Quotes about Church

He looked around the church, at the altar, the tabernacle, the brass candles, and the European saints, pale like albinos in the dark continent.

The Church condemns violence, but it condemns indifference more harshly. Violence can be the expression of love, indifference never. One is an imperfection of charity, the other the perfection of egoism.

This is what every follower of Jesus should be engaged in on a regular basis: sharing our faith, leading others to Christ, discipling them, and helping them to get grounded in the church—and then going out and doing it all again.

A poll by researcher George Barna revealed that about 25 percent of the adults in the United States would go to church if a friend would just invite them.

The full concept of discipleship includes sharing our faith, leading people to Christ, and helping them to mature in their faith. But somewhere along the line, the church has separated evangelism from discipleship.

Today, 75 percent of young people who grew up in Christian homes and churches are now abandoning their faith as young adults. More than one-third of millennials say they are unaffiliated with any faith, up 10 percentage points since 2007.

The church is to be set apart (sanctified) not by possessing a special religious piety but by participating in and manifesting the perfect eternal love of God. As Bonhoeffer said, "Jesus calls men, not to a new religion, but to life.

As the New Testament and the church tradition teach, the life of God is nothing other than the perfect love that eternally unites the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and this Triune God spoke creation into being with the ultimate goal of inviting humans to share in this life. This is what God created us to long for!

Since the primary motive of the evil is disguise, one of the places evil people are most likely to be found is within the church. What better way to conceal one's evil from oneself, as well as from others, than to be a deacon or some other highly visible form of Christian within our culture?"

What kind of holiness does the Western Church manifest today? To answer this, we need only ask: Are the prostitutes and tax collectors of our day attracted to us or repelled by us?

In a creation populated with free agents, God doesn't always get what he wants. Augustine and the church tradition that followed him were simply mistaken when they insisted that the will of the omnipotent is always undefeated. Because God desires a creation in which love is a reality, he allows his will to be defeated to some extent.

The creational monotheism of the Bible and of the church seems to logically require something like a prehistoric fall, regardless of how we interpret the Chaoskampf material of the Old Testament. Assuming that there is one eternal Creator God who is all-good and all-powerful, it is illogical to posit a foundational structural evil within the cosmos.