Quotes About Church History

#1. Sit peacefully in a church and think of church history: witchburning perhaps, or child abuse, genocide, the amassing of disgusting wealth, the repression of women, inquisitions, castrating child choir singers, the denial of Santa Claus and the support of fascists in power.

Kaz Cooke

#2. Over the years, I have studied church history as well as the contemporary church, and I noticed how rare it is for a God-glorifying transition of leadership to take place in a local church.

C.J. Mahaney

#3. Church history has repeatedly and clearly proven one thing: Once the highest view of Scripture is abandoned by any theologian, group, denomination, or church, the downhill slide in both its theology and practice is inevitable.

James R. White

#4. And yet, you do not throw out some of the great minds of the Church - and people in Church history - and say they have no credibility because they committed a sin or made a mistake.

Walter Martin

#5. I'm sick and tired of (only) reading about church history; let's make (some) by the grace of God

Leonard Ravenhill

#6. You can latch onto theological ideas that are, in fact, not accurate, and refuse to let them go. I think we've seen this a few times in church history.

Frederica Mathewes-Green

#7. For every Gospel action, there is an opposite and devious demonic reaction. We see this in the book of Acts. It appears in church history. We experience it in our personal journeys.

Daniel Henderson

#8. The resurrection of Christ from the dead, next to the Crucifixion itself, is the most significant event in church history. It isn't a peripheral issue; it's foundational. It's bedrock. It's the bottom line.

Greg Laurie

#9. It's obvious throughout secular and church history that significant legislation follows only after dramatic action.

Carter Heyward

#10. The doctrines known as Calvinism are not something that emerged late in church history, but rather are that which takes its origins in the teachings of Jesus.1 - James Montgomery Boice

Steven J. Lawson

#11. And we find from Church history that the primitive Christians thus understood it; for that women did actually speak and preach amongst them we have indisputable proof.

Catherine Booth

#12. There is a temptation for the writer or the teacher of church history to want to tell everything, whether it is worthy or faith promoting or not. Some things that are true are not very useful.

Boyd K. Packer

#13. According to Scripture, the invisible church includes everyone who has ever been genuinely born again for every age of church history. This church will not meet in a visible way until Christ returns. The visible church consists of believers who are alive and meeting together right now.

Wayne Mack

#14. If Church history teaches us anything, it is that we cannot afford to be a vacillating Church. We minister to a people who are in great need of hearing truth, we dare not make any attempt to soft pedal that glorious truth.

Martin Luther

#15. I don't know why Christians keep fighting over which is better-singleness or marriage-when it seems rather obvious, both from Scripture and from Church history, that both can glorify God.

Rachel Held Evans

#16. Church History is the record of God's gracious, wonderful and mighty deeds, showing how by his Spirit and Word he rules his Church and conquers the world.

Nils Forsander

#17. The American people need no course in philosophy or political science of church history to know that God should not be made into a celestial party chairman.

Mario Cuomo

#18. Overall, knowledge of Scripture, doctrine, and church history is poor among most Christians, not just young adult believers.

David Kinnaman

#19. From the beginning of church history, music, writing, literature, and the greatest works of art all came from the church. To change the culture and make it a force for good, you have to be in it and be a part of it.

Patricia Heaton

#20. There have been more people saved in the past twenty, thirty, or forty years around the world than at any other time in recorded church history.

Michael Brown

#21. 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

#22. Art is History's nostalgia, it prefers a thatched roof to a concrete factory, and the huge church above a bleached village.

Derek Walcott

#23. By the time I was about ten, I had started to lose faith with church ways. I was educated in some ways by my high school government and history teachers.

Ronee Blakley

#24. 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

#25. During the settling of the American colonies, it was said that the Spaniards would first build a church, the Dutch would first build a fort and the English a tavern. Welcome to Charleston, an English colony founded in 1670.

Mark R. Jones

#26. America and Western Europe are on a moneymaking, pleasure-mad spree unparalleled in the history of the world. God is generally ignored or ridiculed. Church members in many cases are only halfhearted Christians. Judgment is coming.

Billy Graham

#27. The Bible nowhere teaches that the church will ultimately convert the whole world to Jesus Christ. There has never been a generation in history, nor will there ever be generation, in which the majority of the people will believe in Christ.

Billy Graham

#28. Whatever the reason, the fact is that there was no widespread catechetical teaching for Christian children. Things were going to change. The growing awareness of the need for Christian education was one of the chief forces behind the desire in the sixteenth century to reform the rite of baptism.

Hughes Oliphant Old

#29. Wilmington, Del. (AP) June 14, 1966 - A fire that destroyed the city's oldest Negro church has led to the discovery of a wild slave narrative that highlights a little-known era of American history. The First United

James McBride

#30. No time in history has the Church of Jesus Christ gone down!

Loren Cunningham

#31. The history of the Church of Christ from the days of the Apostles has been a history of spiritual movements.

Henry Parry Liddon

#32. The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe in blood for centuries.
[Letter objecting to the use of government land for churches, 1803]

James Madison

#33. The Christian test was a willingness to believe in the one Jesus Christ and His Message of salvation. What was demanded was not criticism but credulity. The Church Fathers observed that in the realm of thought only heresy had a history.

Daniel J. Boorstin

#34. This concern for the poor is in the Gospel, it is within the tradition of the Church, it is not an invention of communism and it must not be turned into an ideology, as has sometimes happened before in the course of history.

Pope Francis

#35. The history of the Church of Rome is a constant leakage of members into such breakaway cults, which go on splitting.

Mary Douglas

#36. Millions of Christians can and do go through life attending church, listening to sermons, reciting the creeds and never confront the seeming contradictions, redaction and myths passed off as verifiable history.

A. N. Wilson

#37. [The Drafters of the Constitution] were intent on avoiding more than 100 years of religious intolerance and persecution in American colonial history and an even longer heritage of church-state problems in Europe.

John M Swomley

#38. A lie is no less a lie because it is a thousand years old. Your undivided church has liked nothing better than persecuting its own members, burning them and hacking them apart when they stood by their own conscience, slashing their bellies open and feeding their guts to dogs.

Hilary Mantel

#39. The only group large enough to handle," the world's biggest, "problems is the network of millions of local churches around the world. We have the widest distribution, largest group of volunteers, local credibility, the promises of God, the power of the Holy Spirit, and the inevitability of history.

Rick Warren

#40. And the sad fact is that the church, both now and at far too many times in its history, has found it easier to act as if it were selling the sugar of moral and spiritual achievement rather than the salt ofJesus' passion and death.

Robert Farrar Capon

#41. Bonhoeffer's experiences with African American community underscored an idea that was developing in his mind: the only real piety and power that he had seen in the American church seemed to be in the churches where there were a present reality and a past history of suffering.

Eric Metaxas

#42. What we need now is the greatest generation of young adults in the history of the Church. We need your whole heart and soul. In other words, it's time to raise the bar not only for missionaries but also for returned missionaries and for your entire generation.

M. Russell Ballard

#43. The history of the church has been largely a history of "believers" refusing to believe in the way of the crucified Nazarene and instead giving in to the very temptations he resisted
power, relevancy, spectacle.

Shane Claiborne

#44. Well, we have nothing to hide. Our history is an open book. They may find what they are looking for, but the fact is the history of the church is clear and open and leads to faith and strength and virtues.

Gordon B. Hinckley

#45. Is this really the church of Christ, or are we just calling it the church because of our traditions and history?

K.P. Yohannan

#46. Give me liberty or give me death.
[From a speech given at Saint John's Church in Richmond, Virginia on March 23, 1775 to the Virginia House of Burgesses; as first published in print in 1817 in William Wirt's Life and Character of Patrick Henry.]

Patrick Henry

#47. I looked up at the wall. My bachelor's degree had been in History. Films like Back to the Future and Quantum Leap had been some of my favorite programs. Could time travel really be possible? This seemed too unreal.

Anna M. Aquino

#48. To be in the mainline is to have a history and not simply to be an amalgam, a community church of who knows what that came from who knows where.

Barbara Brown Taylor

#49. Some wag remarked that the worst dust storm in history would happen if all church members who were neglecting their Bibles dusted them off simultaneously.

Donald S. Whitney

#50. The roughest thing was learning the realities of the world at such a young age. I was 10 or 11, going to church, hearing the adults standing on the podium talking about world affairs, about history, about war, and how America was founded.

Michelle Rodriguez

#51. Probably the greatest tragedy of the church throughout its long and chequered history has been its constant tendency to conform to the prevailing culture instead of developing a Christian counter-culture.

John R.W. Stott

#52. Back then, Black churches were a small piece of peace. Church was a world where, even with its imperfections, the offer of equality and common humanity was the sustenance needed to make it through the rest of the week in a society that deemed them less than human.

Janelle Gray

#53. The church, inserted and active in human society and in history, does not exist in order to exercise political power or to govern the society.

Claudio Hummes

#54. But even considering these, I have great confidence in our young people as a whole. I regard you as the finest generation in the history of the Church. I compliment you, and I have in my heart a great feeling of love and respect and appreciation for you.

Gordon B. Hinckley

#55. The Church is simply the path of history, and not the actual kingdom of God.

Nikolai Berdyaev

#56. Boys did not go to work on the railroad simply because their fathers did. What fetched them were sights and sounds of moving trains, and above all the whistle of a locomotive. I've heard of the call of the wild, the call of the law, the call of the church. There is also the call of the railroad.

Gary Krist

#57. Every church throughout history whose members were willing to surrender their lives for the sake of Christ witnessed dramatic and spontaneous growth.

Neil Cole

#58. Most readers will be shocked by the clear record of history linking Adolf Hitler and the Roman Catholic Church in a conspiracy to exterminate the Jews

John Hagee

#59. Our discernment of Christian doctrines must include a basic knowledge of the history of the church.

Anonymous

#60. Was the real Jesus of history one and the same as the Christ of faith whom we read about in the New Testament and worship in the church? Was Jesus really raised from the dead? Is he really the divine Lord of lords?

John Clayton

#61. The business of the missionary, and the business of the Christian Church in any situation, is to challenge the plausibility structure in the light of God's revelation of the real meaning of history.

Lesslie Newbigin

#62. An unchurched christian is a grotesque anomaly. The New Testament knows nothing of such a person. For the church lies at the very center of the eternal purpose of God. It is not a divine afterthought. It is not an accident of history. On the contrary, the church is God's new community.

John Stott

#63. At the center of the Christian tradition since the first church have been a number who insist that history is not tragic, hell is not forever, and love, in the end, wins and all will be reconciled to God.

Rob Bell

#64. At the first general meeting of this Corporation in 1820, his Lordship presided; a circumstance, which may well be considered an era in the history of the Church of Upper Canada.

John Strachan

#65. Pope Paul III was the greatest thief in the history of the church.

Peter O'Toole

#66. The idea that the Lord wanted me to make prayer such a driving emphasis seemed counterintuitive to positioning the church for revival. How could it be that quite possibly the most unpopular activity in church culture could become a birthing center for a history-making move of the Holy Spirit?

Michael Brown

#67. In Poland, some people think that I'm kind of scandalous because I'm a woman who should stay at home with her kids instead of making movies about what I want and, even worse, addressing Polish taboos like church, homosexuals and history.

Malgorzata Szumowska

#68. The aim of God in history is the creation of an all-inclusive community of loving persons, with Himself included in that community as its prime sustainer and most glorious inhabitant.

Dallas Willard

#69. The 'wall of separation between church and state' is a metaphor based on bad history, a metaphor which has proved useless as a guide to judging. It should be frankly and explicitly abandoned.

William Rehnquist

#70. Look, don't judge Christianity by the imperfect examples that we have seen in history. Judge it by Jesus Christ.

Chuck Smith

#71. Faith is a very powerful force in the history of humanity. So I greatly respect different kinds of faith. Just as I think diversity is a really good thing genetically, it's also a good thing societally.

George M. Church

#72. I think here is the irony of American history. We don't have an established church. When you have an established church nobody takes religion as seriously as we do here. We have a free market in religion. The religious groups are competing with each other.

Eric Foner

#73. The baby should always be saved in preference to the mother. That is the advice of the Holy Church, you know that. I was only reminding women of their duty. There is no need to make everything so personal, Margaret. You make everything into your own tragedy.

Philippa Gregory

#74. C. S. Lewis observed that almost all crimes of Christian history have come about when religion is confused with politics. Politics, which always runs by the rules of ungrace, allures us to trade away grace for power, a temptation the church has often been unable to resist.

Philip Yancey

#75. The plays of children are nonsense, but very educative nonsense. So it is with the largest and solemnest things, with commerce, government, church, marriage, and so with the history of every man's bread, and the ways by which he is to come by it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#76. The illicit Irish homemade spirit, poitin was frowned upon by the Catholic Church, which made its manufacture grave enough of a sin to require a bishop's absolution rather than that of the regular parish priest. Ah, the lengths the Irish will go to for "the demon drink!

Rashers Tierney

#77. Does it not seem strange that the generation with the most advanced technology and the easiest-to-read Bible translations is the weakest generation of Christians in the history of our country? Church attendance has never been lower, and the Christian influence in our culture never weaker.

A.W. Tozer

#78. Those who saw Pope John Paul II either in person or through the mass media glimpsed a man who millions of Catholics believe may be one of the greatest popes in the history of the church.

Chris Matthews

#79. The saints have always been the source and origin of renewal in the most difficult moments in the Church's history.

Pope John Paul II

#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. There once was a time when all people believed in God and the church ruled. This time was called the Dark Ages.

Richard Lederer

#82. How a member of the church - one who had read the Good Lord's bible - could sit so calmly and watch a man be led to his destruction frightened me.

Jay Grewal

#83. The church is missionary by nature because God through the Spirit calls, creates, and commissions the church to communicate to the world that the redemptive reign of God has broken into human history.

Craig Van Gelder

#84. Constantine saw with his own eyes the trophy of a cross of light in the heavens, above the sun, and bearing this inscription: conquer by this. At the sight, he himself was struck with amazement and his whole army also.

Eusebius

#85. I have met so many young people who do not see the church as relevant and do not consider the Bible a real book of history that can be trusted.

Ken Ham

#86. I am predominantly critical concerning the activities, and especially the political activities, through history of the official clergy.

Albert Einstein

#87. God pity us that after years of writing, using mountains of paper and rivers of ink, exhausting flashy terminology about the biggest revival meetings in history, we are still faced with gross corruption in every nation, as well as with the most prayerless church age since Pentecost.

Leonard Ravenhill

#88. The unqualified affirmation of the univeral will of salvation has radically changed the way of conceiving the mission of the Church in the world ... The work of salvation is a reality which occurs in history.

Gustavo Gutierrez

#89. The two great moments in human history are the day that Christ was born and the day He was raised from the dead. These are represented by Christmas and Easter - the two biggest holidays for the church. People who don't even go to church do go on these days.

Louie Giglio

#90. I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square. His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the church has done so often in human history

Francis George

#91. M'Lord, I know from history that once upon a time in a much earlier Church, a vocation to the priesthood meant a call from the bishop, not necessarily a call from God. And I heard the Bishop of Rome himself call you to be that which you have now become by ordination and consecration.

Walter M. Miller Jr.

#92. Then my extended family, there are preachers and evangelists, former priests. So I have quite a bit of history with Church, religion and spirituality.

Wes Bentley

#93. Throughout history people have gazed at the skies in wonder. You only have to stand at the base of a church steeple to understand why.

Fennel Hudson

#94. Conner answered, "Mrs. Turbeldy warned me that you have a history of running away. Where did you go?"
To the church of course. To confess my sins.

Jennifer A. Nielsen

#95. If you say that the history of the Church is a long succession of scandals, you are telling the truth, though if that is all you say, you are distorting the truth.

Gerald Vann

#96. History makes the point time and time again No greater mischief can be created than to merge the power of religion with the power of government.

Lowell P. Weicker Jr.

#97. It's true, the Church will be raptured before the final seven years of Earth's history, but during that final seven years, many people will come to faith in Christ, but they will pay a terrible price to do so.

Robert Jeffress

#98. The prayer of the church determines the history and the fate of its people as well as the whole earth

Sunday Adelaja

#99. The Bible and the history of the church both demonstrate that God's way for the suffering of His people has not always been the way of escape, but the way of endurance.

Billy Graham

#100. Hundreds of young barefoot, long-haired, newly converted believers flocked to the church, and they brought their guitars with them.

Robert J. Morgan