Quotes about Church

Cyril lived in the fourth century. His gift to the church was his refusal to separate good doctrine from good living, insisting that orthodoxy (right belief) and orthopraxis (right living) must be married.

For the church as we know it is a tragically dysfunctional family, in which some children are starving while others have food stashed in their closets. Some of us are living on the street while others have empty rooms in our homes. And, of course, there are all sorts of things being done that bring great dishonor and embarrassment to the family name.

Augustine said, "The church is a whore, but she's our mother." The early Christians said that if we do not accept the church as our mother, we cannot call God our Father. We are not to leave her, but we are to work for her healing, as we would with a dysfunctional parent. Our work is not "para-church" but "pro-church." The church needs our discontent, and we need the rest of the body of Christ.

As Don Everts says in his book Jesus with Dirty Feet, "Referring to the church as a building is like referring to people as two-by-fours.

I remain convinced to this day that if we continue to lose young people in the church, it won't be because we made the gospel too hard but because we made it to easy. We

So for those of us who have nearly given up on the church, may we take comfort in the words of St. Augustine: "The Church is a whore, but she's my mother." She

I once heard a pastor say, "The church is like Noah's ark. It stinks, but if you get out of it, you'll drown." I

It's not always a bad thing to struggle. In fact, if you want to find the church alive, you look at places of struggle. Whenever we have triumphed and dominated, we get sick. Christianity is best when it is humble.

God's deepest longing is for the church to be united as one body. In Jesus' longest recorded prayer, he prayed that we would be "one as God is one." As one old preacher said, "We gotta get it together, because Jesus is coming back, and he's coming for a bride, not a harem.

Wouldn't we all go to a church that believes in ordinary fools and ragamuffins and whose gospel is actually good news? I

I remain convinced to this day that if we continue to lose young people in the church, it won't be because we made the gospel too hard but because we made it to easy.

a generation that stops complaining about the church it sees and becomes the church it dreams of. And