I grew up a Catholic and I don't want to talk badly about the Catholic Church but there's a lot of routine stuff going on. You say the same prayers, you sit, you kneel, whatever.
I believe in the separation of church and state, but I do not believe in the separation of politics from religion.
It can have a secular purpose and have a relationship to God because God was presumed to be both over the state and the church, and separation of church and state was never meant to separate God from government.
It would be far better to be of no church than to be bitter of any.
Even at church, people would not shake my hand.
I am, I think the only surviving member of the original Battle Creek church. The church was disbanded, with the exception of thirteen members, in 1870.
A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.
If it came to saving the life of one priest or sacrificing the life of an entire congregation, the church would save the life of the priest. Which is backwards, of course.
Some churches make intercessory prayer part of their weekly schedule. If that's not the case at your church, find another person in the faith to intercede with or go before God on your own.
I was born again. It happens to Episcopalians. Sometimes it doesn't hit you till you're 47 years old. It changed my whole life for the better... I spent a lot of time giving Christian witness all over the country to church groups and stuff.
If somebody wants to go to church because they like the ritual of it and want to sit in silence for a while one time a week, then that's great. If someone wants to go because they believe that God them and Jesus rose after three days, then that's great, too.
I grew up the son of a Seventh Day Adventist minister, so I was really close to the church and sang church music between sips at my bottle, you know? I sat on the piano bench next to my mother. She was the church organist, so that music is deeply inside of me.
My father is maestro at the Metropolitan church, which gives me an opportunity to write for the church as much as I please.
Gert was always of the mind that she wouldn't go to another church except the Catholic Church. So when I would date her in New York City, and later when we went to Oxford before we got married, we always went to the Catholic church.
It is better to go skiing and think of God, than go to church and think of sport.
I read a lot on the subject and had many conversations, and I have come to the conclusion that the Catholic Church is a force for evil.
One hundred religious persons knit into a unity by careful organizations do not constitute a church any more than eleven dead men make a football team. The first requisite is life, always.
Before I had crossed the threshold of my church I was made to realize that I was shepherd of a divided flock.
If there is anyone who's living the work of the New Testament, it's the nuns of the Catholic church and not the Catholic hierarchy.
If you want to get healthy, you just might not want to go to a doctor. You might instead, go to church.
Christians should emphatically be campaigning for justice for the poor - but the Church is not a campaign.
The Church is the safe place to be. I can safely believe everything the Church teaches. It will not harm me, and in fact it will equip me to grow and grow and have a better and better ability to experience that direct presence.
I consider myself a non-denominational Christian. I grew up in a Bible church and still hold those beliefs very close to me.
The leadership lost its nerve. Instead of taking the lead in the reform movement... they pulled the plug on it. They tried and are still trying to return the church to the dry ice of the previous century and a half.
The great achievement of the Catholic Church lay in harmonizing, civilizing the deepest impulses of ordinary, ignorant people.
The Church has never changed its teaching on the sanctity of human life - it didn't make up a rule for the convenience of a particular time like a rule at a country club as the Governor would have us believe.
Nobody has ever called Shea Stadium a cathedral. In style, it was more like the old warehouse or outdated movie theater that Korean worshippers have transformed into a church in the borough of Queens. Not a cathedral - but a place where people go to be fulfilled, nonetheless.
If I could believe the Quakers banned music because church music is so damn bad, I should view them with approval.
The freedom to be able to offer education, human services, and health care in accordance with our own identity as a church should not be denied us simply because there may be the perception of a political majority who favors a new understanding of the American tradition of pluralism.
When Christians start thinking about Jesus, things start breaking down, they lose their faith. It's perfectly possible to go to church every Sunday and not ask any questions, just because you like it as a way of life. They fear that if they ask questions they'll lose their Christ, the very linchpin of their religion.
The most he would do was to promise that the gates of hell should not prevail against it. It is about all that, looking back on the history of the Church, one can feel that they have not done.
I built my church on Easter services, Christmas Eve services, and Norman Vincent Peale.
In the Church of Scotland, Episcopalian, you don't have to believe in Heaven, but you definitely have to believe in Hell.
Instead of being just a church that welcomes and receives by keeping the doors open, let us try also to be a church that finds new roads, that is able to step outside itself and go to those who do not attend Mass, to those who have quit or are indifferent.
I grew up in a Southern Baptist-style church with a choir, a band, and music, but I've been asking myself my whole life, 'Why is my own church, my own community, rejecting me because of my sexuality?'
I think there's an awful lot of noise about the Church being persecuted but there is a more real issue that the conventional churches face - that the people who are really driving their revival and success believe in an old-time religion which, in my view, is incompatible with a modern, multi-ethnic, multicultural society.
