Early Church Quotes

#1. Much of today's church relies more on a book the early church didn't have, than the Holy Spirit they did.

Bill Johnson

#2. 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

#3. We need to pledge ourselves anew to the cause of Christ. We must capture the spirit of the early church. Wherever the early Christians went, they made a triumphant witness for Christ. Whether on the village streets or in the city jails, they daringly proclaimed the good news of the gospel.

Martin Luther

#4. I want people to help me reanchor the church to undeniable, mind-boggling, culture-shifting demonstration of compassion and generosity. Because, generosity was the hallmark of the early church.

Andy Stanley

#5. The early church braved the sword to gather with God's people, and Christians in our day will hardly brave the rain. That's a problem - one that's bigger than church attendance. This is a love-for-Jesus problem. How we treat his bride equals how we treat him.

J.A. Medders

#6. The early Church had nothing but the Old Testament. The New Testament lies hidden in the Old; the Old Testament lies open in the New.

Randall Terry

#7. We sometimes idealize the early church and want our churches to go back to the simple, old ways. We need to carefully read the history. Harmony takes work.

Jerry B. Jenkins

#8. There is not much we can say with absolute confidence about the early church, but we can be fairly sure that the first Christians would not have dreamed of making a likeness of Jesus.

Neil MacGregor

#9. In early church polemics, Jews are deemed no longer worthy of their own Scriptures because they have failed to accept Christ as the Messiah.

Jack Schwartz

#10. Never was the victory of patience more complete than in the early church. The anvil broke the hammer by bearing all the blows that the hammer could place upon it. The patience of the saints was stronger than the cruelty of tyrants.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

#11. The early church was married to poverty, prisons and persecutions. Today, the church is married to prosperity, personality, and popularity.

Leonard Ravenhill

#12. I think people are transient. Back in the early church, there was a 'stick and stay' mentality. In this day and time, people have a fast food mentality of ministry. If it doesn't fit them or if it doesn't fit in their schedule, they'll move on to something else. That's a norm in today's time.

Marvin Sapp

#13. Today, on our own turf, we face pagan ignorance about God every bit as deep as that which the early church faced in the Roman Empire.

J.I. Packer

#14. Abortion is without a doubt one of the greatest moral evils within modernity. As the "Advocate of Christian Memory," a pope must take up the mantle of defending the culture of life - a defense the Early Church held against the pagans of Rome.

Pope Francis

#15. When the early Church recited the Apostles Creed, it was simultaneously their greatest act of rebellion, and their greatest act of submission.

Matt Chandler

#16. The more we study the early Church, the more we realize that it was a society of ministers. About the only similarity between the Church at Corinth and a contemporary congregation, either Roman Catholic or Protestant, is that both are marked, to a great degree, by the presence of sinners.

D. Elton Trueblood

#17. Certain things happened in the early church. Women who had never had any freedom suddenly have the ability to stand up and speak and be treated as equals within the life of the church.

Tony Campolo

#18. I had always owned them to be the Word of God ... the careful reading of the Acts afforded me a practical picture of the early church; which made me feel deeply the contrast with its actual present state; though still, as ever beloved by God.

John Nelson Darby

#19. As the early church fathers delighted in saying, Christ took what was ours so that we might receive what was His.

Sinclair B. Ferguson

#20. Some have immersed themselves in internet materials that magnify, exaggerate, and in some cases invent shortcomings of early Church leaders. Then they draw incorrect conclusions that can affect testimony. Any who have made these choices can repent and be spiritually renewed.

Quentin L. Cook

#21. Saints of the early church reaped great harvests in the field of prayer and found the mercy seat to be a mine of untold treasures.

Charles Spurgeon

#22. The early Church was birthed and sustained in almost constant persecution and pressures

Greg Gordon

#23. The Bible does not authorize us, either by the words of the Lord or His apostles, to believe that the gifts of healing were granted only to the early church;

Andrew Murray

#24. How can we have revival when we value a book the early Church didn't have over the Holy Spirit they did have?

Kris Vallotton

#25. If the church of today does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authentic ring, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#26. Women are the first witnesses to the resurrection and pillars of the early church.

John Ortberg

#27. That is the power of the Eucharist. At the communion table you have rich and poor together in the early church and they were being challenged.

Shane Claiborne

#28. The choice for the early church was clear: either Jesus was just another failed messiah, or what the Jews of Jesus's time expected of the messiah was wrong and had to be adjusted

Reza Aslan

#29. It was a real surprise to me to come across the evidence that Christianity might once have been a danced religion. Certainly, some of the early church leaders thought this was great and spoke of what seems to have been circle dancing, perhaps around an altar.

Barbara Ehrenreich

#30. Nowhere in the Word of God is there any text or passage or line that can be twisted or tortured into teaching that the organic living church of Jesus Christ just prior to His return will not have every right and every power and every obligation that she knew in that early part of the book of Acts.

Aiden Wilson Tozer

#31. In my twenties, I was determined to change the world. In my thirties, I tried to transform the church. In my early forties, I discovered I was the problem.

Jeff Iorg

#32. There has always been a certain proportion of people who leave the Church on issues of authority and sex. That hasn't changed since we started doing research on it back in the early 1960s.

Andrew Greeley

#33. The early doctrines of the church, even doctrines like Trinity and Incarnation were originally also calls for action, calls for selflessness, calls for compassion, and unless you live that out compassionately, selflessly, you didn't understand what the doctrine was saying.

Karen Armstrong

#34. Early man recognised these lines of force and marked them out on the landscape with, well, any old thing, really standing stones, ditches, mounds, tumps, sacred wells, and that sort of thing. And, later on, with churches, market crosses, crossroads, and whatnot.

Stephen R. Lawhead

#35. Roger Williams died sometime during the early months of 1683. Some of what he said and wrote during his lifetime belongs to the seventeenth century. But much of his historical and philosophical record speaks to us across the centuries.

Alan E. Johnson

#36. What time do we start?" I resisted the urge to grin. "Show up at the New Living Hope Revival Church at ten tomorrow morning." His eyes flew open. "Ten? That early?" "Half the world's awake by ten, and the other half is sleeping in China.

Denise Grover Swank

#37. How the early priests came into possession of these secrets does not appear, and if there were ever any records of this kind the Church would hardly allow them to become public.

Harry Houdini

#38. born on a early Sunday morning in August, 1960. A church baby

Kathryn Stockett

#39. [ ... ] while I felt that the Marxist attitude towards their theory was not at all admirable but was typically dogmatic and had all these properties which the Marxists usually said were characteristic of the churches. So I realized fairly early that Marxism was more of a church than of a science.

Karl Popper

#40. A great reformation and revival-it will happen the same way the early Christians conquered Rome. Their program of conquest consisted largely of two elements: gospel preaching and being eaten by lions, a strategy that has not yet captured the imagination of the the contemporary church.

Douglas Wilson

#41. At ten minutes before eleven, Lanie slipped into her usual pew at Christ Episcopal Church. At least she hoped it was her pew. People could get pretty persnickety if you took their seat, and she usually came to early service.

Alicia Hunter Pace

#42. The rabbit was not domesticated until early medieval times (it was bred by French monks in the belief that newborn bunnies were fish and therefore exempt from the prohibitions against eating meat on certain days in the Church calendar);

Carl Sagan

#43. The apostolic church thought more about the Second Coming of Jesus Christ than about death and heaven. The early Christians were looking, not for a cleft in the ground called a grave but for a cleavage in the sky called Glory.

Alexander MacLaren

#44. Our New Testament text of today is a reconstructed or restored text. It has been reconstructed by modern scholarship from three independent lines of witnesses: the manuscripts, the versions, and the writings of early Christians (Church Fathers). In

Neil R. Lightfoot

#45. When the early Jerusalem church members devoted themselves to prayer, they were doing a lot more than reading names off a list. They were fervent, intense, and passionate about prayer.

Thom S. Rainer

#46. From the steady opposition which faithful Friends in early times made to wrong things then approved, they were hated and persecuted by men living in the spirit of this world, and suffering with firmness, they were made a blessing to the Church, and the work prospered.

John Woolman

#47. No one can have God for his Father, who has not the Church for his mother.

Cyprian

#48. With the early Christians you couldn't have God as your father unless you have the church as your mother. This isn't accepting the church as a perfect thing.

Shane Claiborne

#49. The worlds of folklore and religion were so mingled in early twentieth venture German culture that even families who didn't go to church were often deeply Christian.

Eric Metaxas

#50. One of the characteristics of early modern thought was a tendency to assume binary contrasts. In an attempt to define phenomena more exactly, categories of experience that had once co-inhered were now set off against each other: faith and reason, intellect and emotion, and church and state.

Karen Armstrong

#51. In the early days of the Mormon Church, stewardship toward the land was a priority. It was a matter of survival in the desert.

Terry Tempest Williams

#52. Says one brother to another, 'Joseph says all covenants are done away, and none are binding but the new covenants; now suppose Joseph should come and say he wanted your wife, what would you say to that? I would tell him to go to hell.' This was the spirit of many in the early days of this Church ...

Jedediah M. Grant

#53. I was brought up Catholic and know the stench of the Catholic Church. I moved away from religion early, but the impression remains.

Gunter Grass

#54. I was in a church choir early on and that really helped me musically in terms of chops, learning how to sing harmonies.

Emily Saliers

#55. No wild beasts are so deadly to humans as most Christians are to each other.

Ammianus Marcellinus

#56. The early Christians rejoiced when they were deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the Church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles o popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#57. The African American's relationship to Africa has long been ambivalent, at least since the early nineteenth century, when 3,000 black men crowded into Bishop Richard Allen's African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia to protest noisily a plan to recolonize free blacks in Africa.

Henry Louis Gates

#58. Each of our children during their high school years went to 'early morning seminary' - scripture study classes that met in the home of a church member every school day morning from 6:30 until 7:15.

Clayton Christensen

#59. I understood at a very early age that in nature, I felt everything I should feel in church but never did. Walking in the woods, I felt in touch with the universe and with the spirit of the universe.

Alice Walker

#60. We had a few calls saying election precincts had closed early. But it turned out that the callers were in the wrong places. Some people went to the old locations of a church, rather than the new one. We called the polling locations as well as the church pastor and they verified they were still open.

Jane Anderson

#61. 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.

Sue Monk Kidd

#62. I was raised in a working class family of Baptist faith, and I went to college on a church scholarship where early teachings were reinforced. Abortion was wrong, I was taught.

Dick Gephardt

#63. Religion triggers a lot of emotions in me, most of which stem from being raised Jewish in a very Baptist community in the South. I didn't believe any of it from an early age - the clubby quality of whatever religion or church you belonged to, Judaism included. It just struck me as foolish.

David Cross

#64. 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

#65. The loss of psalmody in the church is one of the early indicators of the loss of faith.

Kevin Swanson

#66. Several congregations had received permission to build churches before Danzig Mennonites were permitted to do so. Thus, in the village of Montau in the vicinity of Kulm, Mennonites were allowed to build their first church in the Vistula valley as early as 1586.8

Peter J. Klassen

#67. Cyril, church warden and lead tenor in the choir, lives with mother, banned from unsupervised contact with schoolchildren; Harold, drunk dentist, early retirement, pretty thatched cottage off the Bodmin road, one son in rehab, wife in the bin.

John Le Carre

#68. I was raised on a farm in Kansas where we lived next door to my Grandma Dew, and I was her shadow. We went everywhere together - to the bank, the doctor, the Early Bird Garden Club, and to an endless procession of Church meetings.

Sheri L. Dew

#69. 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

Dietrich Bonhoeffer