Quotes about Church

It is most unfortunate that, in the long history of the church, "faith" has been almost everywhere transubstantiated into "belief," which transposes the concrete practicality of trust into a cognitive enterprise. How ludicrous that in the long, oppressive history of orthodoxy—which guards cognitive formulations—that those who enforce right belief seem most often to be themselves unable or unwilling to engage in deep trust.

the church is, in my judgment, called to its public vocation to practice neighborliness in a way that includes both support of policies of distributive justice and practices of face-to-face restorative generosity.

My judgment is that as long as the pastors of the church are embarrassed by this urgent language to God and assume in our Enlightenment model that such rhetoric has no actual force, we will not get very far in the struggle for justice.

In practice, I suggest that it is the liturgy that is to enact the settled coherence of church faith, and the sermon that provides the "alien" witness of the text, which rubs against the liturgic coherence.118 There can, in my judgment, be no final resolution of the tension between the systemizing task of theology and the disruptive work of biblical interpretation. It is the ongoing interaction between the two that is the work of interpretation.

The contemporary American church is so largely enculturated to the American ethos of consumerism that it has little power to believe or to act.

Intercession, that is, intrusion into the courts of power on behalf of another, is central to the church's action in prayer.

There is no practical area in the life of the church in which reform is more urgent than in the church's propensity (in all of its manifestations) to silence. Such reform, like every moment of reform, means a return to the core claims of the gospel. In this case, it is the core claim of the baptismal formula of Galatians 3:28 concerning the third element of "male and female.

God does not blame me for being an individual, but for my individualism. His greatest problem is not the outward divisions and denominations that divide His church, but our own individualistic hearts.

While the church is indeed to stand under the authority of the biblical witness, it must avoid bibliolatry and read Scripture with sensitivity to its particular historical contexts and its diverse literary forms.

We can still fall into the trap of self-deceit today. It always begins through pride and arrogance, somehow thinking that our ways are superior to God's ways. In this season when the church celebrates Jesus' mighty work of redemption, let's not miss the joy of complete obedience to God's will and plans for our life.

There is so much wisdom in the straightforward words of A. W. Tozer: The church is famishing for want of his presence. The instant cure of most of our religious ills would be to enter the presence in spiritual experience, to become suddenly aware that we are in God and that God is in us. This would lift us out of our pitiful narrowness and cause our hearts to be enlarged.

Is it any wonder why church is so important? Some think they can live the Christian life without a strong local fellowship, but I'm not one of them. I know how important it is for me to unite with others to fix my mind on what is right, pure, lovely, and admirable—to think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise. What's on your mind? Is it excellent?