Organic Church Quotes

When we start putting together systems to make sure that future generations obey, what we end up doing is building an institution that conforms people to a pattern. They don't have their own faith, they're living off the residue of faith of a previous generation. ~ Neil Cole

Every believer is called to teach and each needs to exercise toward this function. Otherwise, they will remain a babe and never mature. Sharing what the believer has learned should begin as soon as a person comes to know the Lord. ~ Henry Hon

In regard to education, something has been done by the Provincial Legislature; but to build churches, and to place clergymen is a work of greater difficulty. ~ John Strachan

The church changes the world not by making converts but by making disciples. ~ John Wesley

Want something?"
"Yeah, your mouth on my dick."
Remi's eyes darkened.
"I also want your cock up my ass."
Lust and shock slid across Remi's face. "You… you…. Are you saying you want to mate?"
Fuck yes, I was. We'd talked, and I knew what we faced. Didn't matter. I wanted him. All that other shit was unimportant. He was all that mattered. "Yes."
Remi's eyes widened. "We don't have…. We can suck each other off. I can…. We can - "
"Am I your mate?" I demanded.
Remi blinked. "Hell yes."
I noticed he hadn't let go of my cock. "Do you want me?"
Remi gulped and nodded frantically. His hair whipped around his face. "More than my next breath."
"You've explained how we mate, correct?"
"Yes."
"Then as far as I'm concerned, there's no reason to wait. Yes, we have a bunch of issues to deal with, but you want me, and I want you. Is that right ~ M.A. Church

The goal of this office will not be to favor one religious group over another - or even religious groups over secular groups. It will simply be to work on behalf of those organizations that want to work on behalf of our communities, and to do so without blurring the line that our founders wisely drew between church and state. ~ Barack Obama

Growing up in the church in West Virginia, faith is always there. It's part of the fabric of the culture. ~ DeVon Franklin

Higher education holds itself out as a kind of universal church, outside of which there is no salvation. ~ Peter Thiel

We'd been told that the village was already liberated, that there would be no resistance, but there it was, sat between the bakery and the church like a horsefly on a slice of melon. We'd been so relaxed we didn't even notice it until the barrel swung round towards us like the eye of a muddy crocodile and its jaws released the shell that killed two of us outright and young Tommy Kenah three days later in his hospital bed. ~ Claire North

Blue glanced at her watch. A few minutes until eleven. The old legends recommended the church watch be kept at midnight, but the dead kept poor time, especially when there wasn't a moon. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

The Catholic Church is an innately conservative rock - they call themselves the 'rock of Peter' - and its resistance to change is, ironically, what has kept it constant throughout the ages. ~ Gabriel Byrne

I am for marriage. I am for fidelity. I am for love, whether it's a man and woman, a woman and a woman, a man and a man. I think the ship has sailed and I think the church needs
I think this is the world we are living in and we need to affirm people wherever they are. ~ Rob Bell

The only use for military service is that it reveals the number of morons in the population," he would remark. "And that can be discovered in the first two weeks; there's no need for two years. Army, Marriage, the Church and Banking: the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Yes, go on, laugh. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon

I couldn't go to church and worship God if I didn't try to help that man. ~ Harper Lee

I think that if people would be willing to grow some of their own food or eat locally grown organic foods on a regular basis we could significantly decrease the amount of harmful chemicals we pump into our soil every day. ~ Gary Player

I know married Catholics in a second union who go to church, who go to church once or twice a year and say I want communion, as if joining in Communion were an award. It's a work towards integration, all doors are open, but we cannot say, 'from here on they can have communion.' ~ Pope Francis

You don't serve God by saying: the Church is ineffective, I'll have none of it. Your pain at its lack of effectiveness is a sign of your nearness to God. We help overcome this lack of effectiveness simply by suffering on account of it. ~ Flannery O'Connor

Women learn in such a system that, though they are usually tolerated in life and often loved, they are seldom respected for themselves, for their opinions, for their talents, for their perspectives. The life of a woman shrivels under the weight of an unnatural deference and lost development. Women live knowing that inside themselves is a capped well, a fount of untapped treasure, a person gone to waste. The spiritual life of a woman never knows total maturation in an environment that never seeks her opinions, her interpretations, her insights, and her experience of God. Whatever ministry she was born to perform never comes to light, is lost to the church, dies on the vines that were never cultivated. ~ Joan D. Chittister

The United Nations emerged as a temple of official good intentions, a place where governments might - without abating their transgressions - go to church; a place made remote - by agreed untruth and procedural complexity, and by tedium itself - from the risk of intense public involvement. ~ Shirley Hazzard

In 1962 (Engel v. Vitale), the Supreme Court explained that the word 'church' would no longer mean a federally established denomination; it would now mean a religious activity in public. ~ David Barton

So no, I did not rinse out the damned pickle jar." He flopped on the other bed. "And since I'll be going to hell for breaking into a church and stealing holy water, I'll be sure to mention your name when I get there." He paused. "You're probably on Satan's wish-list anyway. ~ Suzanne Johnson

there was a common understanding that religion generally served the powerful, who manipulated the words of the gods and prophets to justify their greed and lust for power. Yet Christianity comes in numerous guises; mystical to dogmatic; it is used by some as a reason to justify their wars, their oppression and their hatreds. Others use it to oppose those wars and other injustices. ~ Ron Jacobs

In your eyes I see the doorway to a thousand churches. ~ Peter Gabriel

So the women would not forgive. Their passion remained intact, carefully guarded and nurtured by the bitter knowledge of all they had lost, of all that had been stolen from them. For generations they vilified the Yankee race so the thief would have a face, a name, a mysterious country into which he had withdrawn and from which he might venture again. They banded together into a militant freemasonry of remembering, and from that citadel held out against any suggestion that what they had suffered and lost might have been in vain. They created the Lost Cause, and consecrated that proud fiction with the blood of real men. To the Lost Cause they dedicated their own blood, their own lives, and to it they offered books, monographs, songs, acres and acres of bad poetry. They fashioned out of grief and loss an imaginary world in which every Southern church had stabled Yankee horses, every nick in Mama's furniture was made by Yankee spurs, every torn painting was the victim of Yankee sabre - a world in which paint did not stick to plaster walls because of the precious salt once hidden there; in which bloodstains could not be washed away and every other house had been a hospital. ~ Howard Bahr

The hippopotamus's day Is passed in sleep; at night he hunts; God works in a mysterious way- The Church can sleep and feed at once. ~ T. S. Eliot

Spiritually, we have marginalized the Bible. We've trivialized marriage, and we've neutralized the church. America today is in great turmoil. It feels like the soul of our nation has been taken from us. ~ David Jeremiah

Although it is a bit of a caricature, I think that there is some truth in the generalizations I'm about to make. The tendency in Roman Catholic theology is to view the kingdom of Christ as a cosmic ladder or tower, leading from the lowest strata to the hierarchy led by the pope. Anabaptists have tended to see the kingdom more as a monastery, a community of true saints called out of the world and a worldly church. Lutheran and Reformed churches tend sometimes to see the kingdom as a school, while evangelicals (at least in the United States) lean more toward seeing it as a market. ~ Michael S. Horton

You tell me: Can you live crushed under the weight of the present? Without a memory of the past and without the desire to look ahead to the future by building something, a future, a family? Can you go on like this? This, to me, is the most urgent problem that the Church is facing. ~ Pope Francis

There can have been no doubt in Eleanor's mind as to what was expected of her as a wife. In her day, women were supposed to be chaste both inside and outside marriage, virginity and celibacy being highly prized states. When it came to fornication, women were usually apportioned the blame, because they were the descendants of Eve, who had tempted Adam in the Garden of Eden, with such dire consequences. Women, the Church taught, were the weaker vessel, the gateway to the Devil, and therefore the source of all lechery. St. Bernard of Clairvaux wrote: "To live with a woman without danger is more difficult than raising the dead to life." Noblewomen, he felt, were the most dangerous so fall. Women were therefore kept firmly in their place in order to prevent them from luring men away from the paths of righteousness.

Promiscuity--and its often inevitable consequence, illicit pregnancy--brought great shame upon a woman and her family, and was punishable by fines, social ostracism, and even, in the case of aristocratic and royal women, execution. Unmarried women who indulged in fornication devalued themselves on the marriage market. In England, women who were sexually experienced were not permitted to accuse men of rape in the King's court. Female adultery was seen as a particularly serious offence, since it jeopardized the laws of inheritance.

Men, however, often indulged in casual sex and adultery with impunity. Because the virtue of high-born women was jealo ~ Alison Weir

That pew became a confessional. There, with a fully clothed, fully present Kyle, he left his plans for lifelong commitment to only the Church in a smoldering pile. This woman, this broken, brave, perfect woman was what he needed. They talked again - about funny parishioners and childhood stories. Anything they thought, they said. ~ Debra Anastasia

The TV shouted an old black-and-white film he didn't recognize, wheelchairs facing it like church pews. ~ Sere Prince Halverson

President Hinckley is not only a living prophet but also a living seer. He sees things that others do not see. He has the gift of discernment; he is an optimist and a realist ... Through President Hinckley's divine guidance, the Church has received many far-reaching blessings, many that are not obvious. I strongly encourage each of you to more closely follow his counsel and guidance, for truly 'a seer hath the Lord raised up unto his people' (Moses 6:36). ~ David E. Sorensen

We have to make a human pyramid displaying the foundations of the Catholic Church and the most frightening aspect, according to Brother Louis, is that Thomas Mackee is holding up the pyramid which makes the whole future of the church incredibly shaky. ~ Melina Marchetta

If you're not ministering and using your gifts in the church, then something God wants done is being ignored. ~ Craig Groeschel

I'm a preacher first and a writer second, although my role is changing a bit at the church. I'm going to bring on a co-teacher, but I'll still be a pastor and a writer. ~ Max Lucado

This paradox - how a belief founded on a gospel of love could cause so much pain - is a big reason why people are leaving the church in droves. And it's no small part of my struggle as I step into the pilgrim realm. ~ Timothy Egan

After the dedication, Eleanor saw Bernard privately, probably at her own request. He came prepared to offer more spiritual comfort, thinking that she too might be suffering qualms of conscience over Vitry, but he was surprised to learn that she was not. Nevertheless, several matters were indeed troubling her, not the least the problems of her sister. She asked him to use his influence with the Pope to have the excommunication on Raoul and Petronilla lifted and their marriage recognised by the Church. In return, she would persuade Louis to make peace with Theobald of Champagne and recognise Pierre de la Chatre as Archbishop of Bourges.

Bernard was appalled at her brazen candour. In his opinion, these affairs were no business of a twenty-two-year-old woman. He was, in fact, terrified of women and their possible effects on him. An adolescent, first experiencing physical desire for a young girl, he had been so filled with self-disgust that he had jumped into a freezing cold pond & remained there until his erection subsided. He strongly disapproved of his sister, who had married a rich man; because she enjoyed her wealth, he thought of her as a whore, spawned by Satan to lure her husband from the paths of righteousness, and refused to have anything to do with her. Nor would he allow his monks any contact with their female relatives.

Now there stood before him the young, worldly, and disturbingly beautiful Queen of France, intent upon meddling in matte ~ Alison Weir