Top 100 Church Not Quotes
#1. I would not be standing here today if my skin were white or my religion were Presbyterian. I am here today only because my skin is yellow and my religion is Unification Church. The ugliest things in this beautiful country of America are religious bigotry and racism.
Sun Myung Moon
#2. Religion that is contained only within a church building is a weekend hobby, not a personal faith.
James Lankford
#3. It is not enough to celebrate Christmas. We need to be changed and shaped by what we are celebrating. If our spiritual life is no better in spite of all our praying, fasting, and church services, then we have not yet begun to fully respond to the significance of Advent and of the Nativity.
Vassilios Papavassiliou
#4. I grew up in the church and had religion in my life for a long time. I'm not really a church goer, but I definitely have a hunger for a spiritual connection to the world and for my soul to be healed.
Wes Bentley
#5. It's important to preach like there's a broken heart on every pew. That's always been a phrase that stuck with me. Not everybody is having a tough time, but you can bet your buck that there's a good tenth of your church that's going through a hard season. There really is a broken heart on every pew.
Max Lucado
#6. Many churches have molded their programs around the community - not the Word of God.
Billy Graham
#7. What I thought as a young adult is you act like you have it together whether or not you do because that is what church people do. That is not what God has called us to do.
Beth Moore
#8. The Revelation speaks powerfully today, and its message to us is the same as it was to the early Church: that "there is not a square inch of ground in heaven or on earth or under the earth in which there is peace between Christ and Satan.".
Gary North
#9. One should not seek among others the truth that can be easily gotten from the Church. For in her, as in a rich treasury, the apostles have placed all that pertains to truth, so that everyone can drink this beverage of life. She is the door of life.
Irenaeus Of Lyons
#10. We are not the Church in failure, running out the back door while the devil kicks in the front door. We are the Church of Luke 10:19 that has authority over all the power of the enemy.
Harold R. Eberle
#11. When an individual is motivated by great and powerful convictions of truth, then he disciplines himself, not because of the demands of the church, but because of the knowledge within his heart
Gordon B. Hinckley
#12. We have need to be as sturdy pioneers still as Miles Standish, or Church, or Lovewell. We are to follow on another trail, it is true, but one as convenient for ambushes. What if the Indians are exterminated, are not savages as grim prowling about the clearings today?
Henry David Thoreau
#13. If the Church has no the authority to tell its members that they may not engage in homosexual practices, then it has no authority at all. And if we accept the argument of the hypocrites of homosexuality that their sin is not a sin, we have destroyed ourselves.
Orson Scott Card
#14. Atheism has become a major threat to the church. New Atheists tend to be articulate and belligerent. They are aggressively engaging in "atheist evangelism," determined to stamp out every vestige of belief in God, which they insist is not only "stupid" but "wicked."
Dave Hunt
#15. As some to church repair, not for the doctrine, but the music there.
Alexander Pope
#16. I've left the Church - for many reasons that I've written about publicly - but it's still a large part of my identity, and I still have my faith, if not my Church.
Julianna Baggott
#17. If God had a church it would not be split up into factions, and that if he taught one society to worship one way, and administer in one set of ordinances, He would not teach another, principles which were diametrically opposed.
Joseph Smith Jr.
#18. All the good you've ever done does not make it permissible to sin now.
Johnny Hunt
#19. 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.
Andy Stanley
#20. My mother told me once that she and my father agreed that I would not be brought up Jewish in Chicago. She had me going to a Methodist church.
Wesley Clark
#21. Churches are having a limited impact on society because they fail to understand that the goal of the church is not the church itself but the kingdom.
Tony Evans
#22. Honest investigation is utterly impossible within the pale of any church, for the reason, that if you think the church is right you will not investigate, and if you think it wrong, the church will investigate you.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#23. I have this certain reluctance when it comes to this idea that we are spiritual but not religious and we want Jesus but not the church. Why can't we have both?
Shane Claiborne
#24. The church is not a campus but a community. Pastors are not CEOs; they are shepherds.
Dillon Burroughs
#25. I've known a lot of religious people. My mother is very religious, but she also is very private about it. When I was growing up, she never went to church. She just prayed and read her Bible and kept it to herself. I'm not from a background of flamboyant believers. It's much more a personal issue.
Michael Shannon
#26. Obviously, a big part of the American Revolution was there would be no Church of England the way there was in England. There was a specific attempt not to have an established church.
Jeffrey Toobin
#27. I was an undergraduate at Princeton, and I was pressed by the math department to go on to graduate school. Actually they gave me fellowships that paid my way, otherwise I would not have been able to continue.
Alonzo Church
#29. First of all, do I think there's some racists in the Tea Party? Yeah. I'm an ordained United Methodist pastor; there's some racists in the Methodist church. I don't know if there's a body that does not have some racists in it.
Emanuel Cleaver
#30. As long as quick numerical growth remains the primary indicator of church health, the truth will be compromised. Instead, churches must once again begin measuring success not in terms of numbers but in terms of fidelity to the Scriptures.
Mark Dever
#31. As a teenager I was very clear that I wasn't in the church just to toe the line, but I saw there was a capacity within Christianity and the bible not to fall into line but to question the status quo, that's what kept me in the church. I was listening to the sort of music that did that questioning.
Alan Green
#32. I'm in a mainline church, I'm very aware, especially as I move through community churches and new-start churches that are making real efforts not to associate themselves with traditional denominations - very often they have no history. They have no institutional memory.
Barbara Brown Taylor
#33. Politics is noble; it is one of the highest forms of charity, as Paul VI used to say. We sully it when we mix it with business. The relationship between the Church and political power can also be corrupted if common good is not the only converging point.
Pope Francis
#34. No person, no idea, and no religion deserves to be illegal to insult, not even the Church of Emacs.
Richard Stallman
#35. Leaders in the realm of religious activity are to be judged by their praying habits and not by their money or social position. Those who must be placed in the forefront of the Church's business must be, first of all, men who know how to pray.
Edward McKendree Bounds
#36. The audience that I try to reach are members of what I call the church alumni association. Now they are people who have not found in institutional religion a God big enough to be God for their world.
John Shelby Spong
#37. The Church does not pretend to be scientists. It teaches based upon what science tells it.
Wellington Mara
#38. We do not need to wait for the Holy Spirit to come: he came on the day of Pentecost. He has never left the church.
John Stott
#39. My heart is in the Church of England but not my mind.
Alister Hardy
#40. The right way to requite evil, according to Jesus, is not to resist it. This saying of Christ removes the Church from the sphere of politics and law.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
#41. The essential thought must ever be that a man does not, except in his spiritual infancy, accept a statement merely because the Church or someone in authority declares it correct, but because, under mature examination, it is found to be true and right and worthwhile.
John Andreas Widtsoe
#42. Hearing Mass is the ceremony I most favor during my travels. Church is the only place where someone speaks to me and I do not have to answer back.
Charles De Gaulle
#43. The church is not an institution forcing us to follow rules but a community inviting us to still our hunger and thirst at its table.
Henri Nouwen
#44. What I believe to be one of the major tragedies in the Church today. Namely, that evangelicals are biblical, but not contemporary, while liberals are contemporary but not biblical, and almost nobody is building bridges and relating the biblical text to the modern context
John Stott
#45. We must always bear in mind that the primary purpose of our work, is not to get persons to join the church or to give up their bad habits or to do anything else than this, to accept Jesus Christ, as their Saviour.
R.A. Torrey
#46. The holy universal Church teaches that it is not possible to worship God truly except in Her and asserts that all who are outside of Her will not be saved.
Pope Gregory I
#47. Whatcha doing, Lieu?" she asked cautiously. "Praying," he muttered. "I suck at it."
"Your doing it wrong," she said flatly. "I'm not big on church, but I'm pretty sure you're supposed to do it with a friend.
Amy Lane
#48. When others sit, a #StaticJedi is found standing - even standing along, with a message not in hand but secure in heart!
Eric Samuel Timm
#49. The church also does not condone a broken immigration system in the U.S., one that too easily can lead to the exploitation, abuse and even death of immigrants.
Roger Mahony
#50. Leading a missional church is not for the faint of heart. It takes courage to push yourself beyond your comfort zone and to lead the church beyond it personal limits.
Gary Rohrmayer
#51. The church is not a brick-and-mortar structure. The church is made of flesh & blood. Followers of #Christ are the church.
Eric Samuel Timm
#52. Mission is not primarily an activity of the church, but an attribute of God.
David Bosch
#53. So when you say who does Christ die for? He died for the church, okay. I don't think God's death on the cross through Christ was a failure, if you are saying that. I do not believe that anybody he intended to die for is failing in that area.
Rick Warren
#54. I hear people say all the time, "I'm not really religious, but I consider myself spiritual." I definitely have always been spiritual, being raised by my grandmother on that little acre in Mississippi, indoctrinated, born into the church and the ways of the church.
Oprah Winfrey
#55. 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.
Hans Urs Von Balthasar
#56. The church, the state, and the poor, are 3 daughters which we should maintain, but not portion off.
Benjamin Franklin
#57. It is not classified as a pagan religion. The so-called New Age activities and this are not called religions and therefore don't come under the prohibition of mingling church and state that we have in this country.
Dixie Lee Ray
#58. Only the Muslims defend their beliefs by burning down churches, killing people and destroying embassies. This path will not yield any results. The Muslims must ask themselves what they can do for humankind, before they demand that humankind respect them.
Wafa Sultan
#59. It is a better thing to save souls for the Lord than to save treasures. He who sent forth his apostles without gold had not need of gold to form his Church. The Church possesses gold, not to hoard, but to scatter abroad and come to the aid of the unfortunate.
Saint Ambrose
#60. Buddha says: "Do not flatter your benefactor!". Let one repeat this saying in a Christian church : it immediately purifies the air of everything Christian.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#61. We do not want an official state church. If ninety-nine percent of the population were Catholics, I would still be opposed to it. I do not want civil power combined with religious power. I want to make it clear that I am committed as a matter of deep personal conviction to separation.
John F. Kennedy
#62. For two people to commit themselves not simply to marriage, but to a lifetime of mutual love and submission in imitation of Christ is so astounding, so mysterious, it comes close to looking like Jesus' stubborn love for the church.
Rachel Held Evans
#63. 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.
R. Kent Hughes
#64. 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.
Wilhelm Reich
#65. Ask yourself, "Who's getting the glory in this ministry?" You see, if we do ministry OUR way, it won't be for His glory, because our ways are not His ways.
Charles R. Swindoll
#66. We should not only attend church but must have a ministry in the church as well
Sunday Adelaja
#67. Not everybody who marries in the church and has a family the old-fashioned way is unhappy." "No, but some are. And even if it's just hit-and-miss . . . even if anybody can fall through the cracks, it's still not what I thought I was buying into at all. It still all feels like it makes no sense.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#68. People sometimes ask me if it is a sin in the Church of Emacs to use vi. Using a free version of vi is not a sin; it is a penance. So happy hacking.
Richard Stallman
#69. God is not attracted to mountaintops or church steeples. God is drawn to suffering, and the dark places it surfaces, which is why sharing pain freely feels very much like love, and may be the same thing. (207)
Keith Ablow
#70. I want get across to not just the church world. I want to get outside those walls to everyday people.
Joel Osteen
#71. 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.
Lord Acton
#72. It's not about the church meeting your needs; it's about joining the mission of God's people to meet the world's needs.
Brian D. McLaren
#73. A church has no right to make anything a condition of membership, which Christ has not made a condition of salvation.
Archibald Alexander Hodge
#74. When cleaning I do it the way people go to church - not so much to discover anything new, although I'm alert for new things, but mainly to reacquaint myself with the familiar. It's nice to go over familiar paths.
Robert M. Pirsig
#75. I certainly respect other people's opinions, but I would not vote for a woman to be the pastor of a church.
Charles Stanley
#76. You have not really learned a commandment until you have obeyed it. The Church suffers today from Christians who know volumes more than they practice.
Vance Havner
#77. 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.
Paul Engle
#78. The Lord did not design the church to cater to people's needs - the Lord breathed life into the church to proclaim His truths.
Billy Graham
#79. Repentance is not merely turning away from your sin but turning to the Lamb who takes away your sin. "Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world". 1 John 1:29
John Paul Warren
#80. The Baptist Church rejects man with wooden leg: It appears the Baptist preacher refused to baptize a veteran of the late war in the holy water- saying they only baptize flesh and blood, not wood.
Nancy B. Brewer
#81. In revival, God is not concerned about filling empty churches, He is concerned about filling empty hearts.
Leonard Ravenhill
#82. School is not like church.
I know a lot of people in my school are happy about this,
but I think that's because they've known the wrong kind
of churches, the ones that hold back instead of lifting up.
David Levithan
#83. I strongly believe in the separation of church and state. But freedom of religion does not mean freedom from religion, there is a better way.
Al Gore
#84. Any tendency to design for design's sake, to create a pattern within which the owner must live according to rules set by the designer, is headed for frustration, if not disaster.
Thomas Haden Church
#85. The Catholic Church is one of the oldest, largest and richest institutions on earth, with a following 1.2 billion strong, and change does not come naturally.
Nancy Gibbs
#86. Donald Lydecker: Alcoholism is not a disease, it's a failing. You've turned it into a church. You worship the altar of self-pity. I come to these rooms for one reason, to remember what I don't want to become ... helpless, impotent, and weak.
James Cameron
#87. The church is the only nonprofit on the planet that does not want its leader to know everything he or she can about how the nonprofit functions and pays its bills.
J. Clif Christopher
#88. The downfall of the church will not come from a lack of apologetic teaching; it will come from disintegration of the families in the church.
Josh McDowell
#89. Certainly, the church is not primarily a moral institution, but the bearer of a hope.
Johann Baptist Metz
#90. The Devils also believe and know abundance: But in this is the Difference, their Faith works not by Love, nor their Knowledge by Obedience; and therefore they are never the better for them. And if ours be such, we shall be of their Church, not of Christ's: For as the Head is, so must the Body be.
Various
#91. If one's careful study of the facts shows that the Catholic Church is correct about Jesus-his life, teachings, death, and Resurrection-then why not give the Church the benefit of the doubt and carefully study her reasons for rejecting contraception, homosexual acts, and women's ordination?
Carl E. Olson
#92. The church that is man-managed instead of God-governed is doomed to failure. A ministry that is college-trained but not Spirit-filled works no miracles.
Leonard Ravenhill
#93. I agree with the idea that there is a separation of church and state. That teachers should not be leading prayer - a particular kind of prayer in classrooms.
Ken Buck
#94. People in the church should not accept the notion that the public square is off limits to religious values.
Lloyd Billingsley
#95. I did not grow up in the church. I'm not a church-goer now. I'm a very spiritual person.
Malcolm D. Lee
#96. Since the baptismal rebirth takes place only with the one Bride of Christ, where could he be born who is not a son of the Church?
Cyprian
#97. Photography is, and has been since its conception, a fabulously broad church. Contemporary practice demonstrates that the medium can be a prompt, a process, a vehicle, a collective pursuit, and not just the physical end product of solitary artists' endeavors.
Charlotte Cotton
#98. As humanism begins to dominate the state, the consequence is complete hostile annexation of the church or persecution by separation. Religion is then removed from the marketplace and the school, later from other domains of public life. The state will not toerlate any gods besides itself.
Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn
#99. It's not how high we jump off our feet in church, it's what we do with them when we hit the ground!
Tom Ridge
#100. Jesus did not come to strike a balance between grace and truth. He brought the full measure of both ... It's easy to create an all-truth church model. It may be even easier to create an all-grace model, but Jesus didn't leave either option on the table.
Andy Stanley
