Quotes About Churches

#1. Without a clear purpose, you will keep changing directions, jobs, relationships, churches, or other externals - hoping each change will settle the confusion or fill the emptiness in your heart.

Rick Warren

#2. My father was Catholic, my mother was Protestant, and because of that I got Christened in both churches, so I've got all these names ... but my Dad always called me Mick.

Mickey Spillane

#3. The nations were awakened from the sleep of death, as the words of eternal life flowed from the Apostles' lips, - the temples of superstition were shut or destroyed, and churches were planted in every part of the civilized world.

John Strachan

#4. Protestant congregations. These surveys found that, out of about one thousand churches who had been asked about sexual abuse since 1993, allegations of child abuse averaged 70 per week.

Joe Klest

#5. The Press has no band of critics who go the round of the churches and chapels, and are on the watch for a slip or defect in the preacher, to make a 'feature' in their article: the clergy are, practically, the most irresponsible of all talkers.

George Eliot

#6. We find not in the Gospel, that Christ hath anywhere provided for the uniformity of churches, but only for their unity.

Roger Williams

#7. It's hard to believe that the truth lies within us. What about the churches, temples, mosques, bibles and scriptures? They offer comfort. If they cause you discomfort, toss them.

Art Hochberg

#8. Benefit performances, bad paintings and statues, philanthropic societies, Gypsies, schools, subscription dinners, carousing, the Masons, churches, books - no one and nothing met with refusal,

Leo Tolstoy

#9. Death is easily fooled. If the churches don't work, a filter will do.

John Updike

#10. The words "Think and Thank" are inscribed in many of the Cromwellian churches of
England. These words ought to be inscribed in our hearts, too: "Think and Thank". Think
of all we have to be grateful for, and thank God for all our boons and bounties.

Dale Carnegie

#11. Why didn't we build more hospitals and fewer churches, you could pray to God everywhere but you could not operate in a gutter!

Axel Munthe

#12. The balance message is that churches are to teach people the miracle workers themselves.

Sunday Adelaja

#13. The church becomes irrelevant when it becomes purely a human creation. We are not all we were made to be when everything in our lives and churches can be explained apart from the work and presence of the Spirit of God.

Francis Chan

#14. The churches are preaching miracles and not gospel of the kingdom.

Sunday Adelaja

#15. Effective churches manage their resources - budgets, schedules, personnel - to accomplish the work of God in their communities without making efficiency the ruling principle of the congregation.

Thomas White

#16. As we watched, the regulations imposed by our government, churches, and press; combined to establish our country's new internal warfare. Fought on the podiums, pulpits, and pages by each in turn to empower themselves, again, while in the corner those that should not have stayed silent, did.

James W. Scott

#17. You get more churches burned down in the United States in the last two years than in the last hundred, because of the lack of understanding of culture and diversity and the beauty of it.

Edward James Olmos

#18. The fault seems to me to have been that men have taken ancient country churches as their models and have failed to discover that between them and churches in towns there ought to be a most distinct and marked difference.

George Edmund Street

#19. The kind of churches we played in, it wasn't about how good you could play your instrument, it was about how much you enjoyed playing your instrument.

Nathan Followill

#20. The more we have of Jesus, the greater the love we have; the greater the love, the greater the sacrifice; the greater the sacrifice, the more we become like Jesus; the more we become like Jesus, the more successful our local churches become.

Eric Samuel Timm

#21. How was the sermon?" "Was it a good service?" Same blank stare from the ancestors. In those days, churches didn't have to be rockin' it, nobody expected the preacher to hit it out of the park, and the service was, well, a service.

Michael S. Horton

#22. Lord, save the Church from desiring to have pews, choirs, organs, or instrumental music, and a congregational ministry, like other heathen Churches around them!

Peter Cartwright

#23. Got no religion. Tried a bunch of different religions. The churches are divided. Can't make up their minds and neither can I.

Bob Dylan

#24. ...relics and churches, paintings and sculptures and holy places, were all just tools, all serving the same purpose: to bring a seeking soul into awareness of the divine.

Sam Cabot

#25. I see apostasy in many ways occurring in Evangelical churches that really aren't teaching the truth of God's word. I do believe that some churches have become entertainment centers and a teaching a type of prosperity Gospel rather than teaching God's word.

Robert Jeffress

#26. Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity. ... In the new order, Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches and the media by transforming the consciousness of society.

Antonio Gramsci

#27. I love going to black churches, and I love some of these black preachers. The best preacher I ever saw in my life was a 93-year-old in a black church in Hamilton, Virginia. What a preacher!

Robert Duvall

#28. It is a reality that we have complete control of organised Christianity. Almost anywhere, completely. We 'Jews' must become lawyers so we could control and strangle the courts, we should become teachers and leaders in all the churches.

Harold Wallace Rosenthal

#29. If real churches exist, such persons are not called on to make them.

John Nelson Darby

#30. According to the historian William H. McNeil, European churches did not have pews until sometime in the eighteenth century. People stood or milled around, creating a very different dynamic than we find in today's churches, where people are expected to spend most of their time sitting.

Barbara Ehrenreich

#31. The existing confusion of conflicting creeds and sects is fitly represented by the term "Babylon," which prophecy (Revelation 14:8) applies to the world-loving churches of the last days.

Ellen G. White

#32. The number of seats we fill will not determine the legacy of our churches. The depth to which the gospel penetrates those lives will determine our legacy.

Brad House

#33. Let us face a pluralistic world in which there are no universal churches, no single remedy for all diseases, no one way to teach or write or sing, no magic diet, no world poets, and no chosen races, but only the wretched and wonderfully diversified human race.

Jacques Barzun

#34. Americans practice different faiths in churches, synagogues, mosques and temples. And many good people practice no faith at all.

George W. Bush

#35. The churches have no confidence in each other. Why? Because they are acquainted with each other.

Robert Green Ingersoll

#36. It takes more than a great church to reach a city, it takes a great movement of churches.

Timothy Keller

#37. In the reign of the Greek Emperor Justinian , and again in the reign of Phocas , the Bishop of Rome obtained some dominion over the Greek Churches, but of no long continuance. His standing dominion was only over the nations of the Western Empire, represented by Daniel's fourth Beast.

Isaac Newton

#38. Although churches seem the most natural space to perform spiritual awakening, the disconcerting reality is that many people in Western society see churches more as museums of religion than sacred stages that dramatize the movement of God's spirit.

Diana Butler Bass

#39. Men build our churches but do not enter them, print our Bibles but do not read them, talk about God but do not believe Him, speak of Christ but do not trust Him for salvation, sing our hymns and then forget them.

Leonard Ravenhill

#40. If I was president of the good old U.S.A., I'd turn the churches into strip clubs and watch the whole world pray.

Kid Rock

#41. Apostles receive revelations from God, and consequently they are able to say 'This is what the Spirit is saying to the churches right now.' Making such a statement with credibility carries with it tremendous authority.

C. Wagner

#42. The whole underside of our society has always been violence and still is. Churches, laws - everybody seems to think that man is a noble savage. But he's only an animal. A meat-eating, talking animal. Recognize it. He also has grace and love and beauty. But don't say to me we're not violent.

Sam Peckinpah

#43. [Whenever the average intellect of the clergy declines in the balance with the average intellect of the people] the churches will be shut up and a new order of things [will] begin.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#44. Doubts about the fundamentals of the gospel exist in certain churches, I am told, to a large extent. My dear friends, where there is a warm-hearted church, you do not hear of them. I never
saw a fly light on a red-hot plate.

Charles Spurgeon

#45. The fair Saxon man, with open front, and honest meaning, domestic, affectionate, is not the wood out of which cannibal, or inquisitor, or assassin is made. But he is moulded for law, lawful trade, civility, marriage, the nurture of children, for colleges, churches, charities, and colonies.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#46. Churches thrive on martyrdom and persecution.

Robert A. Heinlein

#47. Know that no one can have indulged in the Holy Writers sufficiently, unless he has governed churches for a hundred years with the prophets, such as Elijah and Elisha, John the Baptist, Christ and the apostles ... We are beggars: this is true.

Martin Luther

#48. Just imagine how difficult it would've been to create churches, states or laws, if we could only speak about things that really exist, like lions or rivers

Yuval Noah Harari

#49. The need of our times is nothing less than the re-Christianization of our churches, according to the gospel alone, in both doctrine and culture, by Christ himself

Raymond C. Ortlund Jr.

#50. Sadly, many of these churches will die by congregational suicide.

Mohler R.

#51. Really, there is no infidelity, nowadays, so great as that which prays, and keeps the Sabbath, and rebuilds the churches. The sealer of the South Pacific preaches a truer doctrine.

Henry David Thoreau

#52. Jesus planted the first church on earth with a group of hoodlums who wouldn't be let inside the doors of most churches today.

Preston Sprinkle

#53. But I have been in some very beautiful churches, then I've looked outside and seen people starving to death.

Captain Beefheart

#54. 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

#55. The problem is, many of the people in need of saving are in churches, and at least part of what they need saving from is the idea that God sees the world the same way they do.

Barbara Brown Taylor

#56. There are enough churches already, but the world still needs salvation.

Sun Myung Moon

#57. I was raised Catholic, but my father's people were Methodist, so we went to both churches.

Aaron Neville

#58. We have to assess: Are we making disciples along the way as we draw people to our churches?

Ed Stetzer

#59. I stay away from churches in which I feel like I have to pretend I'm a better person than I am. That sort of thing moves my faith backwards.

Donald Miller

#60. Why are Scots so attracted to the secret world? Smiley wondered, not for the first time in his career. Ships' engineers, Colonial administrators, spies. . . . Their heretical Scottish history drew them to distant churches, he decided. "George!

John Le Carre

#61. American Christian churches have a golden opportunity to put aside our idolatrous ties to Republicans and Democrats and think more critically and creatively about how the gospel relates to our new and emerging political culture. When

Charles C. Camosy

#62. The religious superstition is encouraged by means of the institution of churches, processions, monuments, festivities ... The so-called clergy stupefy the masses ... They befog the people and keep them in an eternal condition of stupefaction.

Leo Tolstoy

#63. The tragedy is not that nonviolence did not work against the Nazis, but that it was so seldom utilized ... The churches as a whole were too docile or anti-semitic, and too ignorant of the nonviolent message of the Gospel, to act effectively to resist the Nazis or act in solidarity with the Jews.

Walter Wink

#64. This informal "pre-exclusion" is probably the more powerful and widely exerted form in many churches. It is in my denomination. As the divorced and remarried don't seek communion at a Roman Catholic parish, gays and lesbians don't seek to participate in most evangelical churches.

Ken Wilson

#65. Neighborhood grocery stores, coal yards, gas stations, cheap taverns, big old rundown houses, a few churches with blank embarrassed faces.

Ross Macdonald

#66. Authenticity is the exact opposite of what you find in some churches.

Rick Warren

#67. Every good gospel singer you can hear is a scat singer; they're just using different syllables. There are a lot of jazz singers out there, and more coming out of the churches.

Al Jarreau

#68. Churches were never meant to be mental hospitals. They were supposed to be military outposts under orders to storm the gates of hell. Every believer is on active duty and called to serve a higher purpose with the rank of their blessings and talents.

Shannon L. Alder

#69. [ ... ] 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

#70. I think poetry has started to take on a supplementary role of prayer for some people. The churches, I think, including my own, are terrible at teaching people how to pray. It may be that we need to learn from the ground up as religious people, whether Christian or not, how to pray.

Kevin Hart

#71. False self is an identity based on what you have, what you do, and what others think about you. In stark contrast to this is the true self in Christ, which is who we are before God and in God - Christ living in us, as Paul put it to the churches in Galatia

Basil Pennington

#72. Partner with churches to assist the poor.

Jim DeMint

#73. In places where marriage's core meaning has been altered through legal action, officials are beginning to target for punishment those believers and churches that refuse to adapt.

Salvatore J. Cordileone

#74. Addie and Louis sat down in front. She had arranged the funeral and told the minister about Ruth. He hadn't known her at all. She had stopped going to any church because of her feeling about orthodoxy and the childish ways in which churches talked and thought about God.

Kent Haruf

#75. In vain do we seek to awaken our churches to zeal in evangelism as a separate thing. To be genuine it must flow from love to Christ. It is when a sense of personal communion with the Son of God is highest that we shall be most fit for missionary work, either ourselves or to stir up others.

Archibald Alexander

#76. If the ancient churches, in debating and deciding the greatest mysteries of religion, knew nothing of these two texts, I understand not why we should be so fond of them now the debate is over.

Isaac Newton

#77. Churches should not be directly involved in politics.

John Leo

#78. Gospel bands should take note: More musical equipment is stolen from churches than from clubs or concert halls. For this reason, musicians should be careful leaving instruments unattended in houses of worship.

Attorney Rich Stim

#79. The days are nouns: touch them
The hands are churches that worship the world

Naomi Shihab Nye

#80. It's not just the books Alba craves, it's standing inside a place that houses millions of them. Libraries are Alba's churches, and the university library, containing one edition of every book ever published in England, is her cathedral.

Menna Van Praag

#81. Writers around the world protested when two Communist writers, Siniavski and Daniel, were sentenced to prison by their own comrades. But not even churches protest when Christians are put in prison for their faith.

Richard Wurmbrand

#82. Being a good steward of those material things that God has given our churches is good. Becoming obsessed with any one item to the neglect of His mission is idolatry.

Thom S. Rainer

#83. The churches used to win their arguments against atheism, agnosticism, and other burning issues by burning the ismist, which is fine proof that there is a devil but hardly evidence that there is a God.

Ben Lindsey

#84. Churches are vessels of hush, as well as everything else they are, and when I block out the distractions of vision, the silence is almost shockingly loud.

Francis Spufford

#85. I explained that when our gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender friends aren't welcome at the table, then we don't feel welcome either, and that not every young adult gets married or has children, so we need to stop building our churches around categories and start building them around people.

Rachel Held Evans

#86. We long for our churches to be safe places to doubt, to ask questions, and to tell the truth, even when it's uncomfortable.

Rachel Held Evans

#87. In fact, I've met countless believers who have said, "The church is an organism, not an organization." Yet as they formed those very words, they continued to be devout members of churches that were organized along the lines of General Motors and Microsoft.

Frank Viola

#88. The secret of every discord in Christian homes and communities and churches is that we seek our own way and our own glory.

Alan Redpath

#89. Two thousand years ago, God started a revolt against the religion He started. So don't ever put it past God to cause a groundswell movement against churches and Christian institutions that bear His name.

Erwin McManus

#90. We're not church planters. We are community planters and, as we work in our communities, we join local churches.

Shane Claiborne

#91. I can never feel that setting fire to houses and churches and litter boxes and destroying valuable pictures really helps to convince people that women ought to be enfranchised.

Millicent Fawcett

#92. It is one of those nondenominational churches so busy not condemning anyone that it has little power to attract a steady congregation.

Patricia Briggs

#93. The required cheerfulness that characterizes many of our churches produces a suffocating environment of pat, religious answers to the painful, complex questions that riddle the lives of hurting people.

Tullian Tchividjian

#94. If we desire the "hand of God" (i.e., his power) to return to our churches, we should focus less on the personalities and abilities of people, and more on Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit.

Jim Cymbala

#95. Birth control appeals to the advanced radical because it is calculated to undermine the authority of the Christian churches. I look forward to seeing humanity free someday of the tryanny of Christianity no less than Capitalism.

Margaret Sanger

#96. We must grow out of religion. It is either bugaboo, formalism, or hysteria. Besides, what proof is there that "the churches" know more about "God" than the Cockney sentry on duty outside the camp? We have only their say-so.

Richard Aldington

#97. The top 10% of the people who are most creative, constructive and thoughtful, do not have much to do with churches. To them the canons of reason come first, making faith secondary and questionable.

Joseph Fletcher

#98. Christian churches and Muslim groups have no more right to have their say than women's institutes or trades unions. The government has actively encouraged faith-based education, and therefore given a megaphone to religious voices and fundamentalists.

A.C. Grayling

#99. Churches should teach people on our to value eternal virtues.

Sunday Adelaja

#100. I attend the greatest of all Churches. I put a capital N on Nature, and call it my Church.

Frank Lloyd Wright