Top 100 Quotes About Being The Church
#1. Church begins with Jesus: who He is and what He has done. It is all about Jesus, and if it begins
to be about something else, then it stops being the church as Jesus meant it to be.
Neil Cole
#2. When Lafayette met him in 1775, the first volume of Raynal's 1770 History of the Two Indies had already been banned, which is to say it was a popular success, the Catholic Church's Index of Forbidden Books being the unofficial bestseller list of the day.
Sarah Vowell
#3. Within my hearing you have spoken of the beauty of this small city. How standing inside the stained-glass confection of the old church was like being imprisoned inside a kaleidoscope of jewels. It was like being in the heart of the sun.
Neil Gaiman
#4. I grew up in church. My mom's a minister, and my grandmother was an ordained minister. I was always very mindful of the presence of a greater being I call God.
Mahershala Ali
#5. I grew up in the Baptist Church, and going to church with my father; I remember being 8 years old, trying to determine whether I was really ready to give up sin, and for days I agonized.
Oprah Winfrey
#6. Theres a lot of churches that hide their dirty laundry under the rug, and I know about that from being in the church 27 years. Oh, yeah.
Al Green
#7. The imminent demise of the church has been predicted since the middle of the 18th century. This is the regular secular mantra if churchgoing declines. I could take you to plenty of churches that are full to bursting and new churches being built.
N. T. Wright
#8. The silence of those in positions of influence in the church who know, or have a strong suspicion, that being gay is a nonpathological minority variant in the human condition drives me crazy, far crazier than I am driven by any loud-mouthed purveyor of hateful nonsense.
James Alison
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. I was raised Catholic and I went to church until I was 16. I went through a phase when I was 15 of being quite fanatically Catholic. I was going to church a lot, receiving communion, saying the Rosary, praying, all that stuff. But when I started scrutinizing it, it just fell apart so quickly.
Robert Crumb
#12. I don't want to lose the awe we get to help another human being.
Francis Chan
#13. Country music is basically one-third a part of Southern blood, the other two being church and sweet tea.
Eve Jagger
#14. The Church is or should go back to being a community of God's people, and priests, pastors and bishops, who have the care of souls, are at the service of the people of God.
Pope Francis
#15. A church that does not provoke any crisis, preach a gospel that does not unsettle, proclaim a word of God
that does not get under anyone's skin or a word of God that does not touch the real sin of the society in which
it is being proclaimed: what kind of gospel is that?
Oscar A. Romero
#16. Under pressure, people admit to murder, setting fire to the village church or robbing a bank, but never to being bores.
Elsa Maxwell
#17. The truth is there's always been someone to tell me what to do. The church. The people who I work for. The caseworker. And I can't stand the idea of being alone. I can't bear the thought of being free.
Survivor
Chuck Palahniuk
#18. Our culture doesn't like being told what to do; that's happening in the Church.
Mike Pilavachi
#19. The blues to me is like being very sad, very sick, going to church, being very happy ... it's sort of a mixed up thing. You just have to feel it.
Billie Holiday
#20. I've been stuck on John Eldredge lately. He's all about being a warrior outside of the church. I hate to think about this kind of stuff - I just like to do it.
John Tesh
#21. The dismembering of a human being routinely in 30 minutes on an outpatient bases - or any other way - is barbaric. Four blocks from our church all year long - like churches within smelling distance of Auschwitz or Dachau or Buchenwald.
John Piper
#22. Close examination of the evidence shows that the poor were being included in private education, and only those who did not want to go to school were missing out. There was no need for public school except as a tool to undermine the church's influence in education.
Gregg Harris
#23. I am being a minister of light and a destroyer of ignorance and I shall never keep quiet until this horrendous mountain is pulled down in my country, in the church of Christ and in my continent.
Sunday Adelaja
#24. Instead of being just a church that welcomes and receives by keeping the doors open, let us try also to be a church that finds new roads, that is able to step outside itself and go to those who do not attend Mass, to those who have quit or are indifferent.
Pope Francis
#25. I'm not practising, I don't go to church, but what I got from it was a sense of belonging to something bigger. What I really miss is being forced to be in a community with people that aren't the same as you. Then, you really have to work through the ways that you're different.
Win Butler
#26. Preaching the whole council of God involves man's environment and physical being as well as his soul. There is no doubt that the church is in danger of getting off the main track and getting lost.
Billy Graham
#27. Anybody who had come up with a new concept would have been under suspicion for being out of step with the tradition or out of step with the teachings of the church.
John Templeton
#28. This is what the Church is all about. It is a redemptive fellowship of forgiven sinners who are in the slow, difficult process of being transformed into saints by the grace of God.
Stanley S. Harakas
#29. My whole damn family was nice. I don't think I've imagined it. It's true. Maybe it has to do with being brought up as Christian Scientists. Half of my relatives were Readers or Practitioners in the church.
Henry Fonda
#30. Will-, Tessa began but it was too late, Church made a yowling noise at being woken, and lashed out with his claws. Will began to swear. Tessa left, unable to hide the slightest of smiles as she went.
Cassandra Clare
#31. There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being.
James Joyce
#32. The closing period of the fifteenth century witnessed the slow but sure increase of the churches of the Brethren. Although far from being unmolested, they yet enjoyed comparative rest. At the commencement of the sixteenth century their churches numbered two hundred in Bohemia and Moravia.
Ezra Hall Gillett
#33. God tells me that I need to provide for my family, discipline and teach my children, and love my wife as Christ loves the church. If I don't do that, I'm being unfaithful and sinful.
Kevin DeYoung
#34. The Church at its best is about empowering the disempowered and giving voice to the dispossessed and not putting a price on everything and not being about the bottom line and not worshipping the market or everything that is material.
Steve Coogan
#35. The true well-being of the church: when she cannot count on anything anymore but God's promises.
-Johannes Hoekendijk
Neil Cole
#36. The church is called to embody the boundless love of God by being a community of radical welcome to all God's children.
Alexia Salvatierra
#37. An all-loving god would surely not damn his children to an eternity of torture simply for being born into a culture that believes in the wrong deity, follows the wrong holy book or attends the wrong type of church services.
Armin Navabi
#38. As a self-described Guadalupe girl, Lupe was sensitive to Guadalupe being overshadowed by the "Mary Monster." Lupe not only meant that Mary was the most dominant of the Catholic Church's "stable" of virgins; Lupe believed that the Virgin Mary was also "a domineering virgin.
John Irving
#39. Distance does not decide who is your brother and who is not. The church is going to have to become the conscience of the free market if it's to have any meaning in this world - and stop being its apologist.
Bono
#41. We must re-grasp the idea of church membership as being the membership of the body of Christ and as the biggest honour which can come man's way in this world.
David Lloyd-Jones
#42. many religious folks call a "spiritual hospital" (church) for the "spiritually sick," usually ends up being a place where everyone looks healthy? So instead of being a place where we can "be ourselves," the church usually ends up being a place where we pretend everything is okay.
Joshua Tongol
#43. No church is perfect, but don't let that discourage you. Someone has said that if you ever find one that is, it will stop being perfect the minute you join!
Billy Graham
#44. By operating independently of government aid, the churches ... avoid the resentment of those who do not want to be forced to contribute to churches to which they do not belong and of their own members who do not welcome being forced to contribute through government taxation.
John M Swomley
#45. The funny thing about being Catholic, and I was raised Catholic, is that you identify with the Church, just as part of your character. Nevermind what you believe, it's just who you are.
Alex Gibney
#46. I was brought up as a Catholic and went to church every week and took the sacraments. It never really touched the core of my being.
Sting
#47. The miracles of the church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.
Willa Cather
#48. I would like to suggest that what my accusers have been pleased to call the peace of the Church is more properly called the sleepiness of the Church and we should be thankful to God that it has been disturbed.
Lloyd Geering
#49. You sang in church, you know, and you didn't act at all. You tried not to act, you tried to tell the truth. The idea of being a troubadour on the road singing for your supper was very disturbing to him.
James Earl Jones
#50. Anxious systems also fail to get a clear view of things. Embedded in their dread, they lose a sense of proportion. They have little awareness of what is happening and how it is being mutually maintained. Emotionally cramps the broader view.
Peter L. Steinke
#51. The church is not to be judged by how useful we are as a "supportive institution" and our clergy as members of a "helping profession". The church has its own reason for being, hid within its own mandate and not found in the world. We are not chartered by the Emperor.
Stanley Hauerwas
#52. I was astonished to learn in one of these best-selling books (on church life) that the size of my church parking lot had far more to do with how things fared in my congregation than my choice of texts in preaching. I was being lied to and I knew it.
Eugene H. Peterson
#53. Many of the girls wear simple dresses to church. We do not make a point of 'dressing up,' nor do we study one another to see what is being worn. Nor does God. It's our hearts He views as we enter the doors to His church. Not our clothing.
Janette Oke
#54. If all you are doing is spending time with the struggling members of your church and you are not building proactively into your church's culture, and you are being shortsighted and limiting the effectiveness of your ministry.
James MacDonald
#55. There's a natural point in the development of any religion where the prophet becomes first a nuisance and then a positive liability. Just imagine Jesus walking into an evangelical church while the collection plate was being passed around
Adrian Barnes
#56. My first memories of religion were being taken to Episcopal church. My father was Catholic, but my mother, I believe, was Episcopal. So I sort of veered off into the watered-down version of Catholicism.
Marilyn Manson
#57. Faith cannot be inherited or gained by being baptized into a Church. Faith is a matter between the individual and God.
Martin Luther
#58. 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
#59. It is solely the form of Christ that matters, not any form besides Christ's own. The church is the human being who has become human, has been judged, and has been awakened to new life in Christ.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
#60. Rome has seven sacraments, but the Protestant churches, being less prosperous, feel that they can afford only two, and these of inferior sanctity.
Ambrose Bierce
#61. I would just as soon have abused the old village church at home for not being a cathedral.
Joseph Conrad
#62. There are certain times in a concert when I'll call an audible because I feel like God is calling me to play a different song. But truthfully, I feel called to play for the church whether it's song being played on Christian radio or it's concerts I'm doing primarily in churches.
Jonny Diaz
#63. I thought being a Christian was about following rules and going to church and being good all the time, but this girl helped me understand that it's about having a relationship with God. That was where things shifted for me.
Kelly Clark
#64. Today I ask you in the name of Christ and the Church, never tire of being merciful.
Pope Francis
#65. Sometimes we encourage someone without even being aware of it. Even the example we set by attending church may encourage someone who is searching for God.
Billy Graham
#66. The difference between us and the one being disciplined by the church is not that we're not all sinners...but that we repent of our sin and he doesn't...we take God's side against our own sin
John Kent Folmar
#67. The casket sat in the front of the church, open to all. I didn't look. Whoever was there wan't Jules. Jules was at the ocean now, being a seagull. Dancing. And free.
Davida Wills Hurwin
#68. One couple described the effects as being, "dated hard, married quick, and then ignored." They got into church alright, but the church never got into them; they were let in easily enough, but they never felt they were counted on.
Sue Mallory
#69. Like you, I'm figuring out how to walk with Christ into my day, into Target, into church, into the kitchen, and most importantly, into the lives of other people. Christ doesn't stop being relevant just because I'm standing at my sink, cleaning out my closet, meeting over coffee, driving to the bank.
Emily P. Freeman
#70. Christianity is being concerned about [others], not building a million-dollar church while people are starving right around the corner. Christ was a revolutionary person, out there where it was happening. That's what God is all about, and that's where I get my strength.
Fannie Lou Hamer
#71. As a former Catholic, and as someone who even today is not opposed to being called a Christian, I felt I had every right to use the symbols of the Church and resented being told not to.
Andres Serrano
#72. I catch your eye. I, who had been thinking myself so vast, a temple, a church, a whole universe, confined and capable of being everywhere on the verge of things and here too, am now nothing but what you see.
Virginia Woolf
#73. I say to you Baptists, "Go on being good Baptists, thinking that you are more right than anybody else." Unless you think it, I have no use for you at all. The Church of England does precisely the same itself.
Geoffrey Fisher
#74. I think my election is one of several indications that gay and lesbian folk are being brought more into the center of things. I'd like to think that my election signals my bringing of gay and lesbian folk into the center of the church.
Gene Robinson
#76. Because Scientology is perceived and conceived by Scientologists as being this salvation for mankind, you can have people that lie with a very straight face if they believe that what they are doing is protecting the Church of Scientology.
Mike Rinder
#77. From the time I can remember my mother kept me in church. I think my first recollection of any place, being anywhere was in a church.
Teddy Pendergrass
#78. Being accepted by the world is the worst thing that can happen to the Church.
Michael L. Brown
#79. 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.
Eugene H. Peterson
#80. The church would betray its own love for God and its fidelity to the gospel if it stopped being ... a defender of the rights of the poor ... a humanizer of every legitimate struggle to achieve a more just society ... that prepares the way for the true reign of God in history.
Oscar Romero
#81. When table utensils were invented in the 1100s, the Catholic Church condemned them as obscene and heretical, claiming, 'God gave us fingers with which to eat.' And we're supposed to get politically discouraged? Oh please. We're being opposed by people who denounced the fork.
Robin Morgan
#82. Gentlemen, no one objects to the husband being the head of the wife as Christ was the head of the church
to crucify himself; whatwe object to is his crucifying his wife.
Susan B. Anthony
#83. Faith can be stirred within the walls of church buildings, but faith is formed and nourished in the waiting rooms of hospitals, helplessly witnessing a thirty-one-year-old sister suffer, holding kids affected by the AIDS epidemic, and being stretched outside of our own social makeup.
Josh Ross
#84. The Catholic Church is the only thing which saves a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age
G.K. Chesterton
#85. Those of us who believe in the right of any human being to belong to whatever church he sees fit, and to worship God in his own way, cannot be accused of prejudice when we do not want to see public education connected with religious control of the schools, which are paid for by taxpayers' money.
Eleanor Roosevelt
#86. Instead we have a tradition of common prayer, a general commitment to the well-being of all, including nonmembers of the church, and a desire to seek a faith that can be shared by people of a wide diversity of
Samuel Wells
#87. I know one gay ex-Mormon who is a talented, self-destructive alcoholic. Whenever he is drunk and going on a tear, we are back to the Mormon Church and his being thrown out of the Mormon Church and growing up with this sense of being evil.
Andrew Solomon
#88. Being a member of a church means so much more than standing next to someone else and singing some songs once a week. Being a member of a church means realizing that we are responsible for helping the brothers and sisters around us to grow as disciples of Jesus.
David Platt
#89. For a Christian to be a Christian, he must first be a sinner. Being a sinner is a prerequisite for being a church member. The Christian church is one of the few organizations in the world that requires a public acknowledgement of sin as a condition for membership.
R.C. Sproul
#90. 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
#91. Each woman brings her own separate, unique strengths to the family and the Church. Being a daughter of God means that if you seek it, you can find your true identity.
James E. Faust
#92. Anybody body can be a Church goer, but there is a difference of "GOD" being in them then they being in the WORLD.
Henry Johnson Jr
#93. 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.
Bill McCartney
#94. Being raised as an active member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, The Mormons, I became an Eagle scout, and after graduating high school, I went on a full-time church mission to the West Indies for 2 years.
Shay Carl
#95. To glorify God is not just to do so in religious worship, singing praise and enacting the traditional rites of the church. To glorify God is to reveal his character by being who we were created to be-the embodiment of the image of God in human form.
James W. Sire
#96. Any of us can be happy and have a good attitude when everything is going our way. But I believe it's the real test of your character and of your faith to say, 'Things are not going our way, but I'm still being good to people; I'm still attending church; I still have a good attitude.'
Joel Osteen
#97. They sounded like intestines, only on the outside, and the men in the Bible were always having them cut off and not being able to go to church. Horrid.
Jeanette Winterson
#98. My dear,' said the old men gently, 'I think that you are repeating what you have heard older people say. You are pretending to be touchy; but you are not really. Stop being so tiresome, and tell me instead what part of the church you want to see. To take you to it will be a real pleasure.
E. M. Forster
#99. We are being called to a new and deeper passion: to those who live under the shadow of the cross and those most in need of compassion. Then we become mothers of God, sisters and brothers of Jesus, the loved disciples born in the blood of the Cross and fed on the Word of God.
Megan McKenna
#100. The great end of being is to harmonize man with the order of things, and the church has been a good pitch-pipe, and may be so still.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
