Institutional Church Quotes

#1. The Institutional Church (ecclesia) has killed only two kinds of people: Those who do not believe in the teachings of Jesus Christ, and those who do.

Will Durant

#2. Unless the church quickly recovers the authoritative biblical message, we may witness the spectacle of millions of Christians going outside the institutional church to find spiritual food.

Billy Graham

#3. I believe that that foolish man of Galilee, Jesus Christ, had something to tell us, to tell me. Not considering his existence here, I would immediately go into despair. Immediately. And forgetting him, I would first despair of the institutional church and its hierarchy, and only later, of the Jews.

Elias Chacour

#4. Certainly the institutional church is ill. It's hemorrhaging young people at an astronomical rate.

Shane Claiborne

#5. How ignorant can you be to hurt another person? You cannot hurt someone else without hurting yourself first.

Debasish Mridha

#6. Every human being must have a point at which he stands against the culture, where he says, this is me and the damned world can go to hell.

Rollo May

#7. Be the Church - that is, be an evangelical movement that tells the world of God's passionate love for humanity. That, not institutional maintenance, is what the Church is for. When the Church is that, and does that, it flourishes ...

George Weigel

#8. Let's face it: There are people who are extremists in every corner of society, and whatever flag they're waving is something Bad Religion has stood against.

Greg Graffin

#9. The 'relative' delights the mind (manoranjan), the 'real' delights the Self (the soul, atmaranjan).

Dada Bhagwan

#10. I was born in Swansea in the Principality of Wales in September 1934 and named Clive William John Granger. The 'William John' names were traditional Granger boy's names, and my mother liked the name Clive because some popular musician at the time had it.

Clive Granger

#11. The church may update its techniques and methods, but it is always in service of the institutional organism. This is one of the reasons why the pedophile priest issue is and will remain an endemic disease in the Catholic Church.

Darrel Ray

#12. The author chuckles at the resistance to using a prepared, written liturgy in prayer. He compares it to being unwilling to dress in any clothing we did not make ourselves, or being unwilling to drive a car we did not construct entirely by ourselves.

N. T. Wright

#13. What, the glass is half-full instead of half-empty? Bullshit. What they don't tell you is that regardless of how full the glass is, it's filled with acid, and you'll burn your face off.

T.J. Klune

#14. I'd much rather play the psycho than the pretty girl in hot pants.

Cush Jumbo

#15. You have to do more than just kill time or time will quickly kill you.

Joan Rivers

#16. 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.

C.S. Lewis

#17. But James is my north now. The flames are my north now. Our dark secrets are my north now.

Kiersten White

#18. When you are growing up there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully: the church, which belongs to God, and the public library, which belongs to you.

Keith Richards

#19. Where there is deception there is no relationship.

Henry Cloud

#20. As I look back at the span of the Cold War in those early days, in the '50s, for example, there was a great deal of Soviet propaganda here in the United States, but it was clumsy, and it was anchored to a lot of ideological support in certain circles in America itself.

Alexander Haig

#21. I fear the carnival of crime is beginning on our border.

Edward Blake

#22. 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

#23. 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