#Church

"Clary felt suddenly annoyed. "When the self-congratulatory part of the evening is over, maybe we could get back to saving my best friend from being exsanguinated to death?""Exsanguinated,"said Jace, impressed. "That's a big word.""And you're a big-""Tsk tsk,"he interupted. "No swearing in church."

"Hide yourself in God, so when a man wants to find you he will have to go there first."

"If you live today, you breath in nihilism ... it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now."

"Two or three angelsCame near to the earth.They saw a fat church.Little black streams of peopleCame and went in continually.And the angels were puzzledTo know why the people went thus,And why they stayed so long within."

"It's time we capture our imaginations for Christ"

"Teenagers who do not go to church are adored by God, but they don't get to meet some of the people who love God back."

"Then the singing enveloped me. It was furry and resonant, coming from everyone's very heart. There was no sense of performance or judgment, only that the music was breath and food."

"Did those nice church ladies come by again?"He nodded. "I asked them if a man died and then the woman remarried, and then the three of them met in heaven, would it be a sin for them to have a threesome, since they were all married in God's eye. And they decided they were late to be somewhere else."

"When my dad founded our church, he used either a globe or a map of the world behind him. It was symbolic of what Christ said: to go forth and preach hope to the world. We believe in the cross, but we just continued with the globe."

"People are not being reached in the context of the body of Christ--they're like newborn babies being left on a doorstep somewhere to feed and care for themselves."

"Before the NSA there was the Catholic Church. What is confessional if not a place to gather secrets? No wonder the church had all the power."

"The problem that we are facing in the church today is that we have so many Christians who have made a decision to believe in Jesus but not a commitment to follow Him. We have people who are planning to, meaning to, trying to, wanting to, going to, we just don't have people who are doing it."

"There is no one true church, no one chosen people."

"The top 10% of the people who are most creative, constructive and thoughtful, do not have much to do with churches. To them the canons of reason come first, making faith secondary and questionable."

"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. What I do favor is the attempt to make sense of things by living within a story. The Christian story, for good or ill, is my inheritance."

"The church is not a theological classroom. It is a conversion, confession, repentance, reconciliation, forgiveness and sanctification center, where flawed people place their faith in Christ, gather to know and love him better, and learn to love others as he designed."

"At church, during communion, they give out free wine. Whoa! Talk about a great place to drink and meet women."

"It’s been said that men think only about sex and food. And some men, like my uncle Lester, think about sex with food. Needless to say the church has ordered him to cease bringing his own food to the potlucks."

"When you are growing up there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully: the church, which belongs to God, and the public library, which belongs to you. The public library is a great equaliser."

"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."