Quotes about Church

Esteem the church fathers and other writers, but value none of them as equivalent to the word of God.

The universal church of Christ must consist of individual churches guided by their own overseers, and every Christian must be a member of one of these churches (except those who are away on business or travel or are in other similar cases of necessity). Though a minister is an officer in the universal church, yet in a special manner he is the overseer of that particular church committed to his charge.

If our rest was here, most of God's providences must be useless. Should God lose the glory of his church's miraculous deliverances, and of the fall of his enemies, that men may have their happiness here?

I know necessity may cause the Church to tolerate the weak; but woe to us if we tolerate and indulge our own weakness.

Does Christianity merely mean we must forfeit our Sunday mornings to church attendance, or does being a Christian noticeably improve our lives?

If people in your community are not responding to the gospel as they did in New Testament times, one possible reason is that they do not see God in what you are doing as a church.

Sometimes we see problems in our church. Such occasions are not opportunities to criticize or to leave, but to let Christ use our lives to be a part of His solution. If you are presently in a church that is suffering difficulties, could it be that Christ added you to your congregation for such a time as this?

Church practice has been more influenced by Plato than by Jesus. We invariably prefer the universal synthesis, the answer that settles all the dust and resolves every question even when it is not entirely true over the mercy and grace of God.

As G. K. Chesterton once wrote, Your religion is not the church you belong to, but the cosmos you live inside of. Once we know that the entire physical world around us, all of creation, is both the hiding place and the revelation place for God, this world becomes home, safe, enchanted, offering grace to any who look deeply. I call that kind of deep and calm seeing "contemplation.

People are always trying to build temples and churches for God. And what is God trying to do? He is trying to build us into a temple, a living temple, a temple of the Holy Spirit, as St. Paul says (1 Corinthians 3:16-17).

It really works very well, but the trouble is that it feels so godly that much, if not most, religion is a belonging system more than a search for intimacy with God. Jesus was not into tribal religion, groupthink, and loyalty tests. Much of the institutional church is into them, however, and always has been. It works too well to call it into question. It holds us together and that feels like salvation, even if it is a very deteriorated form.

In fact, I would say what makes so much religion so innocuous, ineffective, and even unexciting is that there has seldom been a concrete "decision to turn our lives over to the care of God," even in many people who go to church, temple, or mosque. I have been in religious circles all my life and usually find willfulness run rampant in monasteries, convents, chancery offices, and among priests and prelates, ordinary laity, and at church meetings.