“You can t have a church town without belief and you can t have belief without intolerance.”
“It is interesting that Jesus encounters a person, personally, forgives him, transforms him adds Him into the Church - the Body of Christ, However today, Church is getting the other way around, she is raising up a believer in Church, feeding the cup of her doctrine and then showing the person of Christ in with the veil of concocted and diseased doctrines.”
“It is interesting that Jesus encounters a person, personally, forgives him, transforms him adds Him into the Church - the Body of Christ, However today, Church is getting the other way around, she is raising up a believer in Church, feeding him up with the cup of her doctrine and then showing the person of Christ with the veil of concocted and diseased doctrines.”
“My double drags his coffin, humble slave, I, at least, am real, though changed to flesh. Far-off, I build me a church no hand can shape ( Winter Sonnets: III )”
“The Church is the Body of Christ, and as such it is both heavenly and earthly. The Church is the communion of saints, and it includes as members both angels and shepherds - cherubim and seraphim, and you, and me.”
“If you have ever belonged to such a community, however, you may have discovered that the trouble starts when darkness falls on your life, which can happen in any number of unsurprising ways: you lose your job, your marriage falls apart, your child acts out in some attention getting way, you pray hard for something that does not happen, you begin to doubt some of the things you have been taught about what the Bible says. The first time you speak of these things in a full solar church, you can usually get a hearing. Continue to speak of them and you may be reminded that God will not let you be tested beyond your strength. All that is required of you is to have faith. If you still do not get the message, sooner or later it will be made explicit for you: the darkness is your own fault, because you do not have enough faith.”
“The people of God cannot be changed until the outcasts are restored to its body.”
“Like the hub of a wheel, the church’s corporate life is an extension of the good news that God was in Christ reconciling the whole world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them.”
“A preacher shouldn t preach just to make you feel good. Then it s about the money not about the teach. He should preach the truth because the truth shall set you free.”
“Going to church is not a sign of going to God, if you think he is omnipresent, he is right there in your soul and bedroom.”
“The voice welling up out of this little man is terrific, Harry had noticed it at the house, but here, in the nearly empty church, echoing off the walnut knobs and memorial plaques and high arched rafters, beneath the tall central window of Jesus taking off into the sky with a pack of pastel apostles for a launching pad, the timbre is doubled, richer, with a rounded sorrowful something Rabbit hadn t noticed hitherto, gathering and pressing the straggle of guests into a congregation, subduing any fear that this ceremony might be a farce. Laugh at ministers all you want, they have the words we need to hear, the ones the dead have spoken.”
“Are we letting the world influence the church more than the church is affecting those in the world?”
“If your church is not going to support the committed same-sex relationships of LGBT congregants, be honest about that. Bait-and-switch is deceptively un-Christ-like and serves to push gay and transgender believers farther away each time the deception happens.”
“There is a long and well-documented tradition of wisdom in the Christian faith that any venture into leadership, whether by laity or clergy, is hazardous. it is necessary that there be leaders, but woe to those who become leaders.”
“God love s in the dark.”
“The problem is not a lack of churches, but a lack of true ministers, and believers that really are followers of Christ.”
“In addition to the transience of their members, churches themselves face a crisis of hypermobility. Many churches have put down only shallow roots in their neighborhood, or no roots at all. We’ve all heard the question, “If our church suddenly moved to a new location fifteen miles away, would anyone in our neighborhood notice we were gone?” But what if we asked ourselves this question: “If our church was magically lifted off the ground and moved to a location fifteen miles away, would we notice the difference?” Western churches have become so disentangled from their own places that this question could be a cold, hard look in the mirror for many faith communities.”