Quotes About Church

The New Testament does not envisage solitary religion: some kind of regular assembly for worship and instruction is everywhere taken for granted in the Epistles. So we must be regular practising members of the Church.

Christianity

The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool. If the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority.

religion democracy church and state

Above all, I see the preaching ministry as a dual process. On the one hand I must attempt to change the soul of individuals so that their societies may be changed. On the other I must attempt to change the societies so that the individual soul will have a change. Therefore, I must be concerned about unemployment, slums, and economic insecurity. I am a profound advocate of the social gospel.

change society

Every day people are straying away from church and going back to God.

God witty

We have to avoid the spiritual sickness of a self-referential Church. It's true that when we stray from its path, as can happen to any man or woman, accidents can happen. But if the Church stays enclosed within itself, self-referential, it will grow old. And between a Church that accidentally strays off its path and one that is sick because of self-reference, I have no doubt: I prefer the former.

If, throughout history, the Church has changed so much, I do not see why we should not adapt it to the culture of [our] time.

The Church is Mother and talks to the people as a mother talks to her child, with that confidence that the child already knows that everything he is being taught is for his good, because he knows he is loved.

The Church was, is, and will continue to be persecuted.

How I would love a Church that is poor and for the poor.

I must not be scandalized by the fact that the Church is my mother: I must look at its sins and shortcomings as I would look at my mother's sins and shortcomings. And when I think of her, I remember the good and beautiful things she has achieved, more than her weaknesses and defects. A mother defends herself with a heart filled with love before doing so with words. I wonder whether there is any love for the Church in the hearts of those who pay so much attention to the scandals.

Instead of just being a Church that welcomes and receives, we try to be a Church that comes out of itself and goes to the men and women who do not participate in parish life, do not know much about it and are indifferent toward it. We organize missions in public squares where many people usually gather: we pray, we celebrate Mass, and we offer baptism, which we administer after a brief preparation.

Sometimes, I ask myself if we, the Church, are complicit with a culture of exclusion, one in which there is no longer space for the old person, for the child, where there is no time to stop on the side of the road like the Good Samaritan.

Such religion as there can be in modern life, every individual will have to salvage from the churches for himself.

religion

The church...is not just to bandage the victims under the wheel, but to put a spoke in the wheel itself.

I have no objection to churches so long as they do not interfere with God's work.

Why do people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?

If I should go out of church whenever I hear a false sentiment, I could never stay there five minutes.

There was a time when the Church was very powerful.  It was during that time when the early Christians rejoiced when they were deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed.  In those days the Church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society.

A church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints.

religion

Unable to suppress love, the Church wanted at least to disinfect it, and it created marriage.

marriage

I seek a deeper truth, but I don't think I have to go to a building designated for worship to find it.

faith

Everyday people are straying away from the church and going back to God.

Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than going to the garage makes you a car.

Christianity religion

How can the Church be received as a trustworthy guide in the invisible, which falls into so many errors in the visible?

I like the silence of a church, before the service begins better than any preaching.

In church, sacred music would make believers of us all—but preachers can be counted on to restore the balance.

clergy

In general, the churches, visited by me often on weekdays ... bore for me the same relation to God that billboards did to Coca-Cola; they promoted thirst without quenching it.

People don't come to church for preachments, of course, but to daydream about God.

The Church has its problems, but the older I get, the more comfort I find there.

The church is the great lost and found department.

The churches must learn humility as well as teach it.

She say, Celie, tell the truth, have you ever found God in church? I never did. I just found a bunch of folks hoping for him to show. Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me. And I think all the other folks did too. They come to church to share God, not find God.

God