quotations about church
The church and the whorehouse arrived in the Far West simultaneously. And each would have been horrified to think it was a different facet of the same thing. But surely they were both intended to accomplish the same thing: the singing, the devotion, the poetry of the churches took a man out of his bleakness for a time, and so did the brothels.
JOHN STEINBECK
East of Eden
We believe that there is one church of God, catholic and universal, and dispersed throughout the whole world; this church is the kingdom, the body, the spouse of Christ; Christ alone is Prince of this kingdom, the head of this body, the Bridegroom of this spouse.
BISHOP J. JEWELL
attributed, Day's Collacon
The directions which are given in Holy Writ for the formation of the church in the time of the Apostles, are to be applied to the same society in all ages.
WILLIAM HEY
Tracts and Essays
I’m such an alcoholic that I go to church just for communion.
JAROD KINTZ
$3.33
Reader! To whatever visible church, synagogue, or mosque you may belong! See if you do not find more true religion among the host of the excommunicated than among the far greater host who excommunicated them.
MOSES MENDELSSOHN
Jerusalem; or
The story goes that a public sinner was excommunicated and forbidden entry to the church. He took his woes to God. "They won't let me in, Lord, because I am a sinner." "What are you complaining about?" said God. "They won't let Me in either."
BRENNAN MANNING
The Ragamuffin Gospel
Behind this Church, made out of the blood and bricks you see before you, there is another Church, infinite and invisible, whose flags are raised towards heaven. This Church lives in the hearts of the millions of the faithful who love Christ and his message. It will be reborn from its ashes and fill the world.
JUAN GOMEZ-JURADO
God's Spy
The church must grope her way into the alleys and courts and purlieus of the city, and up the broken staircases, and into the bare room, and beside the loathsome sufferer; she must go down into the pit with the miner, into the forecastle with the sailor, into the tent with the soldier, into the shop with the mechanic, into the factory with the operative, into the field with the farmer, into the counting room with the merchant. Like the air, the church must press equally on all the surfaces of society; like the sea, flow into every nook of the shoreline of humanity; and like the sun, shine on things foul and low as well as fair and high, for she was organized, commissioned, and equipped for the moral renovation of the whole world.
BISHOP SIMPSON
attributed, Holy Thoughts on Holy Things
Temples and churches have become social centers. They have lost their original purpose because the minds of the people are more attracted to worldly things than to prayer. The lips repeat the prayer mechanically like a phonograph record, but the mind wanders to other places.
SRI S. SATCHIDANANDA
The Yoga Sutras
There have been times when the church seemed afraid, but she is no longer. Analyze, dissect, use your microscope or your spectrum till the last atom of matter is reached; reflect and refine till the last element of thought is made clear; the church now knows with the certainty of science what she once knew only by the certainty of faith, that you will find enthroned behind all thought and matter only one central idea--that idea which the church has never ceased to embody--I AM!
HENRY ADAMS
Esther
Now to get back to our given Church: it lives almost entirely for modesty and moneyed piety. It zealously inveighs against the harm done to Joseph and the sheep, but it has made its arrangements with the upper classes and serves as their spiritual defender. It bristles at see-through blouses, but not at slums in which half-naked children starve, and not, above all, at the conditions that keep three quarters of mankind in misery. It condemns desperate girls who abort a fetus, but it consecrates war, which aborts millions. It has nationalized its God, nationalized him into ecclesiastic organization, and has inherited the Roman empire under the mask of the Crucified. It preserves misery and injustice, having first tolerated and then approved the class power that causes them; it prevents any seriousness about deliverance by postponing it to St. Never-Ever's Day or shifting it to the beyond.
ERNST BLOCH
Man on His Own
We're gonna make it to the church on time
Need to hear the preacher
Give me a sign
We're gonna make it to the church on time
BEN HARPER
"Church on Time"
Church members are either pillars or caterpillars. The pillars hold up the church, and the caterpillars just crawl in and out.
GRENVILLE KLEISER
Dictionary of Proverbs
I think most people come to the Church by means the Church does not allow, else there would be no need their getting to her at all.
FLANNERY O'CONNOR
letter to "A.", Aug. 9, 1955
Ninety-nine percent of everything that goes on in most Christian churches has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual religion. Intelligent people all notice this sooner or later, and they conclude that the entire one hundred percent is bullshit, which is why atheism is connected with being intelligent in people's minds.
NEAL STEPHENSON
Snow Crash
For this hath ever been reckoned a most certain ground and principle in religion, that that Church, which maintaineth, without error, the faith of Christ; which holdeth the true doctrine of the Gospel in matters necessary to salvation, and preacheth the same; which retaineth the lawful use of those Sacraments only which Christ, hath appointed, and which appointeth vice to be punished and virtue to be maintained; notwithstanding, in some other respects and in some points, it have many blemishes, imperfections, nay, divers and sundry errors, is yet to be acknowledged for the Mother of the faithful, the house of God, the ark of Noah, the pillar of Truth, and the spouse of Christ. From which Church whosoever doth separate himself, he is to be reckoned a schismatic or an heretic.
RICHARD BANCROFT
sermon preached at Paul's Cross, February 9, 1589
Every one went to church -- every one with the exception of two or three families whom I looked upon with a kind of mysterious awe, as I might have looked upon a family without visible means of support and popularly suspected of earning a livelihood by counterfeiting or some similar lawless practice. The church itself was an old-fashioned brick Puritan meeting-house, equally free from architectural ornament without and from decoration within. The pews had been painted white; for some reason the paint had not dried, and the congregation, to protect their garments, had spread down upon the seats and backs of the pews newspapers, generally religious. When the paint at length dried the newspapers were pulled off, leaving the impression of their type reversed, and I used to interest myself during the long sermon in trying to decipher the hieroglyphic impressions. There was neither Sunday-School room nor prayer-meeting room. The Sunday-School was held in the church, and the parson at prayer-meeting took a seat in a pew about the center of the building, put a board across the back of the pews to hold his Bible and his lamp, and sat, except when speaking, with his back to the congregation. A great wood stove at the rear, with a smoke-pipe extending the whole length of the room to the flue in front, furnished the heat -- none too much of it on cold winter days. Plain and even homely as was this meeting-house, associations have given to it a sacredness in my eyes which neither Gothic arch nor pictured window could have given to it. My grandfather was largely instrumental in constructing it. In its pulpit each of his five sons preached on occasions. One of them acted as its pastor for a year or more. A grandson and a great-grandson of his were here baptized. My earliest recollections of public worship and of Sunday-School teaching are associated with it. We four brothers have each at times played the organ in connection with its service of sacred song. My brother Edward and myself were both ordained to the Gospel ministry within its walls, and in its pulpit preached some of our first sermons. The church still exists, a flourishing organization, but the meeting-house was destroyed by fire in 1886, and its place has been taken by a more modern structure.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Reminiscences
What has made the Church of Christ what it is to-day? Our struggles? Did we face the persecutions of Nero? Did we flee from the persecuting hordes in the Waldensian valleys? Did we fight the battles with the Duke of Alva on the plains of Netherlands? Did we struggle with hierarchical despotism at Worcester and at Naseby? Did we face the cold and the suffering of New England? Others have struggled for us, and we have taken the fruit of their struggles; and if our posterity are to have a nation worthy of their possession, it will be because in us there is also some hand-to-hand wrestling, some self-denial, some struggle with the forces of corruption and evil in our own time. This is the great general law which Paul has expressed in the declaration, "The whole creation groaneth and travaileth together in pain until now." Vicarious sacrifice is not an episode. It is the universal law of life. Life comes only from life. This is the first proposition. Life-giving costs the life-giver something. That is the second proposition. Pain is travail-pain, birth-pain; and it is a part of the divine order -- that is, of the order of nature -- that the birth of a higher life should always be through the pain of another.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Theology of an Evolutionist
This church is the pillar and stable foundation of truth, because in it soundeth the voice of the Son of God.
JOHN PHILPOT
The Examinations and Writings of John Philpot
If the Church had not always stood so watchfully behind the ruling powers, there would not have been such attacks against everything it stood for.
ERNST BLOCH
Atheism in Christianity: The Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom