Singing In Church Quotes

I started singing in church and I was probably around seven and I started singing anywhere that I could. I used to sing at my school. I was in musicals and then it kind of got to a point where I started to - wanted to do my own songs. ~ Avril Lavigne

I'm very soulful. I grew up singing in church. When I sing a song, I like to feel what I'm singing. ~ Fantasia Barrino

I started off singing in church as a child. The sound of voices coming together, that was my first moment of touching something outside of myself. ~ Florence Welch

I started my teenage years singing in churches across America, and finally wound up on a big stage. ~ Amy Grant

I'm a true singer who grew up singing in church, so I love singing my heart out. ~ Naturi Naughton

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

It is an easy matter, Olav, to be a good Christian so long as God asks no more of you than to hear sweet singing in church, and to yield Him obedience while He caresses you with the hand of a father. But a man's faith is put to the test on the day God's will is not his. ~ Sigrid Undset

Time is important to me because I want to sing long enough to leave a message. I'm used to singing in churches where nobody would dare stop me until the Lord arrives! ~ Mahalia Jackson

I sang in the choir for years, even though my family belonged to another church. ~ Paul Lynde

am inclined rather to approve the practice of singing in church, although I do not offer an irrevocable opinion on it, so that through the pleasure afforded the ears the weaker mind may rise to feelings of devotion. However, when it so happens that I am moved more by the singing than by what is sung, I confess that I have sinned, in ~ Augustine Of Hippo

When I was 5 years old I started singing in church and I hated my voice because I sounded like a grown woman, not a child. I was ashamed of it. ~ Loleatta Holloway

I was pretty young when I decided I wanted to, well, more so be a singer. I started singing in church in my hometown, East Orange, New Jersey. I knew when I was about five or six that I wanted to be a performer. ~ Naturi Naughton

Far more books get written about how to get more people in your church than how to get the people already in your church to have more humility and sincere love. ~ John Ortberg

Rear your children in light and truth. Teach them to pray while they are young. Read to them from the scriptures even though they may not understand all that you read. Teach them to pay their tithes and offerings on the first money they ever receive. Let this practice become a habit in their lives. Teach your sons to honor womanhood. Teach your daughters to walk in virtue. Accept responsibility in the Church, and trust in the Lord to make you equal to any call you may receive. Your example will set a pattern for your children. Reach out in love to those in distress and need. ~ Gordon B. Hinckley

The central problem of our age is not liberalism or modernism, nor the old Roman Catholicism or the new Roman Catholicism, nor the threat of communism, nor even the threat of rationalism and the monolithic consensus which surrounds us. All these are dangerous but not the primary threat. The real problem is this: the church of the Lord Jesus Christ, individually corporately, tending to do the Lord's work in the power of the flesh rather than of the Spirit. The central problem is always in the midst of the people of God, not in the circumstances surrounding them. ~ Francis A. Schaeffer

I was born in the summer of 1970, the last of five boys stretched over eight years. My parents were a struggling young couple who had been married one afternoon under a shade tree by a preacher without a church. No guests or fancy dress, just the two of them, lost in love, and the preacher taking a break from working on a house. ~ Charles M. Blow

The Eucharist is the life of the people. The Eucharist gives them a center of life. All can come together without the barriers of race or language in order to celebrate the feast days of the Church. It gives them a law of life, that of charity, of which it is the source; thus it forges between them a common bond, a Christian kinship ~ Peter Julian Eymard

My vision of the gathered church that had come to me... had been replaced by a vision of the gathered community. What I saw now was the community imperfect and irresolute but held together by the frayed and always fraying, incomplete and yet ever-holding bonds of the various sorts of affection. There had maybe never been anybody who had not been loved by somebody, who had been loved by somebody else, and so on and on... It was a community always disappointed in itself, disappointing its members, always trying to contain its divisions and gentle its meanness, always failing and yet always preserving a sort of will toward goodwill. I knew that, in the midst of all the ignorance and error, this was a membership; it was the membership of Port William and of no other place on earth. My vision gathered the community as it never has been and never will be gathered in this world of time, for the community must always be marred by members who are indifferent to it or against it, who are nonetheless its members and maybe nonetheless essential to it. And yet I saw them all as somehow perfected, beyond time, by one another's love, compassion, and forgiveness, as it is said we may be perfected by grace. ~ Wendell Berry

Venice appeared to me as in a recurring dream, a place once visited and now fixed in memory like images on a photographer's plates so that my return was akin to turning the leaves of a portfolio: a scene of the gondolas moored by the railway station; the Grand Canal in twilight; the Rialto bridge; the Piazza San Marco; the shimmering, rippling wonderland; the bustling water traffic; the fish market; the Lido beach and boardwalk; Teeny in the launch; the singing, gesturing gondoliers; the bourgeois tourists drinking coffee at Florian's; the importunate beggars; the drowned girl's ghost haunting the Bridge of Sighs; the pigeons, mosquitoes and fetor of decay. ~ Gary Inbinder

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

Lovelessness is a huge sin in the church. The four primary personalities in the New Testament- Jesus, Paul, Peter, and John- all four of them say that love is the most important thing. But the only time love really counts is when something unlovely happens. ~ Jeff Chu

I'm always having to check myself and make sure I'm not over singing in some ensemble thing that will render me unavailable for participation in the stuff where it really counts. ~ Katherine Shindle

There are a still lot of people in today's church who can easily identify the idolatry outside the church and are pretty proud of the fact that they are not like them. And yet, we are far too slow to recognize the idolatry inside the church and more painfully, the idolatry inside our hearts. ~ Tullian Tchividjian

Who does not see that ... the same authority which can force a citizen to contribute three pence only of his property for the support of any one establishment, may force him to conform to any other establishment in all cases whatsoever? ~ James Madison

I grew up in the Methodist church and taught Sunday school, and one of my favorite passages of scripture is, 'in as much as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.' Matthew 25:40. ~ Elizabeth Warren

I have no doubt that ignorance is the biggest obstacle facing the church of the lord Jesus Christ in this age ~ Sunday Adelaja

The true Church is born from above. In it there are no sinners, and outside of it no saints. No man can put another's name on its member's roll; and no man can cross another's name off that roll. ~ Leonard Ravenhill

The slave labors, but with no cheer-it is not the road to respectability, it will honor him with no citizens' trust, it brings no bread to his family, no grain to his garner, no leisure in after-days, no books or papers to his children. It opens no school-house door, builds no church, rears for him no factory, lays no keel, fills no bank, earns no acres. With sweat and toil and ignorance he consumes his life, to pour the earnings into channels from which he does no drink, into hands that never honor him. But perpetually rob and often torment. ~ Henry Ward Beecher

The church is the real thing when it is not consumed with the assertion of power in culture, but it is driven by service to others. The word ministry translates the Greek word diakonia, which means service. The church must be about serving others. When a church can lay claim to all three criteria, namely, preaching of the Word, being true to its confession, and focusing on serving, then it's a church worth going to. And then it's a church full of sermons worth listening to. ~ Stephen J. Nichols

The couch and I were what I would describe as frenemies. I loved to hate it. It was too small for my frame. I had tried to tell my wife that fact when we bought it off of Craigslist, but she assured me that it went perfectly with our room decor and it was a good deal. ~ Anna M. Aquino

J.J. Moses was a star football player in college. He was drafted by the Houston Texans and played for them for six years. He was the kick returner and punt returner. He was as fast as lightning! When he had the ball, he electrified fans, darting here and there. He was amazing to watch.
Playing in the National Football League in front of millions of fans, J.J. was at the pinnacle of success. But during the off seasons--and any time he didn't have a game--do you know where J.J. was every Saturday night?
J.J. was not at home with his feet up. He was not out enjoying his celebrity. He was at our church in Houston, serving others as an usher, helping people to their seats, showing visitors around, passing the offering plates, and making everyone feel welcome.
Many of those who came to church didn't know he was a star football player. In the stadium all the lights were on him. Fans wanted his autograph or pictures with him. J.J. could have allowed his fame to go to his head and thought, "I'm big-time, I'm not serving as an usher. I'm not waiting on people--I want them to wait on me."
Instead, J.J. told me, "My greatest honor was not playing in front of eighty thousand people in the stadium each week. My greatest honor was ushering in my section at Lakewood every Saturday night."
J.J. offers testimony to the fact that you are never too big to serve, never too important, never too influential. ~ Joel Osteen

Christians in community must again show the world, not merely family values, but the bond of the love of Christ. ~ Edmund Clowney

Keda,' she said to herself,' Keda, this is tragedy.' But as her words hung emptily in the morning air, she clenched her hands for she could feel no anguish and the bright bird that had filled her breast was still singing ... was still singing. ~ Mervyn Peake

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

Take a walk down the street and see where this is going. You no longer feel like you are living in your own country. There is a battle going on and we have to defend ourselves. Before you know it there will be more mosques than churches! ~ Geert Wilders

I was thinking back to my own childhood in Ethiopia. The church services of our small Christian Indian community were interminable and conducted in an ancient language, Syriac. My parents and the other Indian Christians in Ethiopia knew the liturgy by heart, it was what they had grown up with. And to stand together in an Ethiopian church that they rented, to worship together in a language that could be traced to St. Thomas and to Jerusalem, was an affirmation of who they were, a connection to a corner of India so far away from Africa. ~ Abraham Verghese

When they [the Church] have opened a gap in the hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world, God hath ever broke down the wall itself, removed the Candlestick, etc., and made His Garden a wilderness as it is this day. And that therefore if He will ever please to restore His garden and Paradise again, it must of necessity be walled in peculiarly unto Himself from the world, and all that be saved out of the world are to be transplanted out of the wilderness of the World. ~ Roger Williams

It is not enough to celebrate Christmas. We need to be changed and shaped by what we are celebrating. If our spiritual life is no better in spite of all our praying, fasting, and church services, then we have not yet begun to fully respond to the significance of Advent and of the Nativity. ~ Vassilios Papavassiliou

The invasion of the Church by the world is a menace to the extension of Christ's Kingdom. In all ages conformity to the world by Christians has resulted in lack of spiritual life and a consequent lack of spiritual vision and enterprise. A secularized or self-centered Church can never evangelize the world. ~ John Mott

We look for evidence of the divine and we find it in nature, in art, in literature, in music in film, so, rather than fear the surrounding culture, and the surrounding cities which predictably results in a bunker mentality the emerging congregation embraces the culture and expects to find God in it the emerging congregation embraces the culture recognizing that its not all pretty but it embraces the culture and even then expects to find god in it because there is nowhere god isn't. there are many places where the church isn't but I don't think that means there are places where god isn't. ~ John Middendorf

When they were done, Dionne took her panties in one hand and her new Bible in the other and let the breeze when it came touch her where Trevor had before. She felt wiser somehow, an looking at the church lit up above, thought that maybe this kin of pleasure could be her religion. ~ Naomi Jackson

It is impossible, Bible in hand, to limit Christ's Church to one's own little community. It is everywhere, in all parts of the world; and whatever its external form, frequently changing, often impure, yet the gifts wherever received increase our riches. ~ Abraham Kuyper

The great danger of the new media is that it seems to relish the superficial. There has been an ethos within the Church for many years to pursue an accommodationist strategy in regards to the culture, and this has resulted in a public presentation of the Faith that is often nebulous or "dumbed down." ~ Robert Barron

She will laugh. The sound is as strange, at Briar, as I imagine it must be in a prison or a church. Sometimes, she will sing. Once we talk of dancing. She rises and lifts her skirt, to show me a step. Then she pulls me to my feet, and turns and turns me; and I feel, where she presses against me, the quickening beat of her heart - I feel it pass from her to me and become mine. ~ Sarah Waters

I would say that social work began in my mind in the Unitarian Church when I was ten or twelve years old, and I started to do things that I thought would help other people. ~ Roger Nash Baldwin

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

One day we came home from some errands to find a grocery sack of [zucchini] hanging on our mailbox. The perpetrator, of course, was nowhere in sight ... Garrison Keillor says July is the only time of year when country people lock our cars in the church parking lot, so people won't put squash on the front seat. I used to think that was a joke ... It's a relaxed atmosphere in our little town, plus our neighbors keep an eye out and will, if asked, tell us the make and model of every vehicle that ever enters the lane to our farm. So the family was a bit surprised when I started double-checking the security of doors and gates any time we all were about to leave the premises.
"Do I have to explain the obvious?" I asked impatiently. "Somebody might break in and put zucchini in our house. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

I long for the Church to be more truly itself, and for me this involves changing its stance on war, sex, investment and many other difficult matters. I believe in all conscience that my questions and my disagreements are all of God. Yet I must also learn to live in and attend to the reality of the Church as it is, to do the prosaic things that can be and must be done now and to work at my relations now with the people who will not listen to me or those like me - because what God asks of me is not to live in the ideal future but to live with honesty and attentiveness in the present, i.e., to be at home.

"What if the project in question is myself, and not some larger social question such as war? At the end of the day, it is the central concern for most of us. We long to change and to grow, and we are rightly suspicious of those who are pleased with the way they are and cannot seem to conceive of changing any further. Yet the torture of trying to push away and overcome what we currently are or have been, the bitter self-contempt of knowing what we lack, the postponement of joy and peace because we cannot love ourselves now - these are not the building blocks for effective change. We constantly try to start from somewhere other than where we are. Truthful living involves being at home with ourselves, not complacently but patiently, recognizing that what we are today, at this moment, is sufficiently loved and valued by God to be the material with which he will work, and ~ Rowan Williams

The question may arise - how can credible Christian organizations justify and condone meditative practices that clearly resemble Eastern meditation? As pointed out earlier in this book, Christian terminology surrounds these practices. It only takes a few popular Christian leaders with national profiles to embrace a teaching that sounds Christian to bring about big changes in the church. Moreover, we have many trusting Christians who do not use the Scriptures to test the claims of others. Building an entire prayer method around an out-of-context verse or two is presumptuous, at best. Now more than ever, it is critical that Christians devote themselves to serious Bible study and discernment regarding this issue. ~ Ray Yungen

We planted the church by starting a Sunday night outreach. The very first Sunday we had 70 people turn up. The second week, there were 60, the third week, 53, and by the fourth week, 45. I've often joked that we worked it out at the time- we had only four and a half weeks left until there were no more people. It was about that time that we had our first ever commitment to Christ. We outgrew the school hall after 12 months. The crowds were so big that we were using road-case as the platform, and what should have been the stage as a balcony so that we could fit more people in. ~ Brian Houston

In their book Radical Reconciliation, Curtiss DeYoung and Allan Boesak unpack why this happens. They write, "reconciliation is revolutionary, that is, oriented to structural change." Which means, reconciliation can never be apolitical. Reconciliation chooses sides, and the side is always justice.

This is why white American churches remain so far from experiencing anything resembling reconciliation. The white Church considers power its birthright rather than its curse. And so, rather than seeking reconciliation, they stage moments of racial harmony that don't challenge the status quo. They organize worship services where the choirs of two racially different churches sing together, where a pastor of a different race preaches a couple of times a year, where they celebrate MLK but don't acknowledge current racial injustices. Acts like these can create beautiful moments of harmony and goodwill, but since they don't change the underlying power structure at the organization, it would be misleading to call them acts of reconciliation. Even worse, when they're not paired with greater change, diversity efforts can have the opposite of their intended effect. They keep the church feeling good, innocent, maybe even progressive, all the while preserving the roots of injustice. ~ Austin Channing Brown

If the dog could hum, he'd be singing "La-la-la!" in tune with his footsteps. Cough sauntered over to him. William pressed against the wall. No bullets. So far, so good. Cough clenched, and vomited something chunky onto the grass. Terrific. The big dog sat on his haunches and looked at William with a perplexed expression on his face. "Well, eat it back up," William hissed. "Don't waste it." Cough gave a tiny whine. "I'm not eating your puke." Cough panted at him. "No. ~ Ilona Andrews

How is true possession to be distinguished from fraud or the symptoms of disease? The Church prescribes four tests - the language test, the test of preternatural physical strength, the test of levitation and the test of clairvoyance and prevision. If a person can on occasion understand, or better still, speak a language, of which, in his normal state, he is completely ignorant; if he can manifest the physical miracle of levitation or perform unaccountable feats of strength, and if he can correctly predict the future or describe events taking place at a distance - then that person may be presumed to be possessed by devils. (Alternatively, he may be presumed to be the recipient of extraordinary graces; for in many instances divine and infernal miracles are, most unhappily, identical. The levitation of saintly ecstatic is distinguishable from the levitation of ecstatics demoniacs only in virtue of the moral antecedents and consequences of the event. These moral antecedents and consequences are often hard to assess, and it has sometimes happened that even the holiest persons have been suspected of producing their ESP phenomena and their PK effects by diabolic means.) ~ Aldous Huxley

The litmus test used to discern if a house church is healthy is simple: The believers in a healthy house church focus on loving Jesus, loving each other, reaching those who don't know Jesus and respecting the rest of the Body of Christ. ~ Larry Kreider

How little chance the Holy Ghost has nowadays. The churches and missionary societies have so bound Him in red tape that they practically ask Him to sit in a corner while they do the work themselves. ~ Charles Studd

Do you think it was part of some plan, that you got shot so you would end up in that church and discover religion?' Bruce shook his head. 'I got shot because someone was willing to exchange the name of an undercover cop for a lot of cash. Ending up in church
God was just kind enough to make something come out of the disaster that hit my life. ~ Dee Henderson