Quotes about Church

Prayer is the easiest thing to assume in church and the hardest thing to maintain. Prayer is the first thing our flesh stops when times get easy, and true prayer is the last thing we resort to when times get tough.

When we want decisions more than we want disciples, we get tares instead of true converts and Ichabod, departed glory for the church.

Our view of human problems determines who is qualified to speak to them. If sin is the primary human problem, then those with the theological and practical expertise in dealing with sin — in its varied and complex forms — should lead the way in the field of people-helping. Unless we have an accurate and robust conception of sin, the church will concede much of its work to outside professional and will be ill-equipped to cooperate with them when needed.

In healthy churches, the pastors life, not just his words, sets the tone for the church.

Church was never intended to be a place where we serve God to the exclusion of meeting with Him.

Too often Jesus Christ was not my Master but a bystander I visited with at church occasionally.

Revival is not emotional extravagance where people are caught up in the moment and fall down, act bizarrely, unbiblically, and out of control. That's not revival.

When we fail to assist people responding to the gospel at church, we train our people to repeat that failure at home and at work.

Where is the church persevering in the priority of prayer?

Placing evangelistic mission above the mission of God's glory is the single most destructive error in the church today and the one from which many other errors fall out. God's own glory as the priority for your church, and every church needs no reflection on our part, only obedience. Glory is not a threat to reaching lost people but is actually the most biblical and God-honoring way to get there.

No personal quiet time, no Christian book, no community or small group or service can substitute for the absence of God coming down to meet with His church corporately.

Eventually everyone vacates church where God is not obviously present and working. Getting people back to church is pointless unless God comes back first—that's what Vertical Church is all about! Ritual church, tradition church, felt-need church, emotional-hype church, rules church, Bible-boredom church, relevant church, and many other iterations are all horizontal substitutes for God come down, we all get rocked and radically altered, Vertical Church.