Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Spirituality is no different from what we've been doing for two thousand years just by going to church and receiving the sacraments, being baptized, learning to pray, and reading Scriptures rightly. It's just ordinary stuff.
When hearing aids were first mentioned, I pictured myself as that old geezer at the back of the church with the whistling ear trumpet, but you can't see these Phonak hearing aids, and people don't realise you've got them in.
There were only two things I knew in a Christian framework that I could do. One would be the pastor of a church, the other would be a missionary. I didn't particularly like snakes, so I decided I should probably be a pastor.
This concern for the poor is in the Gospel, it is within the tradition of the Church, it is not an invention of communism and it must not be turned into an ideology, as has sometimes happened before in the course of history.
I'm agnostic because I went through the usual process of parents insisting you go to church, and yet they didn't. So there's me, sitting in the chairs, thinking, 'Jeez, why am I here? I'd rather be playing tennis, seriously.'
Why does no one speak of the cultural advantages of the country? For example, is a well groomed, ecologically kept, sustainably fertile farm any less cultural, any less artful, than paintings of fat angels on church ceilings?
The actual point in question, throughout the centuries of Christian persecution, has never been faith in God, but faith in the Bible as the word of God, and in the Church (this Church or that) as the interpreter of that word.
The historic glory of America lies in the fact that it is the one nation that was founded like a church. That is, it was founded on a faith that was not merely summed up after it had exited, but was defined before it existed.
So, not only am I panicking over the weekend if I need to know my lines, but also if can I get the kids to the zoo. Can I even go to church? I was asking for certain things that would allow me to plan my life a little better.
And they turned around and leased it to The Assembly Of God Churches - their headquarters are in Springfield, Missouri. They leased it to them for the first year. Then, after the first year, they will donate it to the church.
Nobody understands the nature of the Church, or the ringing note of the creed descending from antiquity, who does not realize that the whole world once very nearly died of broadmindedness and the brotherhood of all religions.
The Church, in her wisdom, maintains the distinction between engaged and married couples -- they are not the same, today's culture and society have become rather indifferent to the delicate and serious nature of this passage.
The more I started studying the historical Jesus, the man who lived 2,000 years ago... the more I started to realize that there was this chasm between the historical Jesus and the Jesus that I had been taught about in church.
But perhaps when you were too obedient, and did not do openly what others did, and were quiet in church and hard-working at school, then some unknown rebellion brewed in you, doing harm to you, though how I do not understand.
United with the angels and saints of the heavenly Church, let us adore the most Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist. Prostrate, we adore this great mystery that contains God's new and definitive covenant with humankind in Christ.
[We need reforms] to make the Negro church a place where colored men and women of education and energy can work for the best things regardless of their belief or disbelief in unimportant dogmas and ancient and outworn creeds.
I have always felt that my work is religious, not sacrilegious. I would say that there are many individuals in the Church who appreciate it and who do not have a problem with it. The best place for Piss Christ is in a church.
For example, I was a White House intern the summer before I dropped out of law school. Everybody knew about it. I'd come home and go to church and everybody would say, 'Oh, my God. Demetri, you're working at the White House.'
O, because I have had only that kind of benevolence which consists in lying on a sofa, and cursing the church and clergy for not being martyrs and confessors. One can see, you know, very easily, how others ought to be martyrs.
There is something childish and legalistic about churches in which all of the saints observe precisely the same standards. When all lives begin to sink into the same mould of denial and exercise of liberty, something is amiss.
I pastor a very large church in western Australia. We have about - over 2,000 people, which we have a Bible school, community services, a lot of things linked with it. So my life's very full today. Not enough days in the week.
We have been filled with grief as we have witnessed the decline of the North American Church that was once filled with missionary zeal and yet now seems determined to bury itself in a deadly embrace with the spirit of the age.
My plea to the Body of Christ is while we must do all we can to meet the needs of the suffering and dying millions, we must not see these activities as a substitute for evangelism and establishing churches among the unreached.
Through the confessional system, the Catholic church spied upon the lives of its congregants. While Latin mass excluded most people who could not speak Latin from an understanding of the very system of thought that bound them.
Some of the most remarkable and profound worship encounters I've experienced have happened in churches with no production, no lighting, no exciting visuals or amplification, sometimes with not even a single musical instrument.
If I were not a Catholic, and were looking for the true Church in the world today, I would look for the one Church which did not get along well with the world; in other words, I would look for the Church which the world hated.
I don't go to Mass every day. But I go to church every day. Just sitting there, thinking - it's a great way to start the morning, you know? You feel so good coming out, and your approach to everything is suddenly really clear.
Some people erroneously believe that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its members are not Christian. We have difficulty understanding why anyone could accept and promote an idea that is so far from the truth.
We bless the organized church structures and their meetings. But if there are 10,000 others that meet outside of these ecclesiastical structures, that's wonderful, too. The kingdom of God moves forward in lots and lots of ways.
Cove is essentially a collaboration, coordination and communication tool for the administration of organizations and communities, from the Stanford Graduate School of Business Entrepreneurship Club to church groups and schools.
There's more than one mosque in the world that used to be a church and before that was a temple. Because it's a lot easier to just change the sign on the top and say under new management than it is to change the whole building.
The Catholic Church, though I think it's important that people grow up with moral values, I just always disagreed with their tactics, which I thought were fright tactics, as opposed to sitting down and explaining the situation.
The Church is the safe place to be. I can safely believe everything the Church teaches. It will not harm me, and in fact it will equip me to grow and grow and have a better and better ability to experience that direct presence.
Here we now have the freedom of all religions, and I hope that never again will we have a repetition of religious bigotry, as we have had in certain periods of our own history. There is no room for that kind of foolishness here.
It is, after all, far too easy to pinch and kick the bizarre Mormon Church; to say it's ripe for satire and parody is to say a Catholic schoolgirl is ripe for debauchery. It's like shooting polygamist fish in a barrel of coffee.
The crisis of the church is not at its deepest level a crisis of authority, or a crisis of dogmatic theology. It is a crisis of powerlessness in which our sole recourse is to call on the help and inward power of the Holy Spirit.
When I am at Rome I fast as the Romans do; when I am at Milan I do not fast. So likewise you, whatever church you come to, observe the custom of the place, if you would neither give offence to others, nor take offence from them.
When there is a spirit of controversy in the church or in the land, a revival is needful. The spirit of religion is not the spirit of controversy. There can be no prosperity in religion, where the spirit of controversy prevails.
The Church does not dispense the sacrament of baptism in order to acquire for herself an increase in membership but in order to consecrate a human being to God and to communicate to that person the divine gift of birth from God.
I got divorced, which was not a good thing for a revivalist minister. It did not go down well. I'd already been banned from a couple churches for my jokes. So one day I woke up and decided it was time to start living for myself.
I think records and music are more appropriate and more respectful of the human soul than the churches are. And more respectful of the needs of humans to communicate with the aspects of themselves that are neglected by language.
There is power through prayer. For many Christians, prayer is nothing special, just something we're supposed to do - go to church, tithe, read the Bible, pray. But prayer should be so much more than an item on our "to do" lists.
It might kill you to say it, because the film really takes on the Catholic Church, but I do think there is a sort of affection for certain rituals, and an authenticity to the presentation of those rituals, in 'Mea Maxima Culpa.'
I had a born-again experience at the age of 33. As a result of that I found a church where I felt I was being fed properly. I don't say that as a reflection on Catholicism. But once I was born again, I got an evangelical spirit.
I repeat that no greater immediate responsibility rests upon members of the Church, upon all citizens of this republic and of neighboring republics than to protect the freedom vouchsafed by the Constitution of the United States.
It is impossible for us to understand the Church if we regard her as subject to the limitations of human culture. For she is essentially a supernatural organism which transcends human cultures and transforms them to her own ends.
Some leaders of denominations are not of the Bride of Christ. They are leaders in a Church in which many have long since betrayed the Master. When they meet someone of the Underground Church, a martyr, they look at him strangely.
The great monuments are raised up like dams, pitting the logic of majesty and authority against all the shady elements: it is in the form of cathedrals and palaces that Church and State speak and impose silence on the multitudes.
God is not interested in what you think you should be or feel. He is not interested in the narrative you have construct for yourself, or that others have construct for you. He may even use suffering to deconstruct that narrative.
This determined bias against religion, especially Christianity, is clearly evident when viewed against the religious heritage of American culture as revealed in the Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States, 143 U.S. 452. 1892.