Quotes about Church

According to Barna surveys, 61 percent of today's youth had been churched at one point during their teen years but are now spiritually disengaged.

what about grace? How rare to find a church competing to "out-grace" its rivals.

Jimmy Carter taught a Sunday school class throughout his presidency, winning the grudging respect of reporters who had once questioned his religious talk as a political ploy. Even so, he lost many Christians' votes to Ronald Reagan, the only U.S. president to have been divorced and who rarely attended church and gave little to charity, mainly because Reagan supported many of the favorite causes of the religious Right.

The church works best as a force of resistance, a counterbalance to the consuming power of the state.

Unfortunately, most of my secular friends would agree with Bill Gates, who considers religion a waste of time: "There's a lot more I could be doing on Sunday morning," he told an interviewer. They view the church not as a change agent that can affect all of society but as a place where like-minded people go to feel better about themselves.

A church that lives by power dies by power.

It has taken me years to distill the Gospel out of the subculture in which I first encountered it. Sadly, many of my friends gave up on the effort, never getting to Jesus because the pettiness of the church blocked the way.

The message of this book has the power to reform the church, one relationship at a time.

see the confusion of politics and religion as one of the greatest barriers to grace. C. S. Lewis once said that almost all crimes of Christian history have come about when religion is confused with politics. Politics, which always runs by the rules of ungrace, allures us to trade away grace for power, a temptation the church has often been unable to resist.

A similar cycle has recurred throughout church history. Christians present an attractive counterculture until they become the dominant culture. Then they divert from their mission, join the power structure, and in the process turn society against them. Rejected, they retreat into a minority subculture, only to start the cycle all over again.

Church is a place where I can say, unashamedly, I don't need to sin. I need another sinner.

Sadly, Jesus' followers tend to take the reverse approach. Some churches gradually lower the ideals, accommodating moral standards to a changing culture. Others raise the bar of grace so that needy people feel unwelcome: "We don't want that kind of person in our church." Either way we fail to communicate the spectacular good news that everyone fails and yet a gracious God offers forgiveness to all.