Quotes About Congregations

#1. If people don't know their pastor, it's easy to put the pastor on a pedestal and depersonalize him or her. It's also easy for pastors, who don't know their congregations, simply to classify congregants as saved or unsaved, involved or not involved, tithers or non-tithers.

Eugene H. Peterson

#2. There's no moment in which congregations aren't embodying values that children readily absorb.

Erika Hewitt

#3. THE story of Mr. Knill's prophesying that I should preach the gospel in Rowland Hill's Chapel, and to the largest congregations in the world, has been regarded by many as a legend, but it was strictly true.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. Leaders who think that growth in grace comes by knowing the Word of God without doing it will produce congregations of passive Christians which resemble human beings that eat too much and exercise too little.

Alexander Strauch

#7. Congregations shaped by the Scriptures generally have preachers who are shaped by the Scriptures.

John Ortberg

#8. If we go into white congregations, non-whites will sometimes say it felt like worship never started. It was sort of dead and didn't feel that warmly received. But so - and there are different realities either way, and it makes it difficult for all groups to try and cross boundaries.

Michael Emerson

#9. 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

#10. There are multitudes in our congregations who are just waiting while they ought to be acting. They must work, if they would have God work in them. There can be no religion without obedience.

Ichabod Spencer

#11. There are entire congregations who worship praise and praise worship but who have not yet learned to praise and worship God in Jesus Christ.

Judson Cornwall

#12. What happens is sometimes these congregations will still have the white style of worship, even though they're mixed, because folks are willing to give up whatever they may have come with. So it's still quite a stretch for African Americans, yeah.

Michael Emerson

#13. Prayer less pulpits will produce prayer less and powerless congregations.

Wesley L. Duewel

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. The Eucharist has been preempted and redefined in dualistic thinking that leaves the status quo of the world untouched, so congregations can take the meal without raising questions of violence; the outcome is a "colonized imagination" that is drained of dangerous hope.

Walter Brueggemann

#17. Jesus our Lord is Prophet, Priest, and King. The concept is not new, yet many preachers never preach it, and many congregations never hear it.

Aiden Wilson Tozer

#18. While the United States is becoming the most culturally diverse nation in the world, less than 5.5% of Christian congregations are multiethnic.

James MacDonald

#19. I see it happen in uniracial congregations all the time. But people - when they're in mixed company, we speak differently.

Michael Emerson

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. I think it's easier, I really do, because of not having that similar history, so that's why I think two-thirds of these mixed congregations are either white with Asian and Hispanic, or black with Asian and Hispanic.

Michael Emerson

#23. 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

#24. And he continues: Thus it is increasingly necessary you recognize that other congregations of material bodies exist elsewhere in the universe, like this of our world, which the ether encircles in eager embrace

Umberto Eco

#25. 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

#26. We're going to see more, and we are seeing more, and I'll tell you exactly why. Not because white and black are more likely to get together. Only a third of the seven percent of congregations that are interracial are black and white.

Michael Emerson

#27. We complain today that ministers do not know how to preach; but is it not equally true that our congregations do not know how to hear?

J.I. Packer

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

Rodney Stark

#29. 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

#30. Because religious training means credulity training, churches should not be surprised to find that so many of their congregations accept astrology as readily as theology, or a channeled Atlantean priest as readily as a biblical prophet.

Barbara G. Walker

#31. If churches are to be healthy, then pastors and teachers must be committed to discovering the meaning of Scripture and allowing that meaning to drive the agenda with their congregations.

Thabiti M. Anyabwile

#32. Ah! How often when I have been abroad on the mountains has my heart risen in grateful praise to God that it was not my destiny to waste and pine among those noisome congregations of the city.

John James Audubon

#33. So the tradition from Europe is that you're supposed to emphasize the mind over the body, so you sing from a very kind of staid perspective. Again, there are charismatic white congregations all over, and they don't sing that way. But, you know, on the average.

Michael Emerson

#34. Those of us who preach the Scriptures, along with being nourished by it ourselves, have to figure out along with our congregations how we can incarnate the gospel in our community, or we will preach to a religious ghetto.

John Ortberg

#35. I know that God our Father is in this work in great congregations ... and in the smallest branch and the smallest congregation.

Loren C. Dunn

#36. Men go crazy in congregations
They only get better one by one

Sting

#37. 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

#38. Too many congregations look to their pastors for simple answers to problems that their pastors see as anything but simple. And too many pastors don't trust their congregations enough to say, "It's not that simple from my point of view and here's why.

Ken Wilson

#39. Those who belong to megachurches display as high a level of personal commitment as do those who attend small congregations.

Rodney Stark

#40. I'm honestly not sure that I've ever tried to talk as a theologian about "homosexual acts," per se. My disagreement with the current teaching of the Roman Congregations is about what I consider to be their fundamentally flawed premise of the objectively disordered nature of the inclination.

James Alison

#41. If we tune into the Holy Spirit, our congregations will tune into the worship.

Gangai Victor

#42. Dogmas may fly out at the window but congregations do not come in at the door.

Ronald Knox

#43. For I am verily persuaded the generality of preachers talk of an unknown and unfelt Christ; and the reason why congregations have been so dead is, because they have had dead men preaching to them.

Gilbert Tennent

#44. A 'real pastor' is not preaching of their own; they are speaking what God put in their heart by the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is using them at that very moment to speak to the congregations situations -past, present, and future.

Monica Johnson

#45. The pastors and ministry leaders came away energized to have voter registration drives at their churches and motivated to encourage their congregations to "vote their values."

Paul Smith

#46. Congregations are lifeless because dead men preach to them.

George Whitefield

#47. The reason why congregations have been so dead is because they have dead men preaching to them. How can dead men beget living children?

George Whitefield

#48. My dad was a non-denominational preacher, actually a Congregationalist which is really where all congregations come to congregate. That's why it's called a Congregationalist. Later on in life, he just became a non-denominational preacher, kind of a fire and brimstone type guy. That's how I grew up.

Larry The Cable Guy

#49. Believe it, brethren, God looks for more from England, than from most nations in the world; and for more from you that enjoy these helps, than from the dark, untaught congregations of the land (271).

Richard Baxter

#50. So you find a lot of these sixth Americans congregate in these interracial congregations. They hang out together at work, at school, wherever.

Michael Emerson

#51. 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

#52. 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

#53. 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

#54. Offerings gleam beneath consecrated trees,
boulders, and caves where Kami nature spirits
minister to congregations of saki cans, lotus root,
and the glow of tangerines; still-lives silent as prayer.

Jalina Mhyana

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

Vance Havner