"Those who would renegotiate the boundaries between church and state must therefore answer a difficult question: why would we trade a system that has served us so well for one that has served others so poorly?

on the Ten Commandments ruling"
— Sandra Day O'Conner

"If you live today, you breath in nihilism ... it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now."
— Flannery O'Connor

"i am a little church(no great cathedral)
far from the splendor and squalor of hurrying cities
--i do not worry if briefer days grow briefest,
i am not sorry when sun and rain make april

my life is the life of the reaper and the sower;
my prayers are prayers of earth's own clumsily striving
(finding and losing and laughing and crying)children
whose any sadness or joy is my grief or my gladness

around me surges a miracle of unceasing
birth and glory and death and resurrection:
over my sleeping self float flaming symbols
of hope,and i wake to a perfect patience of mountains

i am a little church(far from the frantic
world with its rapture and anguish)at peace with nature
--i do not worry if longer nights grow longest;
i am not sorry when silence becomes singing

winter by spring,i lift my diminutive spire to
merciful Him Whose only now is forever:
standing erect in the deathless truth of His presence
(welcoming humbly His light and proudly His darkness)"
— e.e. cummings

"It's time we capture our imaginations for Christ"
— Peter E. Gillquist (Becoming Orthodox: A Journey to the Ancient Christian Faith)

"Isn't it funny how the memories you cherish before a breakup can become your worst enemies afterwards? The thoughts you loved to think about, the memories you wanted to hold up to the light and view from every angle--it suddenly seems a lot safer to lock them in a box, far from the light of day and throw away the key. It's not an act of bitterness. It's an act if self-preservation. It's not always a bad idea to stay behind the window and look out at life instead, is it?"
— Allyson Braithwaite Condie (First Day)

"Give to every other human being every right that you claim for yourself - that is my doctrine."
— Thomas Paine (The Age of Reason)

". . . the Twelve Apostles are the most evident sign of Jesus' will regarding the existence and mission of his Church, the guarantee that between Christ and the Church there is no opposition: despite the sins of the people who make up the Church, they are inseparable. Therefore, a slogan that was popular some years back, 'Jesus yes, Church no,' is totally inconceivable with the intention of Christ. This individualistically chosen Jesus is an imaginary Jesus."
— Pope Benedict XVI (The Apostles: The Origin of the Church and Their Co-Workers)

"Then the singing enveloped me. It was furry and resonant, coming from everyone's very heart. There was no sense of performance or judgment, only that the music was breath and food."
— Anne Lamott (Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith)

"The church says the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the church."
— Ferdinand Magellan

"The fact that political ideologies are tangible realities is not a proof of their vitally necessary character. The bubonic plague was an extraordinarily powerful social reality, but no one would have regarded it as vitally necessary. "
— Wilhelm Reich

"One good schoolmaster is of more use than a hundred priests."
— Thomas Paine (The Age of Reason)

"Everybody gets to play."
— John Wimber (Power Evangelism)

"Don't give your money to the church. They should be giving their money to you."
— George Carlin

"We admit that we will never reach our ideal in this life, a distinctive the church claims that most other human institutions try to deny."
— Philip Yancey (Soul Survivor: How My Faith Survived the Church)

"Persecution is not an original feature in any religion; but it is always the strongly marked feature of all religions established by law."
— Thomas Paine (The Age of Reason)

""The church and the whorehouse arrived in the Far West simultaneously. And each would have been horrified to think it was a different facet of the same thing. But surely they were both intended to accomplish the same thing: the singing, the devotion, the poetry of the churches took a man out of his bleakness for a time, and so did the brothels.""
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

"I realized I was going to get through this disappointing service, and anyway, you have to be somewhere: better here, where I have heard truth spoken so often, than, say, at the DMV, or home alone, orbiting my own mind. And it's good to be out where others can see you, so you can't be your ghastly spoiled self. It forces you to act slightly more elegantly, and this improves your thoughts, and thereby the world."
— Anne Lamott (Grace [Eventually]: Thoughts on Faith)

"To be effective the preacher's message must be alive; it must alarm, arouse, challenge; it must be God's present voice to a particular people."
— A.W. Tozer

"What is to be gained if we are so intent in reaching out to the unchurched that we then unchurch the reached?"
— David F. Wells (The Courage to Be Protestant: Truth-lovers, Marketers, and Emergents in the Postmodern World)

"The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe in blood for centuries."
— James Madison

"When the government puts its imprimatur on a particular religion it conveys a message of exclusion to all those who do not adhere to the favored beliefs. A government cannot be premised on the belief that all persons are created equal when it asserts that God prefers some."
— Harry A. Blackmun

"Our lack of community is intensely painful. A TV talk show is not community. A couple of hours in a church pew each Sabbath is not community. A multinational corporation is neither a human nor a community, and in the sweatshops, defiled agribusiness fields, genetic mutation labs, ecological dead zones, the inhumanity is showing. Without genuine spiritual community, life becomes a struggle so lonely and grim that even Hillary Clinton has admitted "it takes a village"."
— David James Duncan

"They always loved my sense of humor. There used to be a light switch inside one of the nurseries that was a cutout of Jesus putting his arm around two children on each side of him as he towered above them. The switch was ironically located in the spot of where his penis would have been and I was the first to point this out. Everyone thought it was funny until I started singing the childhood church song “Jesus Loves the Little Children.” In fear of being struck by lightning or being involved in a massive pile-up car accident after leaving, their laughing ceased. I still thought it was funny."
— Chase Brooks

"The entire range of human experience is present in a church choir, including, but not restricted to jealousy, revenge, horror, pride, incompetence (the tenors have never been on the right note in the entire history of church choirs, and the basses have never been on the right page), wrath, lust and existential despair."
— Connie Willis, Introduction to The Winds of Marble Arch

""Stand tall and be strong in defense of those great virtues which have been the backbone of our social progress. When you are united, your power is limitless. You can accomplish anything you wish to accomplish. -President Gordon B. Hinckley, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints"
— Gordon B. Hinckley

""Against the disease of writing one must take special precautions, since it is a dangerous and contagious disease.""
— Peter Abelard (Forbidden Fruit: From The Letters of Abelard and Heloise)

"The way to preserve the peace of the church is to preserve its purity."
— Matthew Henry

"Far from seeking to
justify, as does the Church, the necessity of torments and
afflictions, he cried, in his outraged pity: 'If a God has made this
world, I should not wish to be that God. The world's wretchedness
would rend my heart.'"
— Joris-Karl Huysmans (Against Nature)

"Christianity without mission is like ice cream without frozenness."
— Gary Stubblefield

"For better of for worse the church in the West bought modernity's claims. We were baptized in its story (even though it said it did not have one) and accepted its categories and definitions. But somewhere along the way we also began to believe that the ways in which we accessed knowledge about God or Jesus or the Spirit or Christianity were those things themselves."
— Tim Keel (Intuitive Leadership: Embracing a Paradigm of Narrative, Metaphor, and Chaos)

"We live in a culture of reductionism. Or better, we are living in the aftermath of a culture of reductionism, and I believe we have reduced the complexity and diversity of the Scriptures to systematic theologies that insist on ideological conformity, even when such conformity flattens the diversity of the Scriptural witness. We have reduced our conception of gospel to four simple steps that short-circuit biblical narratives and notions of the kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven in favor of a simplified means of entrance to heaven. Our preaching is often wed to our materialistic, consumerist cultural assumptions, and sermons are subsequently reduced to delivering messages that reinforce the worst of what American culture produces: self-centered end users who believe that God is a resource that helps an individual secure what amounts to an anemic and culturally bound understanding of the 'abundant life.'"
— Tim Keel (Intuitive Leadership: Embracing a Paradigm of Narrative, Metaphor, and Chaos)

"The loss of connection between churches and neighborhoods creates a corresponding loss of localized imagination and creates an addictive-like dependence on acontextual experts who scan the physical and spiritual horizon for 'success.'"
— Tim Keel (Intuitive Leadership: Embracing a Paradigm of Narrative, Metaphor, and Chaos)

"Saints cannot exist without a community, as they require, like all of us, nurturance by a people who, while often unfaithful, preserve the habits necessary to learn the story of God."
— Stanley Hauerwas

"On the church vaulting above was the clock-face of eternity, void of number and serving as its own hand, only one black finger was pointing and the dead wanted to tell the time by it."
— Jean Paul

"People are not being reached in the context of the body of Christ--they're like newborn babies being left on a doorstep somewhere to feed and care for themselves."
— Peter E. Gillquist (Becoming Orthodox: A Journey to the Ancient Christian Faith)

"There is no one true church, no one chosen people."
— Terry Tempest Williams (Leap)

"What was true of an ancient community of Christian believers struggling with a powerful and appealing philosophy is also true for Christians in a postmodern context. Arguments that deconstruct the regimes of truth at work in the late modern culture of global capitalism are indispensable. So also is a deeper understanding of the counterideological force of the biblical tradition. But such arguments are no guarantee that the biblical metanarrative will not be co-opted for ideological purposes of violent exclusion, nor do arguments prove the truth of the gospel. Only the nonideological, embracing, forgiving and shalom-filled life of a dynamic Christian community formed by the story of Jesus will prove the gospel to be true and render the idolatrous alternatives fundamentally implausible."
— Brian J. Walsh (Colossians Remixed: Subverting the Empire)

"It is impossible to make peace with the Roman Catholic Church. It is one of the permanent enemies of all that is decent in human spirit."
— Harold Laski

"Whether [new Protestant church movements] place their emphasis on new worship styles, expressions of the Holy Spirit’s power, evangelism to seekers, or Bible teaching, these so-called new movements still operate out of the fallacious assumption that the church belongs firmly in the town square, that is, at the heart of Western culture. And if they begin with this mistaken belief about their position in Western society, all their church planting, all their reproduction will simply mirror this misapprehension."
— Alan Hirsch (The Shaping of Things to Come: Innovation and Mission for the 21 Century Church)

"Shall I ask you how the church is to be filled, if a man is neither to take orders with a living, nor without?"
— Jane Austen (Mansfield Park)

"They knew that to put God in the constitution was to put man out. They knew that the recognition of a Deity would be seized upon by fanatics and zealots as a pretext for destroying the liberty of thought. They knew the terrible history of the church too well to place in her keeping or in the keeping of her God the sacred rights of man. They intended that all should have the right to worship or not to worship that our laws should make no distinction on account of creed. They intended to found and frame a government for man and for man alone. They wished to preserve the individuality of all to prevent the few from governing the many and the many from persecuting and destroying the few."
— Robert G. Ingersoll

"Once I am sure there's nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thud shut.
Another church: matting, seats, and stone,
And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut
For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence.

Move forward, run my hand around the font.
From where I stand, the roof looks almost new -
Cleaned, or restored? Someone would know: I don't.
Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few
Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce
'Here endeth' much more loudly than I'd meant.
The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door
I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,
Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.

Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
When churches will fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show,
Their parchment, plate and pyx in locked cases,
And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.
Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?

Or, after dark, will dubious women come
To make their children touch a particular stone;
Pick simples for a cancer; or on some
Advised night see walking a dead one?
Power of some sort will go on
In games, in riddles, seemingly at random;
But superstition, like belief, must die,
And what remains when disbelief has gone?
Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,

A shape less recognisable each week,
A purpose more obscure. I wonder who
Will be the last, the very last, to seek
This place for what it was; one of the crew
That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?
Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique,
Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff
Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh?
Or will he be my representative,

Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt
Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground
Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt
So long and equably what since is found
Only in separation - marriage, and birth,
And death, and thoughts of these - for which was built
This special shell? For, though I've no idea
What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,
It pleases me to stand in silence here;

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.
"
— Philip Larkin

"In post-Christendom, the church is that community of people who look to discover what God is actively doing in the world around them and then join themselves to that work. The church is that community of people gathered around Jesus Christ in order to participate in his life and incarnate it into the context where he has placed them.
"
— Tim Keel (Intuitive Leadership: Embracing a Paradigm of Narrative, Metaphor, and Chaos)

"Are you confused...?
I rest my case."
— Annie Record

"What is to be gained if we are so intent in reaching out to teh unchurched that we then unchurch the reached?"
— David F. Wells (The Courage to Be Protestant: Truth-lovers, Marketers, and Emergents in the Postmodern World)

"What is to be gained if we are so intent in reaching out to the unchurched that we then unchurch the reached?"
— David F. Wells (The Courage to Be Protestant: Truth-lovers, Marketers, and Emergents in the Postmodern World)

"Now the church has not received he Scripture from God in order simply to rest on it, and still less in order to this treasure in earth. On the contrary the church is called to preserve the is Word of God, to explain it, to preach it, apply it, translate it, spread it abroad, recommend it, and defend it – in a word, to cause the thought s of God, laid down in Scripture, to triumph everywhere and at all times over the thoughts of man. All of the work to which the church is called is the effort at, and the ministration of, the Word of God. IT is a service of this Word of God when it is preached in the assembly of believers, is interpreted, and applied, when it is shared in the signs of the covenant, and is maintained in discipline. And in a larger sense much more is a part of and parcel of this service of the Word: this, for example, that in our own hearts and lives, in our profession and business, in house and field and office, in science and art, in state and community, in works of mercy and missions, and in all spheres and ways of life, this Word be applied, worked out, and made to rule. (VIII: Scripture and Confession, pg. 118)"
— Herman Bavinck (Our Reasonable Faith: A Survey of Christian Doctrine)