Church Ministry Quotes

One of the things that happened when the church moved from meetings in homes to having purpose-built buildings beginning before, but accelerated during, the Constantinian era, is that while the church itself was becoming less Jewish in character, it began to apply a more and more Old Testament hermeneutic to its discussions about church, ministry, and sacraments. The church began to be seen as a temple or basilica, the Lord's Supper began to be seen as a sacrifice, and naturally enough the ones offering the sacrifices, just as in Leviticus, were seen to be priests. There was the further move in this direction when Sunday began to be seen as the Sabbath, another example of this same sort of hermeneutic. There were considerable problems with this whole hermeneutic from the start, since nowhere in the New Testament is there set up a class of priests or clerics to administer any sacraments. Indeed, nowhere was there a clear separation between life in the home and life in church. What has often been missed in the discussions of the effects of all this is that it ruled women out of ministry in the larger church and indeed ruled them out of celebrating the Lord's Supper as well, since in the Old Testament only males were priests and only priests could offer sacrifices. ~ Ben Witherington III

I've never known anyone who has fallen into sin and been successfully restored by the formal church structure. Nor have I ever seen a formal church structure wisely deal with sin, enabling ministry to continue without interruption. ~ Ted Haggard

A piece of paper doesn't make you a pastor any more than making predictions makes you a prophet. ~ D.R. Silva

If people like us, our life is good. If somebody doesn't like us, our whole life is tanked. That happens at your job, especially in church ministry. It seems like everybody's your boss sometimes. You're trying to keep everybody happy and pretty soon you realize you're filling yourself up with other people's opinions of you. That's a dangerous place to live. ~ Mark Hall

He that is more frequent in his pulpit to his people than he is in his closet for his people, is but a sorry watchman. ~ John Owen

One of the most amazing and perplexing features of mainstream Christianity is that seminarians who learn the historical-critical method in their Bible classes appear to forget all about it when it comes time for them to be pastors. They are taught critical approaches to Scripture, they learn about the discrepancies and contradictions, they discover all sorts of historical errors and mistakes, they come to realize that it is difficult to know whether Moses existed or what Jesus actually said and did, they find that there are other books that were at one time considered canonical but that ultimately did not become part of Scripture (for example, other Gospels and Apocalypses), they come to recognize that a good number of the books of the Bible are pseudonymous (for example, written in the name of an apostle by someone else), that in fact we don't have the original copies of any of the biblical books but only copies made centuries later, all of which have been altered. They learn all of this, and yet when they enter church ministry they appear to put it back on the shelf. For reasons I will explore in the conclusion, pastors are, as a rule, reluctant to teach what they learned about the Bible in seminary. ~ Bart D. Ehrman

Work is not all there is to life. You will not have a meaningful life without work, but you cannot say that your work is the meaning of your life. If you make any work the purpose of your life - even if that work is church ministry - you create an idol that rivals God. Your relationship with God is the most important foundation for your life, and indeed it keeps all the other factors - work, friendships and family, leisure and pleasure - from becoming so important to you that they become addicting and distorted. ~ Timothy J. Keller

A preacher's life should be a commentary upon his doctrine ... Heavenly doctrines should always be adorned with a heavenly life. ~ Thomas Brooks

I have talked with many pastors whose real struggle isn't first with the hardship of ministry, the lack of appreciation and involvement of people, or difficulties with fellow leaders. No, the real struggle they are having, one that is very hard for a pastor to admit, is with God. What is caused to ministry become hard and burdensome is disappointment and anger at God.

We have forgotten that pastoral ministry is war and that you will never live successfully in the pastorate if you live with the peacetime mentality. Permit me to explain. The fundamental battle of pastoral ministry is not with the shifting values of the surrounding culture. It is not the struggle with resistant people who don't seem to esteem the Gospel. It is not the fight for the success of ministries of the church. And is not the constant struggle of resources and personnel to accomplish the mission. No, the war of the pastor is a deeply personal war. It is far on the ground of the pastor's heart. It is a war values, allegiances, and motivations. It's about the subtle desires and foundational dreams. This war is the greatest threat to every pastor. Yet it is a war that we often naïvely ignore or quickly forget in the busyness of local church ministry.

When you forget the Gospel, you begin to seek from the situations, locations and relationships of ministry what you already have been given in Christ. You begin to look to ministry for identity, security, hope, well-being, meeting, and purp ~ Paul David Tripp

Remove the centrality-of-Jesus-Christ message from ministry and meetings, and you can forget church life or organic meetings. He must be the center of everything ... not in lip service, but in the dynamic experiential whole. ~ Gene Edwards

Jesus has not promised to build your ministry; he has promised to build his church. ~ Rick Warren

This leaves us with the urgent question: How can we be or become a caring community, a community of people not trying to cover the pain or to avoid it by sophisticated bypasses, but rather share it as the source of healing and new life? It is important to realize that you cannot get a Ph.D. in caring, that caring cannot be delegated by specialists, and that therefore nobody can be excused from caring. Still, in a society like ours, we have a strong tendency to refer to specialists. When someone does not feel well, we quickly think, 'Where can we find a doctor?' When someone is confused, we easily advise him to go to a counselor. And when someone is dying, we quickly call a priest. Even when someone wants to pray we wonder if there is a minister around. ~ Henri J.M. Nouwen

We should not only attend church but must have a ministry in the church as well ~ Sunday Adelaja

Well it was not exactly a dissertation in logic, at least not the kind of logic you would find in Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica for instance. It looked more like mathematics; no formalized language was used. ~ Alonzo Church

The church has paid a terrible price for statistics! ~ Leonard Ravenhill

Neither shall they learn, &c. The law of Christ is a law of peace; and all his true MICHEAS The glories of Christ's church ~ Anonymous

Notice in Acts 4 that there were "no needy persons among them." Why? Because they shared with "anyone one who had need." The expression of neediness in the community allowed the economy of love to flow. But in churches in America and other places where affluence poses special problems, the situation is very different. These cultures are enslaved to the fear of death and death avoidance holds serious sway. In these cultures the expression of need is taboo and pornographic. What results is neurotic image-management, the pressure to be "fine." The perversity here is that on the surface American churches do look like the church in Acts 4 - there are "no needy persons" among us. We all appear to be doing just fine, thank you very much.

But we know this to be a sham, a collective delusion driven by the fear of death. I'm really not fine and neither are you. But you are afraid of me and I'm afraid of you. We are neurotic about being vulnerable with each other. We fear exposing our need and failure to each other. And because of this fear - the fear of being needy within a community of neediness - the witness of the church is compromised. A collection of self-sustaining and self-reliant people - people who are all pretending to be fine - is not the Kingdom of God. It's a church built upon the delusional anthropology we described earlier. Specifically, a church where everyone is "fine" is a group of humans refusing to be human beings and pretending to be gods. Such a "church ~ Richard Beck

True blues ain't no new news about who's been abused
For the blues is as old as my stolen soul
I sang the blues when the missionaries came
Passing out bibles in Jesus' name
I sang the blues in the hull of the ship
Beneath the sting of the slavemaster's whip
I sang the blues when the ship anchored the dark
My family being sold on a slave block
I sang the blues being torn from my first born
And hung my head and cried when my wife took his life
And then committed suicide.
I sang the blues on the slavemaster's plantation helping
Him build his free nation
I sang the blues in the cottonfield, hustlin' to make the daily yield
I sang the blues when he forced my woman to beg
Lord knows how I wished he was dead
I sang the blues on the run, ducking the dogs and dodging the gun
I sang the blues hanging from the tree in a desperate attempt to break free
I sang the blues when the sun went down, cursing the master when he wasn't around
I sang the blues in all these wars dying for some unknown cause
I sang the blues in a high tone, low moan, loud groan, soft grunt, hard funk
I sang the blues in land sea and air, about who when why and where
I sang the blues in church on sunday, slaving on monday, misused on tuesday, abused on wednesday, accused on thursday, fried alive on friday, and died on saturday.
Sho nuff singing the blues
I sang the blues in the summer, fall winter ~ Jalal Mansur Nuriddin

Lobbing hand grenades on the bride of Christ takes zero talent or effort. I also think this really ticks God off. My five-year-old child complains and whines when things aren't the way she wants them, but courageous men and women roll up their sleeves and get busy. I want to be an active participant in putting back together the broken pieces. ~ Mike Foster

We're not church planters. We are community planters and, as we work in our communities, we join local churches. ~ Shane Claiborne

Sending his emissaries to sinners rather than sinners trying to make their way to God by their own skill, cleverness, imagination, or efforts. God has already accommodated himself to our weakness. He is not far from us, if we will but attend to the ministry of the Word. Therefore, we must resist "the sky's the limit" when it comes to accommodation. The Bible must be read, sung, and preached in the common language of the people, but when we introduce skits, musicals, and puppet shows on the basis of wanting to bring God down to the level of the people, they can only conclude that God has not already accommodated himself sufficiently through the ministry of the Word. ~ Michael S. Horton

Rashi was trained to wrestle with God like Jacob at Bethel, to bargain with him like Moses at Mt. Sinai. Rashi's people have an ancient tradition of questioning God "face-toface, as a man speaks with his friend." [Exodus 33:11] Conversely, I abandoned my faith because it seemed I had no right to question the difficulties, much less expect answers. I had been taught to accept ready-made dogma rather than to personally take my doubts to God.
Make no mistake; I do not blame the church for my lost time. I might well have fallen away no matter what. But it is just possible that several years of painful isolation from the Lord might have been avoided had I learned at an early age this simple truth that most Reform Jews know:
God loves an honest question. ~ Athol Dickson

I enjoy going to church. ~ Katharine McPhee

Oh, without prayer what are the church's agencies, but the stretching out of a dead man's arm, or the lifting up of the lid of a blind man's eye? Only when the Holy Spirit comes is there any life and force and power. ~ Charles Spurgeon

The less power a church has, the more entertainment it has. ~ Leonard Ravenhill

According to her views," her niece later recalled, "little girls were to be taught to move very gently, to speak softly and prettily, to say 'yes, ma'am' and 'no, ma'am,' never to tear their clothes, to sew, to knit at regular hours, to go to church on Sunday and make all the responses, and to come home and be catechised." Harriet ~ Noel B. Gerson

The single greatest influence in our lives was the church. The Catholic Church in the 1960s differs from what it is today, especially in the Naugatuck Valley, in those days an overwhelmingly conservative Catholic place.
I was part of what might have been the last generation of American Catholic children who completely and unquestioningly accepted the supernatural as real. Miracles happened. Virgin birth and transubstantiation made perfect sense. Mere humans did in fact, become saints. There was a Holy Ghost. Guardian angels walked beside us and our patron saints really did put in a good word for us every now and then. ~ John William Tuohy

How can we say that the Church wishes to bring us back into the Dark Ages? The Church was the only thing that ever brought us out of them. ~ G.K. Chesterton

The most stupendous system of organized robbery known has been that of the church towards woman, a robbery that has not only taken her self-respect but all rights of person; the fruits of her own industry; her opportunities of education; the exercise of her judgment, her own conscience, her own will. ~ Matilda Joslyn Gage

Manny has it made in church ~ Jeff Kinney

A red brick Presbyterian church ... captured by kudzu vines as surely as a butterfly in a net. ~ Barbara Ascher

How much we need, in the church and in society, witnesses of the beauty of holiness, witnesses of the splendour of truth, witnesses of the joy and freedom born of a living relationship with Christ! ~ Pope Benedict XVI

The fun-raising adjunct to many church bazaars is commonly known as a carnival, which used to mean the celebration of the flesh; now a carnival is okay because the money goes to the church so that it can preach against the temptations of the Devil! It will be said that these things are only pagan devices and ceremonies- that the Christians borrowed them. True, but the Pagans reveled in the delights of the flesh, and were condemned by the very same people who celebrate their rituals, but call them by different names. ~ Anton Szandor LaVey

We should wash the fur of the magistrate and clean out his mouth whether he laughs or rages. Christ has instructed us preachers not to withhold the truth from the lords (rulers) but to exhort and chide them in their injustice. Christ did not say to Pilate "You have no power over me". He said that Pilate did have power, but he said, "You do not have this power from yourself. It is given to you from God." Therefore he upbraided Pilate. We do the same, we recognize the authority, but we must rebuke our Pilates in their crime and self-confidence. Then they say to us, "You are reviling the majesty of God" to which we answer, "We will suffer what you do to us, but to keep still and let it appear that you do right when you do wrong, that we cannot and will not do." We must confess the truth and rebuke the evil. There is a big difference between suffering injustice and keeping still. We should suffer, we should not keep still. The Christian must bear testimony for the truth and die for the truth. But how can he die for the truth if he has not first confessed the truth? Thus Christ showed that Pilate did exercise authority from God and at the same time rebuked him for doing wrong. ~ Martin Luther

if we can't worship the same God together inside the same church buildings, then we will still knock on your door and so irritate you thatyou cannot worship your white God in peace, that you cannot escape thinking about the problems of segregation even on Sunday morning, that we are just letting you know that every single aspect of your Southern Way of Life is under attack. ~ Stephen R. Haynes

In the midst of the heavy, hot fragrance of summer, and of the clean salty smell of the sea, there was the odor of wounded men, a sickly odor of blood and antiseptics which marked the zone of every military hospital. All Athens quickly took on that odor, as the wounded Greek soldiers were moved out of hospitals and piled into empty warehouses to make way for German wounded. Now every church, every empty lot, every school building in Athens is full of wounded, and on the pathways of Zappion, the park in the heart of Athens, bandaged men in makeshift wheel chairs are to be seen wherever one walks. Zappion is a profusion of flowers, heavy-scented luxurious flowers; but even the flower fragrance is not as strong as that of blood. ~ Betty Wason

Shayna wasn't so lucky. She waved as she passed her. "Looking good, Mrs. Mancuso."
No. She wasn't. Mrs. Mancuso's neck skin dragged a path between the tulips. "Go to church and get some morals, hussy! ~ Cecy Robson

Where I can preach I do preach and where I can't I still preach with love but just not the normal words we usually use in church. ~ Nick Vujicic

Never does sin so reign in the Church or State, as when it has gained reputation,or, at least, is no disgrace to the sinner,nor is a matter od offence to we who behold it. ~ Richard Baxter

Lillian was determined that her next role would be Hester Prynne in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and assumed she only needed to find the right actor to play opposite her as Reverend Dimmesdale. Mayer informed her there was a much larger issue at stake; The Scarlet Letter was on the Hays office "blacklist" of books that could not be filmed. The very idea of a blacklist was ridiculous to Lillian and she took up the matter directly with Will Hays. While he would occasionally publicly chastise the studios, Hays never forgot that the full name of his office was the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America and worked to smooth the path any and every way he could. He told Lillian that the major source of objection was "the Protestant Church, especially the Methodists," and directed her to the heads of several church and women's organizations where she forcefully presented her case. Even with Hays's assistance, no other actress had the personal and professional reputation pure enough to garner the response she received: the ban would be lifted if she was "personally responsible" for the film.

Lillian turned her attention to finding the consummate Dimmesdale and Mayer suggested she watch Lars Hanson in The Saga of Gosta Berling. The studio boss had seen Mauritz Stiller's film in Berlin the previous December and he immediately put the director and the film's three stars, Hanson, Mona Martenson, and Greta Gustafsson, all under contract. Lillian agreed ~ Cari Beauchamp

Not all parachurch ministries are bad; in fact, the best ones foster collaboration across churches for important ministry and unity. ~ Mark Driscoll

Being accepted by the world is the worst thing that can happen to the Church. ~ Michael L. Brown

Christianity challenged Rome's most basic set of values. The peculiar, mysterious religion forced a distinction - between what it meant to be a Roman and what it meant to be a Christian. The church fathers were quite aware that they were Roman citizens, but they also understood that their faith in Christ transcended the political and social values of their day. ~ Michael Babcock

I just followed my parents' example and advice on living, which was to leave the world a better place than you found it. They were professional do-gooders, ministers of the church, social workers, teachers, and missionaries, that sort of thing. ~ Ian McKellen

The fact is that if the Christian home, church, and school have done their job well and the student has learned well, he may be one of the few on the earth who understand the real world. ~ Jim Berg

That's the biggest purpose of religious gathering: permission to look terrible in public. We used to go to church to confess our worst behaviour, to be heard and forgiven, then to be redeemed and accepted back into our community
Chuck Palahniuk in interview with TMO ~ Chuck Palahniuk

Once an old woman at my church said the secret is that God loves us exactly the way we are and that he loves us too much to let us stay like this, and I'm just trying to trust that. ~ Anne Lamott

Power is of an encroaching nature. ~ James Madison

It is perhaps not the Church and all that it stands for that some fear so, but instead the demons of humanity that lurk within, tainting its Holy walls with their evil and their lust and their malice.

And what if that window into our own souls wasn't just to show us our reflections, the good and bad of who we are, but instead the reflection of the whole world around us, and how we see that, in all its entirety of good and evil. ~ Ross Turner

As the church watches from the sidelines, the ungodly elect atheists and homosexuals to school boards and legislatures to enact policies and laws that destroy our Christian children and discriminate against Christian families. ~ Robert Simonds