Belstead Church Quotes

Current Catholic worship often ignores the essential connection between truth and beauty, body and soul, at the center of the Catholic worldview. The Church requires that we be faithful, but must we also be deaf, dumb, and blind? I deserve to suffer for my sins, but must so much of that punishment take place in church? ~ Dana Gioia

Food history is as important as a baroque church. Governments should recognize cultural heritage and protect traditional foods. A cheese is as worthy of preserving as a sixteenth-century building. ~ Carlo Petrini

Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute? ~ Annie Dillard

Kissing's a good thing, man. It's the doorbell of intimacy. ~ Thomas Haden Church

There was a beautiful church where I lived in Navan, taught by the Christian brothers: fierce, angry men, repressed. ~ Pierce Brosnan

One great idea of the biblical revelation is that God is manifest in the ordinary, in the actual, in the daily, in the now, in the concrete incarnations of life, and not through purity codes and moral achievement contests, which are seldom achieved anyway ... We do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking ... The most courageous thing we will ever do is to bear humbly the mystery of our own reality. ~ Richard Rohr

If you want your kids to know and love God, is it most effective for you to miss church all summer so they can play ball? ~ Herbert Cooper

I want to see the church get closer to the people. I want to get rid of clericalism, the mundane, this closing ourselves off within ourselves, in our parishes, schools or structures. Because these need to get out! ~ Pope Francis

And also those to whom these commandments were given, might have power to lay the foundation of this church, and to bring it forth out of obscurity and out of darkness, the only true and living church upon the face of the whole earth ... ~ Joseph Smith Jr.

The world looks at preachers out of church to know what they mean in it. ~ Richard Cecil

Vanity, showing off, is an attitude that reduces spirituality to a worldly thing, which is the worst sin that could be committed in the church. ~ Pope Francis

It is not the spirit of wealth, of learning, or of culture that can make the church of value, or a power for good in the world, but the spirit of Christ only. ~ Harold Bell Wright

We went to church every Sunday. I do think it's my duty to give back. That's why I'm involved with St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital and the Make-a-Wish Foundation. ~ Jesse McCartney

While we can't force people to be devoted, it may be that we have made it too easy for them not to be. By trying to keep everyone interested and excited, we've created a cheap substitute for devotion. Rather than busying themselves with countless endeavors, the early followers devoted themselves to a few. And it changed the world. It seems like the Church of America is constantly looking for the next new thing. ~ Francis Chan

And I found both literature and the church very dramatic presences in the world of the 1950s. ~ Thomas Keneally

One of the gravestones in the cemetery near the earliest church has an anchor on it and an hourglass, and the words In Hope.
In Hope. Why did they put that above a dead person? Was it the corpse hoping, or those still alive? ~ Margaret Atwood

The library drew Bean down the street, as it had drawn all of us over the years. Our parents had trained us to become readers, and the town's library had been the one place, other than church, that we visited every week. ~ Eleanor Brown

The moment when faith becomes more than rules, you've been taught," Noemi says. "When it becomes a living spirit within you, and guides you. When you're open to God's love and are finally able to show that love to others. I go to church like everyone else, and I pray and I hope...but I've never felt it. Sometimes I think I never will. ~ Claudia Gray

New Rule: If you still think Obama is a Muslim, you just might be a redneck. A Christian church in South Carolina has a sign out front that says 'Obama ... Osama ... Hmmm ... Are they brothers?' No, they're not brothers. In fact, they're not even related, which is more than I can say for the married couples in your church. ~ Bill Maher

Where dogmatics exists at all, it exists only with the will to be a Church dogmatics, a dogmatics of the ecumenical Church. ~ Karl Barth

The Church cannot be content to live in its stained-glass house and throw stones through the picture window of modern culture. ~ Robert McAfee Brown

Summer in England THOSE WORDS ARE SUPPOSED TO CONJURE UP HALCYON SUNNY afternoons; the smell of new-mown hay, little old ladies on bicycles pedaling past the village green on their way to the church jumble sale, the vicar's tea party, the crunching sound of a fast-bowled cricket ball fracturing the batsman's skull, and so on. ~ Charles Stross

The Bible does not authorize us, either by the words of the Lord or His apostles, to believe that the gifts of healing were granted only to the early church; ~ Andrew Murray

The message of the gospel speaks loudest when people can see Christ in us. ~ Jerry Kinard

Everything Hitler did to the Jews, all the horribly unspeakable misdeeds, had already been done to the smitten people before by the Christian churches ... The isolation of Jews into ghetto camps, the wearing of the yellow spot, the burning of Jewish books, and finally the burning of the people - Hitler learned it all from the church. However, the church burned Jewish women and children alive, while Hitler granted them a quicker death, choking them first with gas. ~ Dagobert D. Runes

So it's pretty simple for me: Love when you can. Do the work that is yours to do. Be the person that is yours to be at any given time. Think to wish for what is yours at this very moment. To love. To serve. To touch. To know. Think to wish for all that is yours to have. Think to wish for all that is yours to do. And think to wish that you might be who it is that you might most fully be. Avoid wishful thinking. Avoid the traps and pitfalls of nostalgia for the past. Savor every moment as it passes. And enlist yourself in saving that which can be saved this very moment, ir order that it, too, may endure for others to enjoy. ~ Forrest Church

Zeal, if it be well ordered, is most beautiful in a Christian; but if not, it is a thing of exceeding great danger: as fire in moderation is most comfortable, but in extremity most fearful. ~ Nehemiah Rogers

Someone has said that the marks of a strong church are wet eyes, bent knees, and a broken heart. We'll never be powerful until we let God be God and jealously guard His honor. ~ Erwin W. Lutzer

I read in the newspaper that the Catholic Church finally decided that it had been theologically improper to try to convert the Jews. Whoops! Sorry for all those inquisitions, crusades, and autos-da-fe. Previous popes were wrong - infallible, perhaps, but wrong. ~ Alan Dershowitz

You wonder what had happened, when a feller like that, in a place like that, talked of a childhood that might have as easily belonged to a millionaire, a lawyer, a schoolteacher, you. You had to think he was defective somehow, or had fucked up not once, not twice, but again and again, a peculiar resolve to his life. That was the thing, that resolve. We didn't credit it. You looked at him and your brain said he was on the losing end of one of the two bargains that America made with you. There was the romantic one, that of the rambler, the man out seeking his destiny, living by his wits, all that horseshit. Then there was the classical American dare, that you could risk all, take an internal grudge and make of it a billion dollars and get a monumental tomb in the bargain. But the truth was neither. America was a grindstone. She used those notions as twin abrasives to wear you down into a dutiful drudge walking the straight and narrow. But there was something in the hearts of the some men, some of whom became Fritz, that wouldn't accept that. These men in crummy bars, some of them, most of them, they were main-chance fellers. You could take ten of these wrecks and offer them a salesman's job, a dozen white shirts and ties, forty Gs a year and perks, a neat house on a quiet street, a yard, a car, a dog, a wife, an expense account, a Chinese laundryman, membership in a church, grandkids who'd bounce on their knees, and you'd be lucky if one or two took you up on it. And those two ~ T.D. Badyna

Again and again the Church of Christ has been all but engulfed, as men might have deemed, in the billows; again and again the storm has been calmed by the Master, Who had seemed for awhile to sleep. ~ Henry Parry Liddon

The rain is colder than I expect - which is ridiculous, since it's March. My cheeks are freezing by the time we go two blocks, my hair has a sodden weight on my shoulder. My glasses are so wet I need to shove them in a pocket. I threw Mom's pullover windbreaker over my sweatshirt before leaving the house, thinking it would be waterproof, but I am so wrong.

By the time I make the final turn for the church, I wonder if I'm stupid for being out here. It's pouring so hard that a haze has formed around the streetlight, and I can barely see anything through the darkness.

My sneakers squish in the grass. I get to the spot where we sat for the last two nights.

And of course he's not there.

I sigh. Only a complete moron would go meet in the rain.

Then Texy woofs and bounces on her front paws.

I turn, and it's like I'm in a chick flick. His shadowed figure lopes across the grass.

Okay, maybe the dark and rain make it more like a horror movie than a romantic comedy, BUT STILL.

He draws to a stop in front of me. He had the sense to wear a heavy, waterproof coat over his hoodie, but the hood is soaked and rain drips down his cheeks.

"Hey," he says, his voice a little loud over the rain.

I'm blushing. I tell my cheeks to knock it off. "Hey."

"I wasn't sure you'd show up, but I didn't have a way to text you …"

"I had the same thought process. ~ Brigid Kemmerer

The Church needs a firm hierarchy and is forced to distrust such of her underlings as show a tendency to become too holy. ~ Gabriel Chevallier

I'm free of an abusive cult, based on money and power that worships a fictional deity and safely back with the Catholic Church. ~ Katie Holmes

Over the past thirty-five years, untold numbers of gay Christians have turned from God in their "failure" and "inability to please God," who, they were told, could not accept them as a gay person. Some felt so rejected and depressed that they turned to self-destructive behaviors, including suicide; some went deep in the closet to try to fit in at church; some became vehemently opposed to all things religious; some decided to seek God in other religions, or no religion; and very few individuals were able to find a church community in which they could worship and serve God without being rejected. ~ Kathy Baldock

We are called to be strange in the same way that the early Christian communities were strange to the world around them. The community in Antioch brought together Jews and Samaritans, Greeks and Romans, slaves and free, men and women in a way that was so confusing that people didn't know what to call them. So they called them "Christians." The only way they knew to describe their peculiar actions was to say that they were followers of an odd preacher from Galilee.

The world is longing for such new and odd communities in our time. . . . I pray the time is now and that the resurrection might begin in us. ~ Emmanuel M. Katongole

For many years, despite what I thought were really punitive decisions about women in the church, I stayed and stayed and stayed. I kept saying to myself, "The Catholic church is my church, and by God, I'm going to stay here, despite what the hierarchy does." ~ Anna Quindlen

When I pastored a country church, a farmer didn't like the sermons I preached on hell. He said, Preach about the meek and lowly Jesus. I said, That's where I got my information about hell. ~ Vance Havner

Anyone without a sense of humor is too pretentious to be a good magician. ~ Anton Szandor LaVey

The Church became both more accessible and less imposing. It threw itself open to risk. ~ Lance Morrow

My sense is if the Episcopal Church can't stand challenge within its own ranks, then it is not a church I would want to be a member of anyway. ~ John Shelby Spong