Quotes about Church

What about the poor? How many poor people, unemployed people, financially struggling people are in your church? Are they even willing to let those facts be known? If not, why not?

The ways of reading Revelation that spend time speculating about the questions When will all this happen? and Who is the antichrist? fail the church in discipleship. Instead of a discipleship that teaches us to discern Babylon among us and shows us how to live in Babylon as dissidents instead of conformists, these speculative questions teach Christians how to wait for the escape from Babylon.

Since we are committed in the church to the scriptural revelation as the norming norm, we need to remind ourselves that our task ultimately is to conserve the gospel revealed in Christ by addressing our world in its local manifestation with the grace of God. We will discover that we each have something to say about that grace and for our world.

In our local context, the pastors and elders and deacons are disciples of Jesus, called to submit first to him and to nurture others into serving one another as Jesus himself served his disciples. The strangest words in the church ought to be the words "authority" and "power.

The church, if it is going to be the church God designed it to be, must become a space for the full story of God's artistic grace — the story about where we were, where we are now, and where we will be someday.

The Sermon on the Mount is the moral portrait of Jesus' own people. Because this portrait doesn't square with the church, this Sermon turns from instruction to indictment. To those ends—both instruction and indictment—this commentary has been written with the simple goal that God will use this book to lead us to become in real life the portrait Jesus sketched in the Sermon.

This has to be emphasized, because today too many of us emphasize kingdom but ignore the Holy Spirit and Pentecost and church—as if kingdom meant nothing more than justice and peace and love in the world (or in their country or in their state or in their local village).

One of my favorite kingdom preachers is Minneapolis pastor of Sanctuary Covenant Church, Efrem Smith.

As John Howard Yoder has said, "If in society we believe in the rights of employees, then the church should be the first employer to deal with workers fairly. If in the wider society we call for the overcoming of racism or sexism or materialism, then the church should be the place where that possibility first becomes real.

The Psalter is responsible for creating the prayers in the church. It remains the core of all Christian prayers. Whenever we pray with psalms, we are joining the universal Church in prayer.

Every scene of heaven in the Bible shows us a vision of the Church praying together and singing together and praising together.

Down through the centuries, the Church has carefully preserved, protected, and defended its Marian teachings, because to give them up would be to give up the gospel.