Top 1200 Unitarian Church Quotes & Sayings - Page 15

For a Christian to be a Christian, he must first be a sinner. Being a sinner is a prerequisite for being a church member. The Christian church is one of the few organizations in the world that requires a public acknowledgement of sin as a condition for membership.

I have followed the Church in giving our party program the character of unalterable finality, like the Creed. The Church has never allowed the Creed to be interfered with. It is fifteen hundred years since it was formulated, but every suggestion for its amendment, every logical criticism, or attack on it, has been rejected.

When I was commissioned with the purpose of helping to restore prophetic ministry to the Church for its last-day ministry, I was told that it would not be until the prophets and teachers learned to worship the Lord together as they did at Antioch that He would release true apostolic ministry in the Church again.

The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool. If the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority.

To church in the morning, and there saw a wedding in the church, which I have not seen many a day; and the young people so merry one with another, and strange to see what delight we married people have to see these poor fools decoyed into our condition, every man and woman gazing and smiling at them.

The idea of separating church and state by the Founding Fathers of America was freedom from the domination of one form of religion, because many of them left England, because they were persecuted by the church, because they want to express their Christian faith in a different way. So it was a bit of warfare between Christians.

The Americans speak so much about freedom in their sermons. Freedom as a possession is a doubtful thing for a church; freedom must be won under the compulsion of a necessity. Freedom for the church comes from the necessity of the Word of God. Otherwise it becomes arbitrariness and ends in a great many new ties.

The church that is not jealously protected by mighty intercession and sacrificial labors will before long become the abode of every evil bird and the hiding place for unsuspected corruption. The creeping wilderness will soon take over that church that trusts in its own strength and forgets to watch and pray.

When you look at the decline of church attendance in America, or when you look at the decline of millennials that are not going to church in America, you want to have the conversation that a lot of times people are hit more with religion and rules and the systems than they are with the love of God and having a personal relationship with Christ.

It is true that the Jewish tradition emphasizes the moral mandate to save life. It also has a different position from the Catholic Church on the moral status of the embryo. It has a more developmental view of when human life, in the sense of personhood, begins than does the Catholic Church.

Alas! Much has been done of late to promote the production of dwarfish Christians. Poor, sickly believers turn the church into an hospital, rather than an army. Oh, to have a church built up with the deep godliness of people who know the Lord in their very hearts, and will seek to follow the Lamb wherever he goes!

The church has been brought into the same value system as the world: fame, success, materialism and celebrity. We watch the leading churches and the leading Christians for our cues. We want to emulate the best known preachers with the biggest sanctuaries and the grandest edifices. Preoccupation with these values has perverted the church's message.

I understand perfectly well why the Catholic Church preaches against abortion. But it shouldn't be the purpose of the Catholic Church to prevent non-Catholics from having abortions if they feel that abortions are morally acceptable. They can certainly only argue for what they believe to be right in the court of public opinion and try to persuade people.

For us, church was kind of the way that we found our first entry into community in Arkansas. My parents would drop us off at the First Baptist Church of Lincoln so that we would make friends and we would learn English.

Well we thought a church wedding would be possible. It certainly would be possible in the Catholic church because after all my first marriage had been annulled by Pope Paul VI. The problem arose in that Prince Michael could not have Catholic children.

The Catholic influence just comes from being raised Catholic, going to church every Sunday, being confirmed, going to church on holy days. So it's coming from where I am. It serves the purpose of having people who have a base or foundation where they know what's right.

In evangelical and Pentecostal churches, most people have a home church they identify with, but you have a favourite pastor or evangelist that you listen to occasionally. Studying scripture means you don't just read the Bible: you read devotional books and books designed to help your spiritual walk or the church broadly construed.

A society whose members are united by the fact that they think in the same way in regard to the sacred world and its relations with the profane world, and by the fact that they translate these common ideas into common practices, is what is called a Church. In all history, we do not find a single religion without a Church.

One of our great allies at present is the Church itself. Do not misunderstand me. I do not mean the Church as we see her spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners. That, I confess, is a spectacle which makes our boldest tempters uneasy. But fortunately it is quite invisible to these humans.

He is preeminent in creation because He is the Creator. He is preeminent in redemption for He is the Redeemer. He is preeminent in the church because He is the One who gave Himself for the church.

Nightclubs are the equivalent of a Catholic Church in a poor country. You hear a lot of stuff about churches filled with gold while the people are starving. But what elitists don't get is that for poor people, the church is their own mansion. Nightclubs fill the same function.

Keep to the ancient way and custom of the Church, established and confirmed by so many Saints under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. And live a new life. Pray, and get others to pray, that God not abandon His Church, but reform it as He pleases, and as He sees best for us, and more to His honor and glory.

And so, lastly, does the very name of "Catholic", which, not without reason, amid so many heresies, the Church has thus retained; so that, though all heretics wish to be called Catholics, yet when a stranger asks where the Catholic Church meets, no heretic will venture to point to his own chapel or house.

I've always been funny. I look back in the day, when I would take the mic from my dad in church and just start goin', at age six, the first time I did it. I think 14 was when I knew I wanted to do it and promote my own comedy shows at the church. Then, everyone would come.

I had this moment in church, which I think really turned me off. I was 7 or 8 years old and I was sitting at church, and we happened to be playing with the sunlight that was coming down from the stained glass window, and the monsignor came down to the pew and grabbed us by our neck collars and said, 'I'll deal with you.'

THE FACT THAT MY DAD IS A PREACHER HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH ANYTHING. HE PROBABLY WOULDN'T AGREE WITH SOME OF MY MATERIAL BUT THEN AGAIN THERE'S NO SIGN ON MY COMEDY EVENT THAT SAYS "REVIVAL HERE TONIGHT". IM SURE GOD HAS MORE IMPORTANT THINGS TO DO THAN GO TO MY 8 OCLOCK OMAHA SHOW. THE SHOW IS THE SHOW AND CHURCH IS CHURCH.

My mother and grandmother had me in church, and I was the kid that played in church. But pastor was telling me something totally different that there was a God. He knit me together in my mother's womb. He made me special. He wanted to have a personal relationship with me.

The Church tries to fit Christ into it, not the Church into Christ.

In all cases, the Church is to be judged by the Scripture, not the Scripture by the Church.

My grandmother made sure that I went to church every Sunday. And shed come over and pick us boys up, and we would go to the Nazarene church. And back then, that was about as close to heaven as I ever got, because just the time to be able to spend with her, and she was very, very religious.

God hates it when we stir up strife, disloyalty, or contention among His people. It may happen in the church, but don’t you be a part of it. Don’t do it. Pray, ask the Lord to make you a peacemaker, and ask the Lord to show you how you can minister support and encouragement to the spiritual leaders of your church.

Can any deny that in the modern church setup the main cause of anxiety is money? Yet that which tries the modern churches the most, troubled the New Testament Church the least. Our emphasis is on paying; theirs was on praying. When we have paid, the place is taken; when they had prayed, the place was shaken!

May a merciful God preserve me from a Christian Church in which everyone is a saint! I want to be and remain in the church and little flock of the fainthearted, the feeble and the ailing, who feel and recognize the wretchedness of their sins, who sigh and cry to God incessantly for comfort and help, who believe in the forgiveness of sins.

I believe in absolute freedom of conscience for all men and equality of all churches, all sects and all beliefs before the law as a matter of right and not as a matter of favor. I believe in the absolute separation of church and state and in the strict enforcement of the Constitution that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof I believe that no tribunal of any church has any power to make any decree of any force in the law of the land, other than to establish the status of its own communicants within its own church.

If Jesus Christ is the head of the church and hence the source and goal of its entire life, true growth is only possible in obedience to Him. Conversely, if the church becomes detached from Jesus Christ and His Word, it cannot grow however active and successful it may seem to be.

It is simultaneously the blessing and the curse of the reflective Christian that believers are called to live out their faith in the church. No institution has accomplished so much for good in the world; none has fallen so short of its calling! The church is God-ordained, God-inspired, but accomplishes its work through human beings subject to every possible failing.

I go to church because my parents go to church, and I believe the things they were doing at the time were right because they were the ones growing up in righteousness, and their life was supposed to be an example, seen?

National Socialism would have every German decide for himself on spiritual questions, just as in the days of Frederick the Great. The National Socialist state gives to the church what belongs to the church, and to the state what belongs to the state.

My mother attended the local church, Saint Nicolas, and consequently, I attended that church and its Sunday School. My only prizes from the Sunday School were 'for attendance,' so I presume my atheism, which developed when I left home to attend university, although latent, was discernible.

My position on the issue of homosexuality is no different from the position of the Anglican Church and all the major denominations around the world. I know that it's different from the secular culture in the western world, but it's no different from the teaching of the church globally. We're Christians basically.

There are congregations on nearly every corner. I'm not sure we need more churches. What we need is a church. I say one church is better than fifty. I have tried to remove the plural form churches from my vocabulary, training myself to think of the church as Christ did, and as the early Christians did. The metaphors for her are always singular - a body, a bride. I heard one gospel preacher say it like this, as he really wound up and broke a sweat: "We've got to unite ourselves as one body. Because Jesus is coming back, and he's coming back for a bride not a harem.

The 20th century was a turning point; it freed and emancipated women, broke the back of segregation, and began the struggle to give justice to gay and lesbian people. But the Christian church, in both Catholic and Protestant forms, resisted every one of those humanizing developments. The church was on the wrong side of all three of those fights.

The Germans now seem the primary example of this [institutional-maintenance type] - which is another reason to scratch the head at their seeming determination to force the whole Church to adopt the Catholic Lite approach that has, in a bizarre inversion, emptied German churches of congregants while vastly expanding the German Church's bureaucracies.

Christ did not found an abstract religion, a mere school of religious thought. He setup a community of apostles, of teachers, with the task of spreading His message and so giving rise to a society of believers: His Church. He promised the Spirit of truth to His Church and then sent Him.

Extremist groups like People for the American Way attack Christians who run for public office as a threat to the 'separation of church and state,' though they never specify why conservatives are any more of a threat than churchmen and church women on the Left who have led religiously inspired causes for decades.

The life function of [the local church] is to love the God who created it - to care for others out of obedience to Christ, to heal those who hurt, to take away fear, to restore community, to belong to one another, to proclaim the Good News while living it out. The church is the invisible made visible.

In Britain, when someone says they do not believe in God, they stop going to church. In the U.S., many who may have doubts about Christian orthodoxy may continue to go to church. They do so because they assume that a vague god vaguely prayed to is the god that is needed to support family and nation.

I'm open to the gifts of the Spirit. The real healings are so beautiful I hate to see it blasphemed by fakes who merchandise the gifts. Bethel Church and HRock Church now charge thousands of dollars to teach the gifts of the Spirit in contrast to the Apostle Peter who rebuked Simon for offering money for it.

Why would God send people to our church if we don't have a great dream? Why would God give a multigifted, multitalented, and multifinancially wealthy person to a church if the biggest thing you are going to do is paint the restrooms next year? That's bad stewardship.

It's not so much that the church has a mission, it's that the mission of God has a church.

If the church would only be the church- if Christians would only be Christians- nothing could halt our onward march.

The church I lead could have the least gifted people, the least talented people, the fewest leaders, and the least money, and this church under the power of the Holy Spirit could still shake the nations for his glory.

Power corrupts. If the Church is given too much power, it will become corrupted. So to keep the Church in line with the teachings of Christ, we must make sure that it can never have temporal power. Religion has its place and politics has its own. These two should not be mixed together or the result would be catastrophic.

There have been times when the church seemed afraid, but she is no longer. Analyze, dissect, use your microscope or your spectrum till the last atom of matter is reached; reflect and refine till the last element of thought is made clear; the church now knows with the certainty of science what she once knew only by the certainty of faith, that you will find enthroned behind all thought and matter only one central idea--that idea which the church has never ceased to embody--I AM!

Pastors started killing their church members and church members killed pastors. Husbands killed wives. It's a situation no one can describe.

Those who are marginal in the world are central in the Church, and that is how it is supposed to be! Thus we are called as members of the Church to keep going to the margins of our society. The homeless, the starving, parentless children, people with AIDS, our emotionally disturbed brothers and sisters - they require our first attention.

Our ultimate aim in this welfare work is to help Church members to become self-supporting, and to obtain work they can do best. The Church, with its members independent and free from debt, with time to labor in the ministry, can then successfully carry on the work of the Lord here on earth.

Helmut Walcha was a gifted organist, improviser, and composer! He would play Evensong every week at his church for free, the Dreikönigskirche in Frankfurt, where the audience would consist of only six or so of us students. When he would give a public recital that had a hefty ticket price, the church was packed.

It is an absurd fiction that the churches are useful. They are nothing more than propaganda centers for superstitious faiths and doctrines. Church members have a right to believe in and propagate their various doctrines. But they should pay every item of the cost, of this propaganda, including fair taxation for all church property.

I still follow the lifestyle of the Mormon church. I try to go to church every Sunday even when I'm on tour. It's not only my upbringing, but it helps me stay sane. It helps me remember my purpose and the overall picture of what is important to me and what makes me happy.