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If churches around the world would grasp the revolutionary truth that Christ's transforming power always comes through sacrifice and weakness, it would dramatically alter the landscape of the global church.
I not only play at the prestigious classical concert halls like Carnegie Hall and Kennedy Center, but also hospitals, churches, prisons, and restricted facilities for leprosy patients, just to mention a few.
I support gay unions. I think the government should get out of the marriage business completely - leave marriages to the churches. And grant civil unions to gay couples, grant civil unions to a man and woman.
The principle that certain sins should not receive the Church's testimony of forgiveness was probably no novelty at all, but had been applied in various churches; perhaps, however, with no strict consistency.
The charm of Brittany is to be found in the people and in the churches. The former, with their peculiar costumes and their customs, are full of interest, and the latter are of remarkable beauty and quaintness.
Ten years ago, 15 years ago, I think the church would have been asleep at the switch. This level of activism and engagement with the needs of society by local churches I never thought I'd see it in my lifetime.
If organized religion has become less relevant, it's not because churches have held fast to their creedal beliefs - it's because they've held fast to their conventional structures, programs, roles and routines.
When taxes go up, tithing goes down. When the government assumes the role of the shepherd, the power of churches is diminished. It's another way to attack religion and for the state to eradicate it from society.
Some of the most moving experiences I've had are just in black churches in the South, during the Civil Rights Movement, where people were getting beaten, killed, really struggling for the most elementary rights.
Much of the impotence of American churches is tied to a profound ignorance and apathy about justification. Our people live in a fog of guilt. Or just as bad, they think being a better person is all God requires.
A lot of these liberal churches that harbor illegal immigrants who are criminals say they are following the example of Jesus. They are following the Jesus of their imagination rather than the Jesus of the Bible.
As a preacher who has spent significant time in churches and houses of worship all across the country, I can tell you firsthand that religious liberty and freedom are principles that can never be infringed upon.
Churches, by the very reason of their structures, are monolithic and do not adapt easily. But in many cases, they, too, have allowed themselves to become allied or even part of an unjust establishment or system.
I grew up in a modern home, but my grandmother lived across the street in an old house that was built when churches were illegal in Mexico. She had a chapel in the home, right between the kitchen and dining room.
We as preachers/teachers/pastors have to figure out things to do in order to garner the attention of individuals and also keep them at our churches by making sure that we reinvent ourselves on a consistent basis.
The Left regards the Constitution as defective and outmoded - in part because it impedes the government's ability to control institutions, like churches and families, which stand between the state and individuals.
Some respected and beloved brethren insist that the forming and organising of churches is, according to God's will, the only means of finding blessing in the midst of that confusion which is acknowledged to exist.
The rosary was said every evening. I always liked that sentence about the medieval Churches, that they were the Bibles of the poor. The Church was my first book and I would think it is still my most important book.
St. Paul was making it impossible to be Jewish and Christian at the same time. What is very striking about those early churches and communities is that you could be both. Under Paul, though, you absolutely couldn't.
Every Christmas should begin with the sound of bells, and when I was a child mine always did. But they were sleigh bells, not church bells, for we lived in a part of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where there were no churches.
The first time I ever went out of the country, it was to London. I was with the choir from my college, and we were touring around all these different churches. I loved it so much I tried to find a way to stay there.
I travel all over the United States basically in evangelism, speaking in churches, speaking in prisons, speaking in rehab centers wherever I can basically sharing my story of redemption and the turnaround in my life.
Would a President Hillary Clinton and her liberal allies suspend the tax-exempt status of churches deemed 'not friendly' to her administration? It is within the realm of possibility considering their hateful beliefs.
Jesus is why women have traveled continents, spent decades learning a strange language so they could translate the Gospel, planting churches, caring for the sick, educating the illiterate, and marching for the oppressed.
The fault seems to me to have been that men have taken ancient country churches as their models and have failed to discover that between them and churches in towns there ought to be a most distinct and marked difference.
In 1775, no fewer than nine colonies had established churches, ranging from Congregational establishments in New Hampshire, Connecticut and Massachusetts to Episcopal churches in the southern states from Maryland on down.
Some hypocrites and seeming mortified men, that held down their heads, were like the little images that they place in the very bowing of the vaults of churches, that look as if they held up the church, but are but puppets.
We have to start making sure that churches start to talk about... black queerness in a way that's affirming. Because a lot of young black men are in the church, and that's where they start to learn this self-hate behavior.
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.
I was raised in Austin, Texas, around trial lawyers. My friend and I - we were 14 - would go and watch her father try cases. I also heard of lot of Baptist preachers in little churches saying crazy things with such conviction.
There used to be a tradition of the loveable rogue who would steal from the honour boxes in churches and buy a round of drinks with the money he snagged. And everyone would find him tremendously good company. But not any more.
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.
I think that the pivotal point of me in terms of the choral stuff is that I was involved in this provincial choir at 16 or 17. We went and played in churches and convention centres. The music we got to do was so inspiring for me.
We could say that people who eat grits, listen to country music, follow stock-car racing, support corporal punishment in the schools, hunt 'possum, go to Baptist churches and prefer bourbon to Scotch are likely to be Southerners.
The nations were awakened from the sleep of death, as the words of eternal life flowed from the Apostles' lips, - the temples of superstition were shut or destroyed, and churches were planted in every part of the civilized world.
I am an atheist, and I believe that religion should not be in the classrooms; it has to be in the churches. In the classrooms, you have to form citizenship, not people with religious beliefs, that corresponds to the private sphere.
In the real world, I see conservatives volunteering at adoption agencies, at churches, at bake sales and the local American Legion Post while the only charity a progressive sends is a smug sermon on fair share and what fairness is.
The Old Testament is responsible for more atheism, agnosticism, disbelief - call it what you will - than any book ever written. It has emptied more churches than all the counter-attractions of cinema, motor-bicycle and golf course.
When I board an airplane these days, all the middle-aged men are dressed like me - when I was an 8-year-old. They're in shorts and T-shirts. And it's not just on airplanes. It's in business offices, teachers' lounges, and churches.
It's not just that government has failed us. It's not just that we have failed ourselves. It's government. It's individuals. It's sort of everything in between, from families and communities and neighborhoods, churches and so forth.
London is a city of ghosts; you feel them here. Not just of people, but eras. The ghost of empire, or the blitz, the plague, the smoky ghost of the Great Fire that gave us Christopher Wren's churches and ushered in the Georgian city.
The first two crusades brought the flower of European chivalry to Constantinople and restored that spiritual union between Eastern and Western Christendom that had been interrupted by the great schism of the Greek and Roman Churches.
I think that huge Christian institutions deal a lot with corruption. You see it happen with so many institutions. We've seen the questions with Catholicism, we've seen the questions with some other mega churches that really do exist.
Santa Monica, where I have always lived, is not a town where you will find storefront Church of God in Christ churches. So, the whole idea of gospel quartet singing is something I never knew existed until I began to hear it on record.
While I was raised around churches and had gotten to know a few preachers fairly well, the thought never entered my head that I would one day stand and deliver. Not only was I not interested, I lived with a major struggle: I stuttered.
Sometimes in churches somebody will discover a particular vein of spirituality and seek to recruit others into it, or assume a superior position because they have found certain techniques - but no one actually wants to become like them.
There's some criminals that wear badges. Guess what? There's some criminals that work in the media. There's some criminals that are football coaches. There's some criminals that are politicians. There are criminals that work in churches.
The genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges, or churches, or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors, but always most in the common people.
But how odd that in this heathen nation of empty pews, where churches' bare, ruined choirs are converted into luxury loft living, a Labour government - yes, a Labour government - is deliberately creating a huge expansion of faith schools.