I grew up in the Holiness Church, where prayer was an event.

No religion can long continue to maintain its purity when the church becomes the subservient vassal of the state.

My life has far exceeded my expectations not because of my own personal efforts or mindset but because of my friends who have enriched my existence

Husbands and wives, recognize that in marriage you have become one flesh. If you live for your private pleasure at the expense of your spouse, you are living against yourself and destroying your joy. But...

Let God Himself be the main attraction at church again, and let us be tireless in our insistence that church is for God, about God, through God, and to the glory of His great Son.

The way to preserve the peace of the church is to preserve its purity.

My mom always says I cut my teeth on the church pew.

The Church has an excellent appetite. She has swallowed whole countries and the questionHas never risen of indigestion. Only the Church . . . can take Ill-gotten goods without stomach-ache!

You have to treat that. You have to get rid of that. Believe in Christ. Be converted.

When we consider that so few generations had passed since thechurch left off disemboweling innocent men before the eyes of theirfamilies, burning old women alive in public squares, and torturingscholars to the point of madness...

Bombs have kill-radiuses; churches should have love-radiuses–anyone within twenty miles of a church should know it.

Clearly the person who accepts the Church as an infallible guide will believe whatever the Church teaches.

The church is like Noah’s ark. It stinks, but if you get out of it, you’ll drown.

I grew up in San Francisco in the 1970s. We were part of a church that belonged to the California Jesus movement.

My double drags his coffin, humble slave,I, at least, am real, though changed to flesh.Far-off, I build me a church no hand can shape(“Winter Sonnets: III”)

Officially, the New Testament church at an early stage took seriously their responsibility for widows who lacked family or other resources. The office of deacon was instituted initially to address this pressing need.

I remind you that there are churches so completely out of the hands of God that if the Holy Spirit withdrew from them, they wouldn’t find it out for many months

Don’t let hard lessons harden your heart.

I’m not particularly in favor of doctrine or creed, ordination, the elevation of holy texts, the institution of church, or, for that matter, Christianity. Like most religions, it has irreconcilable shortcomings and an unforgivable history....

You stand out like a fart in church.

The Gospel of Judas is a kind of protest literature. It’s challenging leaders of the church.

If people think honoring pastors means doing everything they say, why don’t they honor Jesus the same way?

The preachers and lecturers deal with men of straw, as they are men of straw themselves. Why, a free-spoken man, of sound lungs, cannot draw a long breath without causing your rotten institutions to come...

The moment we care for anything deeply, the world – that is, all the other miscellaneous interests – becomes our enemy. Christians showed it when they talked of keeping one’s self “unspotted from the world;”...

I must admit, that I have learned more from my negative experiences than I have ever learned from my positive one.

There is an obsession in the Church with sin management. People think more about their sins than about their redemption through Jesus

We all have that divine moment, when our lives are transformed by the knowledge of the truth.

May our lives and gentle spirit be evident to all that we are members of God’s family.

The most important part of religion isn’t in any church. It’s down in your own heart. Religion is in your thoughts, and in the way you act from day to day, in the way you...

I was a virgin. People find that hard to believe, but when you’re raised in a church, that was just the way it is.

Stay in church, stay in prayer, stay in the Word, and stay in fellowship with other believers.

How vigilant we must be to ensure that we don’t allow our impression of Jesus to be held captive by the prevailing mores of our secular culture! Rather, it is essential that we continue to...

The church I had loved so much was not a good place for me to hear the sound of my own voice. There was room for my talent but no room for my voice. The...

Without vision, a church devolves into a lukewarm, aimless organization characterized by infighting, budget grabbing and a dead heart for the lost.

The loss of connection between churches and neighborhoods creates a corresponding loss of localized imagination and creates an addictive-like dependence on acontextual experts who scan the physical and spiritual horizon for ‘success.

The organist was almost at the end of the anthem’s long introduction, and as the crescendo increases the cathedral began to glitter before my eyes until I felt as if every stone in the building...

But, actually, so many of the clerics that I’ve met, particularly the Church of England clerics, are people of such extraordinary smugness and arrogance and conceitedness who are extraordinarily presumptuous about the significance of their...

You can’t say asses in church unless you are speaking of donkeys.

Oh, it’s terrible what these young people do to themselves, in my lsi other drugs, is a terrible thing”.Then you look, the woman who speaks in this way: you have no eyes, no teeth, no...

If God be near a church, it must pray. And if he be not there, one of the first tokens of his absence will be a slothfulness in prayer.

All agree that, the first responsibility for the alleviation of poverty and distress and for the care of the victims of the depression rests upon the locality — its individuals, organizations and Government. It rests,...

How to love is the real question. We all know to love and to keep loving more, but man’s confusion comes from the differing opinions on how to love. The Church will always be accused...

Even as a man just recovering from illness walks only so far as he is obliged to go, with a slow and weary step, so the converted sinner journeys along as far as God commands...

My job as a Christian is not to get people to heaven when they die, it’s to get heaven to people while they’re alive

Government should not be involved in marriage at all, I believe. There’s no reason for it. I don’t get the value of my marriage government, I get it from God. I want the government out...

An historic institution, which never went right, is really quite much of a miracle as an institution that cannot go wrong.

The secret to strong leaders is that strong leaders are strong because they have been tempered by the negative. They have discovered the secret of combining the negative and the positive to PRODUCED their very...

The cross has two sides to it. One side is what Jesus did for us. He forgave us our sins. The other is the God side. God now lives in man!

For his own unfathomable reasons, God chooses to disguise himself when he comes to this planet, and there have been few disguises better than the church.

Look at yourself! You’re a priest. You know damn well that if I were setting out to make a girl at this moment instead of young Paolo, you’d take an entirely different view. You’d disapprove,...