Church Politics Quotes

The Tories in England had long imagined that they were enthusiastic about the monarchy, the church and beauties of the old English Constitution, until the day of danger wrung from them the confession that they are enthusiastic only about rent. ~ Karl Marx

There's no stronger bulwark of sound conservatism than the evangelical church, and no better place to make friends who'll help you to gain your rightful place in the community than in your own church-home! ~ Sinclair Lewis

I did not worry about what a man or woman personally believed, but the nation's official religion should be outwardly practiced by all its citizens. A religion was a political statement. Being a Calvinist, a papist, a Presbyterian, an Anglican labeled a person's philosophy on education, taxes, poor relief, and other secular things. The nation needed an accepted position on such concerns. Hence the fines for not outwardly conforming to the national church. ~ Margaret George

We sometimes think, and even like to think, that the two greatest exertions that have influenced mankind, religion and science, have always been historical enemies, intriguing us in opposite directions. But this effort at special identity is loudly false. It is not religion but the church and science that were hostile to each other. And it was rivalry, not contravention. Both were religious. They were two giants fuming at each other over the same ground. Both proclaimed to be the only way to divine revelation. ~ Julian Jaynes

All politics are local, and so in church. ~ Greg Boyle

Adulterers in churches and pornography in the schools, you got gangsters in power and lawbreakers making rules. When you gonna wake up? ~ Bob Dylan

Thomas Jefferson declared, stating that he was speaking on behalf of the other founding fathers, ... (that) we should build a wall between the church and state. ~ Jimmy Carter

Securing, not prohibiting, the orderly transfer of wealth from A to B, based on wealth differentials, is the raison d'être of the [New Deal programs]. The contrast between the modern progressive and classical liberal agendas could not be more explicit. ~ Richard A. Epstein

The child tends to be stripped of all social influences but those of the market place, all sense of place, function and class is weakened, the characteristics of region and clan, neighborhood or kindred are attenuated. The individual is denuded of everything but appetities, desires and tastes, wrenched from any context of human obligation or commitment. It is a process of mutilation; and once this has been achieved, we are offered the consolation of reconstituting the abbreviated humanity out of the things and the goods around us, and the fantasies and vapors which they emit. A culture becomes the main determinant upon morality, beliefs and purposes, usurping more and more territory that formerly belonged to parents, teachers, community, priests and politics alike. ~ Jeremy Seabrook

I think there is a limit beyond which free speech can't go….a limit that is very seldom mentioned. It's the point where free speech begins to collide with the right to privacy… I don't think there are any other conditions to free speech. I have the right to say and to believe anything I please, but I don't have the right to press it on anybody else. For example, take for instance the Catholic Church, which I am on good terms with, personally, but which I have no belief in whatsoever. I have a right to print my dissent from its doctrines, to utter them. I have exercised that right for many years. But I have no right to go on the cathedral steps on Sunday morning, when the Catholics are coming out from High Mass, and make a speech denouncing them. I don't think there is any such right. Nobody has got the right to be a nuisance to his neighbors, or to hurt his neighbor's feelings wantonly. If they come to him and say "What do you think of this Mass that we have just finished?", I think that he has the right to answer. But he has no right to press his opinions on them. Of course you'll notice the peculiar thing about the United States, where there is very little free speech. Free speech is a very limited right, in this country, as I have learned to my bitter experience, more than once. Yet, it is the country where the right to press opinions on reluctant hearers is carried to a development that is unheard of on earth. The whole country's full of propagandists who are bothering ev ~ H.L. Mencken

I didn`t change. The Democratic Party slid to the Left from right under me. ~ Charlton Heston

When a civil servant or politician acts out of self-interest, it's called corruption, but when a citizen does it, it's called public interest. ~ Abhijit Naskar

The church hates a thinker precisely for the same reason a robber dislikes a sheriff, or a thief despises the prosecuting witness. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll

We went to church sometimes, so it's not like Mom had anything against religion, but Kerry totally did and Mom was ferociously protective of the people she loved, so much that she took insults up them personally. ~ Gayle Forman

The spontaneous expansion of the Church reduced to its elements is a very simple thing ... What is necessary is faith. What is needed is the kind of faith which uniting a man to Christ, sets him on fire. ~ Roland Allen

Revolutions are infinite. ~ Yevgeny Zamyatin

The world must learn to work together, or finally it will not work at all. ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

The best critique of what is wrong is the practice of something better. So let's stop complaining about the church we've experienced and work on becoming the church we dream of. ~ Shane Claiborne

Unfortunately, a lot of liberals seem to choose what policies to support based on whether they make them feel nice or mean, instead of whether they work. ~ John Hawkins

Emerence understood nothing of this. She rejected it. Like the leader of some primitive tribe she flew her standard - a sequinned evening dress - against the banner of the Lamb of God. The old woman opposed the church with an almost sixteenth-century fanaticism; not only the priesthood, but God himself and all the biblical characters, with the single exception of Joseph, whom she revered for his occupation: her own father had been a carpenter. ~ Magda Szabo

To regret religion is to regret Western civilization. ~ Theodore Dalrymple

I liked this shop very much, it has a cynical and obstinate look, it insolently recalled the rights of dirt and vermin, only two paces from the most costly church in France. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

Preaching is the primary means of growth for the local church. There is a great deal of debate about this in our day, but it is the preaching of the Word that God most uses to build up a church, not only numerically but above all (and far more importantly) in spiritual depth and understanding of the people who make up the congregation. ~ James Montgomery Boice

The church on earth is full of souls healed by our beloved Physician; and the inhabitants of heaven confess that "he healed them all." Come, ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

The elms and the poplars were turning their ruffled backs to a sudden onslaught of wind, and a black thunderhead loomed above Ramsdale's white church tower when I looked around me for the last time. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

The kind of sociopolitical structure that Protestantism engenders - based on free inquiry, participatory politics, and limited government - tends to favor market economics. ~ Alec Ryrie

The time is well past for the church, particularly the Western church, to rethink and reimagine what it means to be the church in the twenty-first century. ~ Richard R. Dunn

It is hard to believe that many of those now exercising authority in the Church appears to have as their dearest ambition the obliteration of the most Sacred Prayer [1962 Latin Mass] from the face of the earth - and would it be too outrageous to suggest that where they do manage to obliterate the Sacred Prayer, the sacrifice which it enshrines may vanish too? ~ Michael Treharne Davies

The Journal of Discourses ranks as one of the standard works of the Church, and every right-minded Saint will certainly welcome with joy every Number as it comes forth from the press as an additional reflector of 'the light that shines from Zion's hill. ~ George Q. Cannon

There is no relationship here between Church and State. Religious liberty has its unalterable place, along with civil and human liberty, in the very foundation of the Republic. I hold it [religious intolerance] to be a menace to the very liberties which we boast and cherish. ~ Warren G. Harding

I've met Obama a few times, and I think Obama's a quality human being, but I think that he finds himself in a position where your actions are largely dictated by things out of your control. I'm not giving him a pass for not being more courageous, but I do think the entire system needs an overhaul and taking money out of politics would be a really good first step. ~ Shepard Fairey

Nations and governments come and go, but people remain, and therefore people are the ultimate foundation of what is real and worthy. ~ Bryant McGill

In politics, yesterday's lie is attacked only to flatter today's. ~ Jean Rostand

A church determined to hold only those doctrines that a secular world finds adequately comprehensible is a church that will hold to no central vital Christian teaching whatsoever. ~ Albert Mohler

Our goals are the same, to have a just system of economics and politics, to let the people of the world share in growth, in peace, in personal freedom, and in the benefits to be derived from the proper utilization of natural resources. We believe in enhancing human rights. We believe that we should enhance, as independent nations, the freedom of our own people. ~ Jimmy Carter

You can do a lot with diplomacy, but with diplomacy backed up by force you can get a lot more done. ~ Kofi Annan

The human race will possess the technology to create God. Why not build this being? Emerging technologies such as nanotechnological molecular manufacturers will likely be so powerful and potentially destructive that it will take God to master them. God may turn out to be inevitable simply in order for the human race to save itself. If virtue as excellence is ultimately identical with evolutionary perfection, then virtue is ultimately identical to whatever leads evolution towards a higher state of perfection. Virtue as excellence is thus ultimately inseparable from evolutionary ethics. Evolutionary ethics ties or morality with whatever is conductive to evolutionary progress. If politics is control over evolution, then is virtue the values that best steer political control over evolution? ~ Mitchell Heisman

When we think "mission" we must think "church." And the best way to link church and mission is through church planting. ~ Tim Chester

Peace isn't the absence of wars provoked by a series of delinquents of all sort, but a dynamic process of cooperation between states and people ... ~ Ahmed Padia Binkatabana

All the arts, music, the visual arts, acting and dancing arts, cooking arts, and I believe sports, will save the human race because they can leap over barriers, religions, leap over barriers of race, politics. ~ Pete Seeger

I wonder what really goes on in the minds of Church leadership who know of the data concerning the Book of Abraham, the new data on the First Vision, etc ... It would tend to devastate the Church if a top leader were to announce the facts. ~ Thomas Ferguson

Being president is like being a jackass in a hailstorm. There's nothing to do but to stand there and take it. ~ Lyndon B. Johnson

The only candidate I'd allow to play my music would be Bigfoot, and unless we're talking about foraging for squirrels, he's notoriously apolitical. ~ Greg Gutfeld

A tree's a tree. How many more do you need to look at? ~ Ronald Reagan

God, Benny, don't blow your nose like that in the church. You'd lift half the congregation out of their seats," Patsy warned. ~ Maeve Binchy

It is not necessary to believe in God to be a good person. In a way, the traditional. Notion of God is outdated. One can be spiritual but not religious. It is not necessary to go to church and give money - for many, nature can be a church. Some of the best people in history do not believe in God, while some of the worst deeds were done in His name. ~ Pope Francis

A politics that defines itself by difference holds no appeal for me. ~ Douglas Alexander

But as the weeks passed, he began to look forward to the hour spent in the fellowship room, with its blue carpet and bay window view of the walled garden that set the church apart from the rest of the campus. He began to recognize faces and see them as individuals--sunny, serious, smart, fun--understanding that they were distinct individuals, even in their faith in God. ~ Cara Wall

To be conservative in politics is to take one's bearings not from the latest bright idea about how to make a better world, but by looking carefully at what the past reveals both about the kind of people we are and the problems that concern us. As we get older, we often become conservative in our habits, in our family practices, and in our recognition of the richness of our civilization, but this evolution of our character into a set of habits in no way blocks adventurousness. The old no less than the young may be found starting new enterprises, sailing around the world, and solving arcane academic questions. But it is in the ordinary business of life that we find our excitement, not in foolish collective dreams of political perfection. ~ Kenneth Minogue

Probably no other meeting we hold in the Church has the high referral and future baptismal harvest that a baptismal service does. Many of the investigators who attend a baptismal service (that is, the service of someone else being baptized) will go on to their own baptisms. That is more likely to occur if this service is a spiritual, strong teaching moment in which it is clear to participants and visitors alike that this is a sacred act of faith centered on the Lord Jesus Christ, that it is an act of repentance claiming the cleansing power of Christ, that through His majesty and Atonement it brings a remission of sins as well as, with confirmation, membership in His Church. ~ Jeffrey R. Holland

Ordinary" has to be one of the loneliest words in our vocabulary today. Who wants a bumper sticker that announces to the neighborhood, "My child is an ordinary student at Bubbling Brook Elementary"? Who wants to be that ordinary person who lives in an ordinary town, is a member of an ordinary church, and has ordinary friends and works an ordinary job? Our life has to count! We have to leave our mark, have a legacy, and make a difference. And all of this should be something that can be managed, measured, and maintained. We have to live up to our Facebook profile. It's one of the newer versions of salvation by works. ~ Michael S. Horton