Church Quotes - Page 15

WHEN SIN HINDERS YOUR WORSHIP.God will never delay His promise.You have delayed Him."..However, when the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on the earth?" Luke 18:8b

It is so easy to have problems with people when you are not God's will.

If you are truly able to walk in the shoes of Christ, the very label of religion called Christianity would disappear from the face of earth.

He (Jesus) gave up his life not because of the so-called sins of humanity, but because he was too adamant to give in to orthodox monstrosity.

From a medical standpoint, the third and the most probable explanation is that Jesus was indeed dead, and what his disciples experienced were mere hallucinations evoked by the grief over the loss of their beloved teacher. It is clinically known as “Post-Bereavement Hallucinations Experiences” or PBHE.

A disciple of Jesus Christ is a visible verbal follower of Jesus Christ at the expense of the ones and things that they hold dear. It's that serious.

Kingsley Opuwari Manuel

The Church has carried out some of the most inhuman and above all un-Christian acts of human history, yet, it is still gloriously hailed by the majority of human population as to be synonymous with Jesus Christ.

We have created youth ministry that confuses extroversion with faithfulness. We have effectively communicated to young people that sincerely following Jesus is synonymous with being 'fired up' for Jesus, with being excited for Jesus, as if discipleship were synonymous with fostering an exuberant, perky, cheerful, hurray-for-Jesus disposition like what we might find in the glee club or at a pep rally.

James K.A. Smith

Culture cannot be a monolithically universal phenomenon without some kind of demonic imposition of one culture over the rest of cultures. Nor is it possible to dream of a universal "Christian culture" without denying the dialectic between history and eschatology which is so central, among other things, to the eucharist itself. Thus, if there is a transcendence of cultural divisions on a universal level - which indeed must be constantly aimed at by the Church - it can only take place via the local situations expressed in and through the particular local Churches and not through universalistic structures which imply a universal Church.

John D. Zizioulas

Wasn’t I allowed at least one nervous breakdown a year? Maybe next year Jon and I could pencil it into our calendar. Maybe we could post it in the church bulletin. It would read “ATTENTION: Our Dear Pastor’s wife is scheduling her annual nervous breakdown, so if you could avoid calling, texting, emailing, or whining in her direction for the next week between the hours of 10:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m., she would be most grateful.

I was going to stop pretending that just because we were in ministry we were perfect. I was tired of wearing the mask of ministry, and knew that I needed to start living the life.

Repentance seemed like too loose of a word. I knew I’d been wrong, but that didn’t soften the blow.

Jennifer was good at her job and loved it. However, I hated the fact she was forced on me. She was young, beautiful, and thin. Everything I never felt that I was, and she always insisted on wearing heels and cute little suits in the office. Really? Who had such bionic feet that they could wear those day in and day out. My attitude toward her bordered on civil with a touch of sarcasm. I was sure she had stories to tell the women in the church on how hard I was to work with. I told myself I didn’t care. I’d wear flip-flops and flats at my desk and sequester all shoes over a two-inch heel to be worn only on Sundays.

To love one another as He loves us, is the true Gospel of Jesus Christ. For it is love that kills our outward man’s ways; buries him in baptism; and causes our inward-man (named Jesus) to resurrect on the inside of us!

We know many among ourselves who have given themselves up to bonds, in order that they might ransom others. Many, too, have surrendered themselves to slavery, that with the price which they received for themselves, they might provide food for others.

Clement of Rome

Don't just cry over your 10 or 20 member church. Sometimes, God gives you your future first. The ones you call little carry in them every possibility you desire of the future. God would send you leaders but they may come as weak men and women first. Don't be so 'gift' conscious that you fail to realize that certain things are results of growth.

Kingsley Opuwari Manuel

The faithful have no dread of using the traditional language of the church. Terms like incarnation and resurrection need to be explained, not avoided.

For centuries after Christ, the church and other religions that use cruciform symbols have misrepresented the physical nature of Christ's death with a satanic symbol (cross), and a pagan idol (corpus). This secret has been concealed by the church for centuries after Christ.

Nwaocha Ogechukwu

There is no indication that any church official suggested or supported the emperor's action against gay people. On the contrary, the only persons known by name to have been punished for homosexual acts were prominent bishops.

True worship leaders worship the Lord at all times and use songs only when necessary.

As a newborn baby breathes and cries, so the signs of life in a newborn Christian are faith and repentance, inhaling the love of God and exhaling an initial cry of distress. And at that point what God provides, exactly as for a newborn infant, is the comfort, protection, and nurturing promise of a mother."If God is our father, the church is our mother." The words are those of the Swiss Reformer John Calvin ... it is as impossible, unnecessary, and undesirable to be a Christian all by yourself as it is to be a newborn baby all by yourself.

If you cannot see that divinity includes male and female characteristics and at the same time transcends them, you have bad consequences. Rome and Cardinal O'Connor base the exclusion of women priests on the idea that God is the Father and Jesus is His Son, there were only male disciples, etc. They are defending a patriarchal Church with a patriarchal God. We must fight the patriarchal misunderstanding of God.

Whether [new Protestant church movements] place their emphasis on new worship styles, expressions of the Holy Spirit’s power, evangelism to seekers, or Bible teaching, these so-called new movements still operate out of the fallacious assumption that the church belongs firmly in the town square, that is, at the heart of Western culture. And if they begin with this mistaken belief about their position in Western society, all their church planting, all their reproduction will simply mirror this misapprehension.

For better of for worse the church in the West bought modernity's claims. We were baptized in its story (even though it said it did not have one) and accepted its categories and definitions. But somewhere along the way we also began to believe that the ways in which we accessed knowledge about God or Jesus or the Spirit or Christianity were those things themselves.

Tim Keel

For Christians to influence the world with the truth of God's Word requires the recovery of the great Reformation doctrine of vocation. Christians are called to God's service not only in church professions but also in every secular calling. The task of restoring truth to the culture depends largely on our laypeople.To bring back truth, on a practical level, the church must encourage Christians to be not merely consumers of culture but makers of culture. The church needs to cultivate Christian artists, musicians, novelists, filmmakers, journalists, attorneys, teachers, scientists, business executives, and the like, teaching its laypeople the sense in which every secular vocation-including, above all, the callings of husband, wife, and parent--is a sphere of Christian ministry, a way of serving God and neighbor that is grounded in God's truth. Christian laypeople must be encouraged to be leaders in their fields, rather than eager-to-please followers, working from the assumptions of their biblical worldview, not the vapid clichés of pop culture.

J Gresham Machen

Church is too often the most risky place to be spiritually honest.

There are wolves within, and there are sheep without.

Augustine of Hippo

Let us not forget: we are a pilgrim church, subject to misunderstanding, to persecution, but a church that walks serene, because it bears the force of love.

Oscar A. Romero

The spirit of Christ is the spirit of missions. The nearer we get to Him, the more intensely missionary we become.

What is to be gained if we are so intent in reaching out to the unchurched that we then unchurch the reached?

The church is constituted as a new people who have been gathered from the nations to remind the world that we are in fact one people. Gathering, therefore, is an eschatological act as it is the foretaste of the unity of the communion of the saints.

Stanley Hauerwas

A good church is a Bible-centered church. Nothing is as important as this--not a large congregation, a witty pastor, or tangible experiences of the Holy Spirit.

Our greatest fear as individuals & as a church should not be of failure, but of suceeding at things in life that dont really matter.

The church exists primarily for two closely correlated purposes: to worship God and to work for his kingdom in the world ... The church also exists for a third purpose, which serves the other two: to encourage one another, to build one another up in faith, to pray with and for one another, to learn from one another and teach one another, and to set one another examples to follow, challenges to take up, and urgent tasks to perform. This is all part of what is known loosely as fellowship.

Ninety-nine percent of everything that goes on in most Christian churches has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual religion. Intelligent people all notice this sooner or later, and they conclude that the entire one hundred percent is bullshit, which is why atheism is connected with being intelligent in people's minds.

Neal Stephenson

Change is inevitable. Progression is a choice. We all move, but are you going to move forward?

If you do not cultivate your life's environment, you will not captivate the worlds enlightenment.

Stop looking back when your future is ahead of you

Don’t ever forget you are beautiful, although your life, your past and your present situation may be ugly. You are beautiful.

I long for the Church to be more truly itself, and for me this involves changing its stance on war, sex, investment and many other difficult matters. I believe in all conscience that my questions and my disagreements are all of God. Yet I must also learn to live in and attend to the reality of the Church as it is, to do the prosaic things that can be and must be done now and to work at my relations now with the people who will not listen to me or those like me—because what God asks of me is not to live in the ideal future but to live with honesty and attentiveness in the present, i.e., to be at home."What if the project in question is myself, and not some larger social question such as war? At the end of the day, it is the central concern for most of us. We long to change and to grow, and we are rightly suspicious of those who are pleased with the way they are and cannot seem to conceive of changing any further. Yet the torture of trying to push away and overcome what we currently are or have been, the bitter self-contempt of knowing what we lack, the postponement of joy and peace because we cannot love ourselves now—these are not the building blocks for effective change. We constantly try to start from somewhere other than where we are. Truthful living involves being at home with ourselves, not complacently but patiently, recognizing that what we are today, at this moment, is sufficiently loved and valued by God to be the material with which he will work, and that the longed-for transformation will not come by refusing the love and the value that is simply there in the present moment."So we come back, by a longish detour, to the point to which Mark's narrative brought us: the contemplative enterprise of being where we are and refusing the lure of a fantasized future more compliant to our will, more satisfying in the image of ourselves that it permits. Living in the truth, in the sense in which John's Gospel gives it, involves the same sober attention to what is there—to the body, the chair, the floor, the voice we hear, the face we see—with all the unsatisfactoriness that this brings. Yet this is what it means to live in that kingdom where Jesus rules, the kingdom that has no frontiers to be defended. Our immersion in the present moment which is God's delivers the world to us—and that world is not the perfect and fully achieved thing we might imagine, but the divided and difficult world we actually inhabit. Only, by the grace of this living in the truth, we are able to say to it at least an echo of the 'yes' that God says, to accept as God accepts.

It is time to change the paradigm of the church and of every Christian

Much of what we accomplish in the church is due to the selfless service of women.

Quentin L. Cook

Officially, the New Testament church at an early stage took seriously their responsibility for widows who lacked family or other resources. The office of deacon was instituted initially to address this pressing need.

Carolyn Custis James

Again, as I had often met it in my own church, I was confronted with the Impurity of Women doctrine that seemed to preoccupy all clergymen.

In fact, even Tillich's socialism was accommodationist because it continued the Constantinian strategy: The way to make the church radical is by identifying the church with secular "radicals", that is, socialists.

Stanley Hauerwas

That which makes the church "radical" and forever "new" is not that the church tends to lean toward the left on most social issues, but rather that the church knows Jesus whereas the world does not. In the church's view, the political left is not noticeably more interesting than the political right; both sides tend towards solutions that act as if the world has not ended and begun in Jesus.

Stanley Hauerwas

Mankind will never know peace until the last politician is strangled to death with the entrails of the last priest.

There’s no stronger bulwark of sound conservatism than the evangelical church, and no better place to make friends who’ll help you to gain your rightful place in the community than in your own church-home!

The fact that political ideologies are tangible realities is not a proof of their vitally necessary character. The bubonic plague was an extraordinarily powerful social reality, but no one would have regarded it as vitally necessary.

Some men do not know the father of 'their' children.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The primary goal of a righteous parent who has a daughter is to minimize the number of boys and men for whom their daughter will have willingly opened her legs come her wedding day; the closer to zero, the more righteous they will seem.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Some people are so sexually unattractive that the thought of masturbating turns them off.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Coco Chanel is said to have said that a girl should be two things: who and what she is. I say a girl should do two things: what and who she wants.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

It was masturbation, not willpower, that made it possible for gazillions of women to walk down the aisle with their reputation and their hymen still intact.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Some women have been faking orgasms for so long that they sometimes fake one when they are masturbating.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

A man cannot really be called (sexually) confident if he has never bought his woman a vibrator.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Whenever He answers prayers, God usually prioritizes those by people who, instead of their mouths, have prayed with their hands and/or feet.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Most priests wish they were as righteous as they seem to most members of their congregations.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The anti-life of [Jerry Falwell] proves only one thing: that you can get away with the most extraordinary offenses to morality and truth in this country if you'll just get yourself called Reverend. People like that should be out in the street, shouting and hollering with a cardboard sign and selling pencils from a cup.

Christopher Hitchens

At its root, the logic is that of the Grand Inquisitor, who bitterly assailed Christ for offering people freedom and thus condemning them to misery. The Church must correct the evil work of Christ by offering the miserable mass of humanity the gift they most desire and need: absolute submission. It must “vanquish freedom” so as “to make men happy” and provide the total “community of worship” that they avidly seek. In the modern secular age, this means worship of the state religion, which in the Western democracies incorporates the doctrine of submission to the masters of the system of public subsidy, private profit, called free enterprise. The people must be kept in ignorance, reduced to jingoist incantations, for their own good. And like the Grand Inquisitor, who employs the forces of miracle, mystery, and authority “to conquer and hold captive for ever the conscience of these impotent rebels for their happiness” and to deny them the freedom of choice they so fear and despise, so the “cool observers” must create the “necessary illusions” and “emotionally potent oversimplifications” that keep the ignorant and stupid masses disciplined and content.

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