Quotes about Church

The church works best as a separate force, a conscience to society that keeps itself at arm's length from the state. The closer it gets, the less effectively it can challenge the surrounding culture and the more perilously it risks losing its central message. Jesus left his followers the command to make disciples from all nations. We have no charge to "Christianize" the United States or any other country — ?an impossible goal in any case.

positioned myself. I once described the people I tend to hear from as "borderlanders," those caught in a no-person's-land between faith and disbelief. Some approach the church cautiously, attracted to Jesus but turned off by his followers. Some have fled the church due to bad experiences, yet still yearn for the consolation they felt there. I've spent time in the borderlands myself and want to honor those wandering on the edges, the misfits.

many such episodes it became clear that religion allied too closely to the state leads to the abuse of power. Christian experiments with church-state blending, whether in Geneva under Calvin or in Spain and Latin America under the Inquisition, may have worked for a time but inevitably provoked a backlash against the church, such as that seen in secular Europe today.*

The church works best as a force of resistance, a conscience to society that keeps itself at arm's length from the state. The closer it gets, the less effectively it can challenge the surrounding culture and the more perilously it risks losing its central message.

We do not give up on the institution of family because of its imperfections-why give up on the church?

Today, if I had to answer the question "Where is God when it hurts?" in a single sentence, I would make that sentence another question: "Where is the church when it hurts?" We form the front line of God's response to the suffering world.

What would it take for church to become known as a place where grace is "on tap

I can view prayer as a way of asking a timeless God to intervene more directly in our time-bound life on earth. (Indeed, I do so all the time, praying for the sick, for the victims of tragedy, for the safety of the persecuted church.)

The young church was nourished spiritually by apostles who set down their beliefs and messages in a series of letters. The first 13 such letters (Romans through Philemon) were written by the apostle Paul, who led the advance of Christianity through the non-Jewish world.

The church of my own childhood, as well as that of my present and my future, comprises deeply flawed human beings struggling toward an unattainable ideal.

The church has allowed itself to get so swept up in political issues that it plays by the rules of adversarial power. In no other arena is the church at greater risk of losing its calling than in the public square. Somehow the paramount command to love—even to love our enemies—gets lost.

I yearn for a grace-abounding church that rewards rather than punishes honesty, and that, in Jesus' words, exists for the sinners and not the righteous, the sick and not the healthy.