#Church

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"Growing up, in church we had the homily; at home it's what I call the 'momily' - the inspirational and instructive mom-isms that every family has."

"Prayer will make a man cease from sin, or sin will entice a man to cease from prayer."

"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."

"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."

"Why are those who are notoriously undisciplined and unmoral also most contemptuous of religion and morality? They are trying to solace their own unhappy lives by pulling the happy down to their own abysmal depths."

"... challenge the church to do better, be more of who Christ wants us to be ..."

"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."

"I do know this... I seem to reach a lot of previously unchurched people. So many people have told me they never went to church until they heard our message of hope that God is a good God who desires to bless those who are faithful and obedient to Him through Jesus Christ."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"Those who would renegotiate the boundaries between church and state must therefore answer a difficult question: why would we trade a system that has served us so well for one that has served others so poorly?"

"Sometimes we can focus so much on nothing that we make it a big something of nothing"