Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
People are not on a truth quest; they are on a happiness quest. They will continue to attend your church - even if they don't share your beliefs - as long as they find the content engaging and helpful.
The principle of the Inquisition was murderous. . . . The popes were not only murderers in the great style, but they also made murder a legal basis of the Christian Church and a condition of salvation.
We must always bear in mind that the primary purpose of our work is not to get people to join a church, to give up their bad habits, or to do anything other than to accept Jesus Christ as their Savior.
The Church has little idea how unorthodox it is at any given moment. If a church can't yet be perfectly orthodox, it can, with the Holy Spirit's help and by the grace of God, be perpetually reformable.
You sang in church, you know, and you didn't act at all. You tried not to act, you tried to tell the truth. The idea of being a troubadour on the road singing for your supper was very disturbing to him.
In the early 1800s, religion was often used as a way to keep slavery in place. Slaves were forced to attend the church of their owners, listen to selective dogma that kept them obedient and subservient.
On the most elementary level, you do not have to go to church to be a Christian. You do not have to go home to be married either. But in both cases if you do not, you will have a very poor relationship.
Ludlow....is probably the loveliest town in England with its hill of Georgian houses ascending from the river Teme to the great tower of the cross-shaped church, rising behind a classic market building.
The church is the bride of Christ. The kingdom will be the eternal celebration of the wedding of Christ and the church. We will enjoy rapturous celebration as the bride of Christ in the eternal kingdom.
It is necessary to obey a Pope in all things as long as he does not go against the universal customs of the Church, but should he go against the universal customs of the Church, he need not be followed.
You don't decide to build a church because you have money in the bank. You build because God says this is what I should do. Faith is the supplier of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen.
If you're consumed with God's life, if you share his love with others, if you practice it each day, you too can start a revolution of love in your own home, in your own church, in your own neighborhood.
My first memories of religion were being taken to Episcopal church. My father was Catholic, but my mother, I believe, was Episcopal. So I sort of veered off into the watered-down version of Catholicism.
To campaign in the South is a unique cultural experience. You go into the little church facilities and meet people, or you go to a spaghetti supper, and it's about talking and hugging and shaking hands.
We get along, we talk music.Lenny Kravitz took me to Harlem to see this little jazz show in the back of a church. It was just shitty fluorescent lights and a small stage piano, but this band tore it up.
The Church is missionary by nature and her principal task is evangelization, which aims to proclaim and to witness to Christ and to promote his Gospel of peace and love in every environment and culture.
St. Peter announced the glad tidings of the Gospel to the people on the day of Pentecost, and converted, by the first Christian sermon, ever preached, three thousand - which formed the primitive Church.
My first church had seven members in it, and I have to remember, the rent was $225 a month and I worked for Union Carbide and took the check I made from work to pay for the rent to keep the church open.
There are fully forty towers, which are lofty and well built, the largest of which has fifty steps leading to its main body, and is higher than the tower of the principal tower of the church at Seville.
Put bluntly, the American church today accepts grace in theory but denies it in practice. We say we believe that the fundamental structure of reality is grace, not works - but our lives refute our faith.
They were beginning to burn churches. They were beginning to move beyond crosses... They burned churches because they understood that the Christian faith was what inspired the movement and kept it going.
We are forbidden to neglect the assembling of ourselves together. Christianity is already institutional in the earliest of its documents. The Church is the Bride of Christ. We are members of one another.
The early morning belongs to the Church of the risen Christ. At the break of light it remembers the morning on which death and sin lay prostrate in defeat and new life and salvation were given to mankind
The Church is the new creation, it is life and joy, it is the sacramental fellowship in which we share the ultimate purpose of God, made real for us now in our hearing the Word and sharing the Sacrament.
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'.
Being no bigot myself, I am disposed to indulge the professors of Christianity in the church that road to heaven which to them shall seem the most direct, plainest, easiest and least liable to exception.
We in the church have humility and contrition to offer the world, not a formula for success. Almost alone in our success-oriented society, we admit that we have failed, are failing, and always will fail.
The ordinary ministry is that which receives all of its direction from the will of God revealed in the Scriptures and from those means which God has appointed in the church for its continual edification.
It appears likely that there was no normative pattern of church government in the apostolic age, and that the organizational structure of the church is no essential element in the theology of the church.
That phrase "hocus-pocus" started out as "hocus-pocus dominocus", and was, in the beginning, a mocking imitation of the holy incantations of the Catholic Church's Latin liturgy. So say the lexicologists.
I was married awfully young and I felt trapped. My wife had been divorced and all the time we were married we were out of the Church. It wasn't until we were divorced that we became good Catholics again.
We have the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church talking about how gay marriage is a sign of the apocalypse, or Russian TV talking about how meteorites are coming to punish Russians for homosexuality.
The credulity of the church is decreasing, and the most marvelous miracles are not either 'explained,' or allowed to take refuge behind the mistakes of the translators, or hide in the drapery of allegory.
I didn't want to raise my daughter in the church because from what I experienced and what I saw, the church becomes everything - your mother, your father, your everything. You are dependent on the church.
Those who have entered into the afflictions of Christ for His Church's sake know something of what they mean, for they have learned in a measure to pour out their souls unto death, in fellowship with Him.
I realize that my ministry would someday come to an end. I am only one in a glorious chain of men and women God has raised up through the centuries to build Christ's church and take the Gospel everywhere.
These then are the marks of the ideal Church - love, suffering, holiness, sound doctrine, genuineness, evangelism and humility. They are what Christ desires to find in His churches as He walks among them.
I'm a student of Eric Church, and I say that a lot... I was drawn to it because of the honesty and because it's got rough edges on it. He doesn't shy away from anything, and that's the way I wanted to be.
If all the rich and all of the church people should send their children to the public schools they would feel bound to concentrate their money on improving these schools until they met the highest ideals.
So many today are worshiping in the mountains, big churches, stone and frame buildings. But Jesus teaches that salvation is not in these stone structures-not in the mountains-not in the hills, but in God.
I will go where the Lord and the leaders of His Church want me to go, I will do what they want me to do, I will teach what they want me to teach, and I will strive to become what I should and must become.
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.
And because Jesus is the Eucharist, keeping Him in the center allows all the rich doctrines of the Church to emanate from Him, just as the beautiful gold rays stream forth from the Host in the monstrance.
If I started preaching politics from the pulpit, our church would empty overnight. That's not why people come to church. They want to hear the word of God being proclaimed, not the word of Robert Jeffress.
My whole damn family was nice. I don't think I've imagined it. It's true. Maybe it has to do with being brought up as Christian Scientists. Half of my relatives were Readers or Practitioners in the church.
It is ironic to watch the churches, including large sections of my own religion, surrendering to the spirit of modernity at the very moment when modernity itself is undergoing a kind of spiritual collapse.
I suppose the Church would be perfect only if it were run by perfect beings. God is perfect, and His doctrine is pure. But He works through us - His imperfect children - and imperfect people make mistakes.
Although the church has often been far too slow to follow his lead, Jesus' insistence that women, as well as men, bear the full image of God has had a way of sparking reform movements across the centuries.
'Safe Harbor' is a state of mind... it's the place - in reality or metaphor - to which one goes in times of trouble or worry. It can be a friendship, marriage, church, garden, beach, poem, prayer, or song.
Even Martin Luther and John Calvin believed that the Roman Catholic church, up to the Council of Trent, was basically orthodox - a true church with sound fundamental doctrines as well as significant error.