Top 1200 Church Today Quotes & Sayings - Page 15

A church must be more deeply and practically committed to deeds of compassion and social justice than traditional liberal churches and more deeply and practically committed to evangelism and conversion than traditional fundamentalist churches. This kind of church is profoundly counter-intuitive to American observers. It breaks their ability to categorize (and dismiss) it as liberal or conservative. Only this kind of church has any chance in the non-Christian west.

I was born or raised in the church, so I guess the first songs I would have played would have been church songs.

A church is not a Fortune 500 company. It's not simply another nonprofit organization, nor is it a social club. In fact, a healthy church is unlike any organization that man has ever devised, because man didn't devise it.

That's all the information I need to know about the church, Jesus picked it. And so instead of me telling the church how she would really look better if she had this in her hair, or that over there, I think I'm just respecting the Groom's pick.

If your church loves the way you do church more than your children, it loves the wrong thing.

My upbringing was in the church. We had to attend regularly. And, of course, the church provided a training ground for me, so to speak, as a young vocalist and certainly gave me all of the spiritual values that I needed as a young lady.

Robertsons love Sundays! The most important thing we do is gather together with our church family for worship, teaching, and fellowship. After church, we like to have a nice lunch of roast, vegetables, and definitely rolls or biscuits. And I love catching a nap when I can.

Where I am today is my starting point. Who I am today is my starting point. My failures and successes of the past, my fears and hopes of the future are all shadows. Today is my reality, and I'll use it to create my world.

With others, I feel betrayed that those who had the authority in the Church to stop Brendan Smyth failed to act on the evidence I gave them. However, I also accept that I was part of an unhelpful culture of deference and silence in society and the Church, which thankfully is now a thing of the past.

The basic question 'will I obey Christ 's teaching?' is rarely taken as a serious issue. For example, to take one of Jesus' commands, that is relevant to contemporary life, I don't know of any church that actually teaches a church how to bless people who curse them, yet this is a clear command.

Religion is so focused on family. These days, for many people, being gay is also focused on family. The Mormon Church is especially focused on family, and I'd have hoped, therefore, that the Mormon Church would especially have celebrated how all of these people who might have been lonely and suicidal and childless are now able to lead this other life. I would have thought it would be a cause for immense celebration. Instead it has been, obviously, a cause of great concern to the Church and its leadership.

The theatre is your pulpit - it is your church - and you want to be a priest in your church, and that's what I believe in.

In a world where families are drowning on beaches to escape war, leaving the church because of sexual abuse, or denied access because of sexual orientation, the utopia that Pope Francis desires may be impossible for the church to attain.

The only sure rule is to remember that the Bible is indeed God's gift to the church, to equip that church for its work in the world, and that serious study of it can and should become one of the places where, and the means by which, heaven and earth interlock and God's future purposes arrive in the present.

I used to go to church. I even went through a rather intense religious period when I was sixteen. But the idea of an everlasting life -- a never-ending banquet, as a stupid visiting minister to our church once appallingly described it -- filled me with a greater terror than the concept of extinction.

The downfall of the church will not come from a lack of apologetic teaching; it will come from disintegration of the families in the church.

When will the church do her appointed work? She is represented as an angel of light, flying through heaven with the everlasting gospel to be proclaimed to the world. This represents the speed and directness with which the church is to prosecute her work.

I go to a Calvary Chapel church out here in Los Angeles. I had been here about two years at the time. I'm very close with my church, very close with the pastor and his wife, and I work with a girls' ministry here.

The responsibility of building leadership in the Church belongs to the father and the mother. . . . As youth grow and mature through their teenage years and move toward adulthood, the Church picks up an important role in this process of giving youth an opportunity to lead, but it begins in the home.

In my leadership conferences, pastors ask, "Do you have a vision for my church?" Many times they want me to give them a picture of where they should go and what their church should look like. When these pastors do this, I always feel bad.

In Freethinkers Hall, which before the Nazi resurgence was the national headquarters of the German Freethinkers League, the Berlin Protestant church authorities have opened a bureau for advice to the public in church matters. Its chief object is to win back former churchgoers and assist those who have not previously belonged to any religious congregation in obtaining church membership. The German Freethinkers League, which was swept away by the national revolution, was the largest of such organizations in Germany. It had about 500,000 members.

I think that as many Catholics, you have a complicated relationship with the church. When my brother died, I felt like there couldn't be a God. I just felt that way and for a couple of years, I just felt turned away from the church.

Today must not be a souvenir of yesterday, and so the struggle is everlasting. Who am I today? What do I see today? How shall I use what I know, and how shall I avoid being victim of what I know? Life is not repetition.

Have you ever wondered what a church full of Pharisees would be like? 1. They would all attend every service 2. They would all tithe 3. They would all work in the church 4. They would all go to hell

You can change your tomorrow if you do something today. Few people understand how the way you live today impacts your tomorrow. Today is the only time we have within our grasp, yet many people let it slip through their fingers, recognizing neither its value nor potential. If we want to do something with our lives, then we must make today matter, because that's where tomorrow's success lies.

It is really impressive and makes us proud that in a lot of places in Indonesia, a church is close to a mosque, and even in many places, both Islamic and Christian communities cooperated to build a mosque or church.

You and I, we are the Church, no? We have to share with our people. Suffering today is because people are hoarding, not giving, not sharing. Jesus made it very clear. Whatever you do to the least of my brethren, you do it to me. Give a glass of water, you give it to me. Receive a little child, you receive me. Clear.

An unholy church! It is useless to the world, and of no esteem among men. It is an abomination, hells laughter, heavens abhorrence. The worst evils which have ever come upon the world have been brought upon her by an unholy church.

See, that why I ain’t go to church. Figger I got me a church wherever I be. Want’a talk to God, well I say, ‘howdy-howdy, God,’ and we jaw fer a bit.’ - Jimmy ‘Diamond’ Skinner

The first trip I can remember would have to be to Marianna, Arkansas. My mother's parents are from there, and we'd go every year to visit the church where they were buried. We'd attend church service that day, put flowers around their tombstones, and visit with family and friends that still lived there.

I think the Church is a conduit to God. The Church is not God. And I think that from the very beginning Jesus taught us that.

I don't think we should focus on what church that person walks into .. I think we need to focus on what they do when they walk out of church.

I think I first got into acting through church. I would go to these church retreats, and they would tell us to make a skit or make a video and present it to the rest of the group. And I started doing that. And I fell in love with it.

Sit peacefully in a church and think of church history: witchburning perhaps, or child abuse, genocide, the amassing of disgusting wealth, the repression of women, inquisitions, castrating child choir singers, the denial of Santa Claus and the support of fascists in power.

I was raised Catholic and I went to church until I was 16. I went through a phase when I was 15 of being quite fanatically Catholic. I was going to church a lot, receiving communion, saying the Rosary, praying, all that stuff. But when I started scrutinizing it, it just fell apart so quickly.

Probably after Vietnam and Watergate, there was an increasing distrust of institutions, so that Jesus was still in, but the institutional church was no longer an attraction. So, I think that the dropping of the denominational label is to become more generic, less of a threat, less of a reminder of negative stereotypes if you've walked away from church.

But today I felt different, today I forgot how long it takes to get into the skin of a character and I remembered it, because today I actually got into that skin and it felt so different.

A few places are especially conducive to inspiration - automobiles, church - public places. I plotted Couples almost entirely in church - little shivers and urgencies I would note down on the program, and carry down to the office Monday.

I do believe that the Church is God's primary instrument for ushering in the Kingdom (God's dream) on earth as it is in heaven, but God is not limited to use only the Church, or only Christians for that matter.

PRIMATE, n. The head of a church, especially a State church supported by involuntary contributions. The Primate of England is the Archbishop of Canterbury, an amiable old gentleman, who occupies Lambeth Palace when living and Westminster Abbey when dead. He is commonly dead.

I grew up performing in glee club at my school; I was the ostrich in 'Peter Pan,' and then I was super-involved in church choir and worship leading at my church. So I always loved music and was involved with it, but never really thought it was what I wanted to do until I started writing.

Preparation for marriage is very important. It's very, very important because I believe it is something that in the Church, in common pastoral ministry, at least in my country, in South America, the Church it has not valued much.

I think in work like 'Passion According to St Luke,' which I wrote when the Church was being persecuted by the Communist regime, it mattered to me to declare for the cause. I sided with the militant Church and I think my music fulfilled an important socio-political function.

As a practicing Catholic all my life, my faith and the church are never far from my mind. The lessons I learned in the church have structured the way I've approached my life and my career. They were lessons of grace, kindness, forgiveness, and compassion.

But the supreme teacher in the Church is the Roman Pontiff. Union of minds, therefore, requires, together with a perfect accord in the one faith, complete submission and obedience of will to the Church and to the Roman Pontiff, as to God Himself.

The church must never become a government factory, carrying on a nationalized industry of religion with the people as the bolts and nuts; with God reduced to the role of cramped advocate of current national policy. Surely the pages of history are replete and the examples in many a foreign country convincing that this kind of church-state union-whatever the original motives, or however noble the original purposes-winds up with a state that is less than stable and a church that is less than sanctified, and with the poor still hungry.

Instead of being just a church that welcomes and receives by keeping the doors open, let us try also to be a church that finds new roads, that is able to step outside itself and go to those who do not attend Mass, to those who have quit or are indifferent.

The Roman Catholic Church, had it captured me, as it nearly did, would have sent me on some mission of danger and sacrifice and utilised me as a martyr; the Church established by law transformed me into an unbeliever and an antagonist.

It can have a secular purpose and have a relationship to God because God was presumed to be both over the state and the church, and separation of church and state was never meant to separate God from government.

Music can bring about different vibes on the field, off the field, urban life, going to church, leaving church. Everything the world may bring, there's a song for it to put you in the right frame of mind.

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute - where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishoners for whom to vote - where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference - and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.

The Church of Reason, like all institutions of the System, is based not on individual strength but upon individual weakness. What's really demanded in the Church of Reason is not ability, but inability. Then you are considered teachable. A truly able person is always a threat.

I would love to see churches start using their Web sites to present video profiles of people within their congregations so that the average person could get a sense of what the life of the church (not the organization, but the people - the true church) is really like.

There is a tradition that the church represents, without which we wouldn't have the church, that's all about diving deep beneath the surface of the culture and finding those timeless, eternal truths that the whole Christian enterprise is rooted in. And one of those is that you don't come to God at 180 miles an hour.

Undoubtedly, church fish fries and picnics help build social cohesion. It was at my dad's medium-size evangelical church - my first real exposure to a sustained religious community - that I first saw people of different races and classes worshiping together.

If the church adopts a school, and the school has kids, and the kids have parents, well, then you've reconnected the hub of a community, because you've brought together its three most fundamental institutions - church, schools, and family.

Ours is a very eclectic offering. We're affiliated with the church but we're not just offering church music. Our philosophy is that we wanted to bring quality music to the entire valley and let everyone enjoy it since we have a fine venue.

In 2000, Pope John Paul II canonized 120 saints of China, 87 of whom were ethnically Chinese. My home church was incredibly excited because this was the first time the Roman Catholic Church acknowledged Chinese citizens in this way.

I do believe in the separation of church and state. But I don't think separation of church and state means you have to be free from your faith.

We grow up as natural optimists as Americans. Catholic priests were so hopeful as we watched the Vatican II experience. Yet, it's a punch in the belly to see what has happened in the church and the world. Dualistic thinking seems to have taken over the church and our politics to a really neurotic degree.