Church is the textured context in which we grow up in Christ to maturity. But church is difficult. Sooner or later, though, if we are serious about growing up in Christ, we have to deal with church. I say sooner.

For me, when I grew up playing music, I played music in church and people were shouting and having a big time, and church wasn't something where it was subdued. If you played something, you brought it to church with you.

The Church is that one wherein the true word of God is preached, which Christ left to His Apostles, which the same Church hath always observed, the doctors preached, and Martyrs and confessors witnessed. This is the Church I believe to be true.

All Church power arises from the indwelling of the Spirit; therefore those in whom the Spirit dwells are the seat of Church power. But the Spirit dwells in the whole Church, and therefore the whole Church is the seat of Church power.

This is what heaven's gonna be like. Not just a white church or a black church, but people.

When a church is faithless to its duties, the real church is outside its walls, in the community.

What I have seen in the past 10 years of traveling- performing at a church one day and a casino the next- is that a lot of people in the church want to be entertained, and people in casinos want to be ministered to. That's hard to understand, but I see a hunger in the world that I don't see in the church.

If you're not looking forward to church this morning perhaps it's time to look for a church.

I believe with all my heart that the Church of Jesus Christ should be a Church of blurred edges.

What the church should be telling the worker is that the first demand religion makes on him is that he should be a good workman. If he is a carpenter he should be a competent carpenter. Church by all means on Sundays-but what is the use of church if at the very center of life a man defrauds his neighbor and insults God by poor craftsmanship.

I was that kid. I was entertaining everybody in the living room and throwing myself down flights of stairs and making the family look special and making my mother feel better and I really wanted to make people happy. That has been my ministry my whole life. I call it The Church of F.F.C. - The Church of Freedom From Concern. And I'm a high priest in that church.

Stop going to church everywhere and start belonging to church somewhere.

The future of the church is also about looking back and looking at where we see these wonderful renewals and what we can learn from the early church. I think it is a really exciting time where Phyllis Tickle said every few hundred years the church needs a rummage sale where we can get rid of some of the clutter.

One would think that [persecution] would be an obstacle to church growth when joining the church meant a death sentence. And yet, the age of persecution was the greatest period of church growth in history.

When I was growing up, I'd be in the choir. My mum was the organist in the church, so I'd sing in the church.

I wish, in America, (that) we were as concerned about separation from church and sin as we are about separation between church and state. Church and sin-- it's a monstrous problem.

Though you see a Church-man ill, yet continue in the Church still.