God expects us to measure the church not against tradition but against the standards & promises of His Word.
What has the church gained if it is popular but there is no conviction, no repentance, no power?
Nothing on earth has greater potential to change lives and carry out His kingdom work in your community, than your local church. There's nothing like the local church when it's working right. Its beauty is indescribable. Its power is breathtaking. Its potential is unlimited. No other organization on earth is like the church. Nothing even comes close.
If you're going to say you're Catholic, you inform your conscience so that you're activities will conform to what God is telling us through the Church. If God is telling you something outside of that, well, the Church will look at that and say: we think it is true or we don't think it is true. The Church might say: that might be true for you but it has no public normative value.
When the church hears the cry of the oppressed it cannot but denounce the social structures that give rise to and perpetuate the misery from which the cry arises.
I had to get rid of any idea of hell or any idea of the afterlife. That's what held me, kept me down. So now I just have nothing but contempt for the institution of the church.
The doctrine of hell is not "mediaeval priestcraft" for frightening people into giving money to the church: it is Christ's deliberate judgment on sin. . . . We cannot repudiate hell without altogether repudiating Christ.
Most people would not want to live where there are no churches but many people live as though there were no churches.
All you have to do is get in a closer walk with God and you'll find your enemies are in your own church.
Our own theological Church, as we know, has scorned and vilified the body till it has seemed almost a reproach and a shame to have one, yet at the same time has credited it with power to drag the soul to perdition.
I am a vicar's daughter and still a practising member of the Church of England.
Apart from the resurrection of Jesus, the eschatological orientation of the church appears as the spoke of a wheel without a hub.
My mother made sure we stayed involved in the church and the things of God. My relationship with Christ came about through that and the influences of my mother and grandmother helped my faith to grow.
The Europeans have fallen away from religion and the church while the rest of the world is seemingly more religious. I don't know how to explain it.
My family took me to church when I was like 4 years old, and I had to be in a pageant, and I was playing Jesus.
The church as we know it today seems a million miles from the New Testament church. That may be a great generalization, but I will stand on it. There is a gulf between our average Christianity and the church of New Testament that makes the Grand Canyon look like a cavity in someone's tooth.
If the state - and within the state, the judiciary particularly - harasses and undermines the Church , in any society the state undoes itself.
Jesus never says to the poor: ‘come find the church’, but he says to those of us in the church: ‘go into the world and find the poor, hungry, homeless, imprisoned.
Here we now have the freedom of all religions, and I hope that never again will we have a repetition of religious bigotry, as we have had in certain periods of our own history. There is no room for that kind of foolishness here.
Folks, it's time to evolve. That's why we're troubled. You know why our institutions are failing us, the church, the state, everything's failing? It's because, um – they're no longer relevant. We're supposed to keep evolving. Evolution did not end with us growing opposable thumbs. You do know that, right?