Quotes about Church

If you're not ministering and using your gifts in the church, then something God wants done is being ignored.

And the church does not exist for us. We are the church, and we exist for the world.

Training is an active, dynamic process lived out daily in all areas of life- not a rote exercise in memorizing verses and going to church every week.

When did we, as Christ followers, start to think that the church exists for us? When did we forget that we are the church? And that we're here for the world?

The problem with thinking "we go to church" is that it gives us a consumer mindset: I'm looking for a church that meets my needs. I need a good church that will help me.

When it comes to the church what has your answer been? Has it been no? Has it been, "Well, maybe, if I have time"? Or has it been an unconditional yes? Imagine how your life might change if you were willing to say to your church and to God, My answer is yes. Anything. Anywhere. Anytime. Use me as your church and for your glory.

the early church fathers provide abundant evidence that gifts such as prophecy and miracles continued in their own time, even if not as abundantly as in the first century. Christians in the medieval and modern periods continued to embrace these activities of the Spirit. It is, in fact, cessationism that is not well documented in earlier history; it seems no coincidence that it arose only in a culture dominated by anti-supernaturalism.

So pervasively has Enlightenment culture's anti-supernaturalism affected the Western church, especially educated European and North American Christians, that most of us are suspicious of anything supernatural.

As Elijah's mantle fell on Elisha and as other prophetic disciples sought to emulate their mentors, so the ascending Jesus empowered his church with the Spirit to carry on his mission to the ends of the earth (1:9—11).

Romanists tell us that the Pope is the vicar of Christ; that he is his successor as the universal head and ruler of the Church on earth. If this is so, he must be a Christ.

When pastors don't have rich spiritual lives with Christ, they become victimized by other models of success - models conveyed to them by their training, by their experience in the church, or just by our culture.

But the standard churchy spirituality doesn't require any real action, courage, or sacrifice from its attendees.