Emergent Church Quotes

Our real beliefs are generally not to be found at the level of ego. ~ Peter Rollins

My problem with the Emergent Church is not the questions they are bringing up, but the answers they are giving. They are making Christianity milky. They are making it so you can no longer define anything. There is no sound judgment allowed. ~ Eric Ludy

What we see taking place in the church today is the reduction of God to an idol. ~ Peter Rollins

Dialogue with Catholics and other nonevangelical Christians offered some correction to the Church Growth movement's fixation on cultural accommodation and baptism rates. However - save for those few who converted - evangelicals attracted to other Christian traditions have made those traditions their own. They assemble do-it-yourself liturgies from a hodgepodge of monastic prayers and mystics' visions. They lionize medieval dissenters - Celtic monks, or renegade Franciscans - but don't understand their broader Catholic context. Without quite realizing what they have done, evangelicals often use these ancient teachings and practices to confirm, rather than challenge, their own assumptions. History becomes a sidekick to one's twenty-first-century journey with Jesus. ~ Molly Worthen

The emergent Church is the latest act in the wave of antimodernist revolt by liturgical renewal and charismatic revival, a rebellion whose central insight is that rationalistic fundamentalism, as much as liberalism, is a mass of worldly accretions. The historical record and human feeling, not the illusion of inerrancy, are supposed to command authority in the post-Christian age. Yet American evangelicals' craving for clear authority is second only to their refusal to let any authority boss them around. Skeptics note that the Emergent Church is a movement of quintessentially evangelical individualists. 'By constantly appealing to the "capital T" Tradition, and then in effect picking and choosing from its offerings, they do not succeed in living out any of the traditions that flow from the Tradition, but create their own eclectic, ad hod churchmanship,' wrote D.A. Carson, a professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. 'It is controlled by what these emerging thinkers judge to be appropriate in the postmodern world - and this results, rather ironically, in one of the most self-serving appeals to tradition I have ever seen. ~ Molly Worthen

As they seek authenticity, Emerging Evangelicals seek freedom - from loneliness, convention, unwanted authority, dominant paradigms, the prevailing social climate, and impersonal bureaucracies. Ironically, in this sense, their preferred narrative and their desired subjectivity are just as modern as what they seek to distance themselves from: the conservative Christian subculture, including its born-again narrative of awakening and transformation. ~ James S Bielo

If I have so far argued that Foucault is a kind of closet liberal and thus deeply modern, I need to be equally critical of evangelical (and especially American) Christianity's modernity and its appropriation of Enlightenment notions of the autonomous self. Indeed, many otherwise orthodox Christians, who recoil at the notion of theological liberalism, have unwittingly adopted notions of freedom and autonomy that are liberal to the core. Averse to hierarchies and control, contemporary evangelicalism thrives on autonomy: the autonomy of the nondenominational church, at a macrocosmic level, and the autonomy of the individual Christian, at the microcosmic level. And it does not seem to me that the emerging church has changed much on this score; indeed, some elements of emergent spirituality are intensifications of this affirmation of autonomy and a laissez-faire attitude with respect to institutions. ~ James K.A. Smith

I think there is a shadow network where everybody has infiltrated in terms of hotel concierges, restaurants, will tip off journalists or paparazzi, the airlines, everywhere. ~ Charlotte Church

It's exciting to hear them talking about poetry and science and philosophy - about Shakespeare and Milton; Newton and Einstein and Freud; about Plato and Hegel and Kant, and all the other names that echo like great church bells in my mind. ~ Daniel Keyes

Again, a conversation with the doctor. We always come back to the same point: "The church may not mix in politics." he says. And I tell him that when you are a Christian and profess that God is almighty, there is no single area of life from which you can eliminate God. -From the diary of Diet Eman ~ Diet Eman

What I'm talking about here, by the way, is salvation. The latin root, salve, means 'health.' The Teutonic cognates 'health' and 'holy' share the same root. Being agnostic about the afterlife, I look for salvation here - not to be saved from life, but to be saved by life, in life, for life. ~ Forrest Church

Let me tell you one story to illustrate what I mean. I remember a woman who was a spiritist, and even a medium, a paid medium employed by a spiritist society. She used to go every Sunday evening to a spiritist meeting and was paid three guineas for acting as a medium. This was during the thirties, and that was quite a large sum of money for a lower middle-class woman. She was ill one Sunday and could not go to keep her appointment. She was sitting in her house and she saw people passing by on their way to the church where I happened to be ministering in South Wales. Something made her feel a desire to know what those people had, and so she decided to go to the service, and did. She came ever afterwards until she died, and became a very fine Christian. One day I asked her what she had felt on that first visit, and this is what she said to me; and this is the point I am illustrating. She said, 'The moment I entered your chapel and sat down on a seat amongst the people I was conscious of a power. I was conscious of the same sort of power as I was accustomed to in our spiritist meetings, but there was one big difference; I had a feeling that the power in your chapel was a clean power.' The point I am making is simply this, that she was aware of a power. This is this mysterious element. It is the presence of the Spirit in the heart of God's children, God's people, and an outsider becomes aware of this. This is something you can never get if you just sit and read a book on your own ~ D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

If the churches don't move, much of the community won't move. We've got a situation in which a black church is still a major institution in the black community where 55 percent of the black folk attend and over 75 pass through its doors. ~ Cornel West

If there is one thought with regard to the Church of Christ, which at times comes to me with overwhelming sorrow; if there is one thought in regard to my own life of which I am ashamed; if there is one thought of which I feel that the Church of Christ has not accepted it and not grasped it; if there is one thought which makes me pray to God: "Oh, teach us by Thy grace, new things" - it is the wonderful power that prayer is meant to have in the kingdom. [ ... ] And that is the law of the kingdom - the King upon the throne, the servants upon the footstool. ~ Andrew Murray

Thousands of people have entered churches without discovering a vital experience with Jesus Christ. The substitutes have been handed them in the guise of religious rituals, good works, community effort, or social reform ... none of which can gain a person a right relationship with God. ~ Billy Graham

As I say, it never ceases to amaze me how gullible some of our Church members are ... "
Admonitions for the Priesthood of God", Ensign, Jan 1973 ~ Harold B. Lee

The Catholic Church is like a thick steak, a glass of red wine, and a good cigar. ~ G.K. Chesterton

[As a young man ] I came to the conclusion that the church was just a bunch of fascists that supported Franco. I stopped going on Sunday mornings and watched the birds with my father instead. ~ James D. Watson

Preaching' is common, oral, gospel proclamation by the entire church. It is not, and never was, pulpit oratory. In the New Testament, the word 'preaching' is almost never used to describe discipleship sermons within the four walls of a building. It is missionary proclamation to lost people out in the world. The audience is generally a group of people who have not been introduced to the Savior. ~ Daniel Sheard

R. C. Sproul (theologian & pastor; b. 1939): "We are persuaded that the biblical mandate is still in effect... If there's ever an indication of a perpetual ordinance in the church, it is that which is based on an appeal to Creation... I don't think it matters one bit whether it's a babushka, a veil, or a hat, but I think that the symbol should remain intact as a sign of our obedience to God."[150] ~ David Phillips

I have a huge chip on my shoulder. ~ Eric Church

President J. Reuben Clark, Jr., a modern prophet, said over and over again that the Lord would never let one of his Saints who had been faithful in the payment of tithes and offerings go without the necessities of life" (Marion G. Romney, "The Blessings of an Honest Tithe," New Era, Jan.-Feb. 1982, 45). Members who faithfully pay tithing are promised spiritual blessings as well. "I think it is not well known in the Church that payment of tithing has very little to do with money. Tithing has to do with faith ~ A. Theodore Tuttle

Maybe you've attended church for five, ten, or even twenty years, but you've never cracked open the Bible to prepare yourself for effectiveness as His instrument. You've been under the Word, but not in it for yourself. ~ Howard G. Hendricks

If the whole church goes off into deception, that will in no way excuse us for not following Christ. ~ Leonard Ravenhill

The biggest thing is to continue to do what you do. A lot of people, when they get to a certain level, start thinking about it too much and they change what they do. ~ Eric Church

An institution theoretically devoted to providing comfort to those in need (the church) is in trouble because it has embraced the same pressure cooker we find everywhere else. ~ Tullian Tchividjian

Liz Tierney had nothing against the salvation of all men. She was as grateful for the fact of heaven as she was sure of her path toward it. She counted the Blessed Mother as first among her confidantes. She loved the order and the certainty the Church gave her life, arranging the seasons for her, the weeks and the days, guiding her philosophies and her sorrows. She loved the hymns. She loved the prayers. She loved the way the Church - the priests and the Brothers and the nuns, as well as the handy threat of eternal damnation - ordered her disorderly children. But holiness bored her. ~ Alice McDermott

You want to marry me?" Xavier asked, and I saw some faces turn toward u in curiosity. "I was thinking we'd start slow and see where things went, but hey, what the hell! ~ Alexandra Adornetto

By giving us control, our new technologies tend to enhance existing idols in our lives. Instead of becoming more like Christ through the forming and shaping influence of the church community, we form, and shape, and personalize our community to make it more like us. We take control of things that are not ours to control. Could it be that our desire for control is short-circuiting the process of change and transformation God wants us to experience through the mess of real world, flesh and blood, face-to-face relationships? ~ Tim Challies

Be thou an example. ~ The Church Of Jesus Christ Of Latter-day Saints

The moment we care for anything deeply, the world - that is, all the other miscellaneous interests - becomes our enemy. Christians showed it when they talked of keeping one's self "unspotted from the world;" but lovers talk of it just as much when they talk of the "world well lost." Astronomically speaking, I understand that England is situated on the world; similarly, I suppose that the Church was a part of the world, and even the lovers inhabitants of that orb. But they all felt a certain truth - the truth that the moment you love anything the world becomes your foe. ~ G.K. Chesterton

This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body. ~ Walt Whitman

In fact, there are all sorts of great institutions and human enterprises that the Bible doesn't address or regulate. And so we are free to invent them and operate them in line with the general principles for human life that the Bible gives us. But marriage is different. As the Presbyterian Book of Common Worship says, God "established marriage for the welfare and happiness of humankind." Marriage did not evolve in the late Bronze Age as a way to determine property rights. At the climax of the Genesis account of creation we see God bringing a woman and a man together to unite them in marriage. The Bible begins with a wedding (of Adam and Eve) and ends in the book of Revelation with a wedding (of Christ and the church). Marriage is God's idea. ~ Timothy Keller

In 1546 a band of weevils were tried for damaging church vineyards in St Julien. Such trials were rife in the sixteenth century, and the distinguished French lawyer Bartholomew Chassenée rose to fame as an advocate for animals. His work is commemorated in Julian Barnes's mischievous short story 'The Wars of Religion', in which excommunication is sought for a colony of woodworm which had gnawed away the supporting legs of the Bishop of Besançon's throne, causing him to be 'hurled against his will into a state of imbecility'. ~ Richard Mabey

It takes three to make love, not two: you, your spouse, and God. Without God people only succeed in bringing out the worst in one another. Lovers who have nothing else to do but love each other soon find there is nothing else. Without a central loyalty life is unfinished. ~ Fulton J. Sheen

HE TURNED AROUND AND LOOKED BACK down the empty church, ~ Sidney Sheldon

Oh, one of the things that I am most proud of is that people can say, "I am an atheist," in the United States today, without being called a Communist atheist, or an atheist Communist. I separated those two words. I think that's probably the best thing that I did. The other thing is, of course, that we are developing something that we call "modern atheism," or "American atheism," which is entirely different from the materialism of the Greek philosophers. What we are interested in is moving out, in order to see that there is a more viable life cycle for all people, and that the human condition can be ameliorated somewhat by human beings working in concert to do something. We must do something about the pollution. We must do something about the waste. We have to do something about the greed. We must stop war. And we're not going to do any of those things as long as we feel the solution is to go to church on Sunday, or funnel our energy into prayer or religious solutions. Everybody has to get mixed up in the problems, to try to solve them. ~ Madalyn Murray O'Hair

The principle of plural marriage was revealed to the Mormons amid much secrecy. Dark clouds hovered over the church in the early 1840s, after rumors spread that its founder, Joseph Smith, had taken up the practice of polygamy. While denying the charge in public, by 1843 Smith had shared a revelation with his closest disciples. ~ Scott Anderson

The most consistent musical experience I had growing up was church music. ~ Amy Grant

Paul did not begin by attacking the false teachers and their doctrines. He began by exalting Jesus Christ and showing His preeminence in five areas: the gospel message, redemption, creation, the church, and Paul's own ministry. ~ Warren W. Wiersbe

He knew he could never jingle change in his pocket or park his car like a confident adult, he was the Adrian he had always been, casting a guilty look over a furtive shoulder, living in eternal dread of a grown-up striding forward to clip his ear.
But there again, when he sipped at the whiskey his eyes failed to water and his throat forgot to burn. The body shamelessly welcomed what once it would have rejected. At breakfast he demanded not Ricicles and chocolate spread, but coffee and unbuttered toast. And if the coffee was sugared he leapt from it like a colt from an electric fence. He ate the crust and left the filling, guzzled the olives and spurned the cherries. Yet inside he remained the same Adrian who fought down the urge to stand and shout 'Bullocks' during church services, smelt his own farts and wasted hours skimming through National Geographic on the off-chance of seeing a few naked bodies. ~ Stephen Fry

Any revelation from God's Word that does not lead us to an encounter with God only serves to make us more religious. The Church cannot afford 'form without power,' for it creates Christians without purpose. ~ Bill Johnson

The Church is a collection of poor sinners. The Catholic Church is a collection of 1.1 billion very poor sinners. That's a lot of original sins, and it is no wonder we have trouble. ~ Benedict Groeschel

Both church and state claiming to be of divine origin have assumed divine right of man over woman; while church and state have thought for man, man has assumed the right to think for woman. ~ Matilda Joslyn Gage

I feel comfortable singing in the great cathedrals of the world because I spent so much time as a child singing in church. And it isn't very different. Of course, nothing looks quite like Notre Dame de Paris. ~ Jessye Norman

The Church must breathe with her two lungs! ~ Pope John Paul II

I don't know that the Libertarian Party has an official position on the separation of church and state. ~ Michael Badnarik

Becoming a junior usher at a black church was my entry into the wonder of worship. ~ Isaiah Washington