Quotes About Church Congregations

#1. I'm tied of hearing about temperance instead of abstinence, in order to please the cocktail crowd in church congregations.

Vance Havner

#2. I go farther, and say, that it is plainly our duty to desire pastors and teachers to take the care of such congregations, and that God did raise up such in the church as we see it in the word.

John Nelson Darby

#3. The more members of the clergy that are out there working to expand their congregations, the more people will go to church.

Rodney Stark

#4. I gave up writing blurbs because you make one friend and 200 enemies.

Leslie Fiedler

#5. In a team setting, leadership is shared by a community of people, which counters the tendency for pastors to form congregations in their own images.

Adam S. McHugh

#6. The Church, during the apostolic age, did not consist of isolated, independent congregations, but was one body, of which the separate churches were constituent members, each subject to all the rest, or to an authority which extended over all.

Charles Hodge

#7. The panorama-city is a 'theoretical' (that is, visual) simulacrum, in short a picture, whose condition of possibility is an oblivion and a misunderstanding of practices.

Michel De Certeau

#8. I would love to see churches start using their Web sites to present video profiles of people within their congregations so that the average person could get a sense of what the life of the church (not the organization, but the people - the true church) is really like.

Frank Minis Johnson

#9. I wish I could turn to the church for help, but so many congregations are preoccupied with keeping the lights on right now that the last thing they want to talk about is how to befriend the dark.

Barbara Brown Taylor

#10. Old churches must not simply stand as monuments to the past but as spiritual grandparents that have invested in the future by passing on their life to others and releasing their offspring to form new congregations. Church planting needs to be given priority by old-line denominations.

Eddie Gibbs

#11. Don't dwell on sadness. Joy will take you where you want to go.

Bryant McGill

#12. Defining a mono-racial church as one that has more than 80 percent of its membership consisting of a single racial group, nearly nine in ten (86 percent) congregations, which account for 80 percent of churchgoers, remain essentially mono-racial.46

Robert P. Jones

#13. 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

#14. There is real value in these local congregations. For me, a lot of it is the value of the sacraments we share. In neighborhoods like ours, the churches provide stability.

Shane Claiborne

#15. I am suggesting that congregations across America are weak because many of us church members have lost the biblical understanding of what it means to be a part of the body of Christ.

Thom S. Rainer

#16. Christian proclamation might make the gospel audible, but Christians living together in local congregations make the gospel visible (see John 13:34-35). The church is the gospel made visible.

Mark Dever

#17. I was also a big Woody Allen fan. When I got into college I listened to Lenny Bruce but it's taken me years to put him into context historically and really get what he did.

Marc Maron

#18. The church can proscribe anything and everything it wants to, but the church is still made up entirely of human beings. Heaping rule upon rule on our congregations isn't going to make anyone holier. It'll serve only to add to the guilt that is endemic in our churches.

Tiffany Reisz

#19. You belong neither to God nor the state nor me. You belong to yourself and no one else.

Oriana Fallaci

#20. Much of the conflict occurring in congregations is caused when a church calls a pastor whose gifts and passion do not match what the church has been in the past.

Rick Warren

#21. Religious experience, as we have studied it, cannot be cited as unequivocally supporting the infinitist belief. The only thingthat it unequivocally testifies to is that we can experience union with something larger than ourselves and in that union find our greatest peace.

William James