Church Quotes

“Jesus gave us a model for the work of the church at the Last Supper. While his disciples kept proposing more organization ─ Hey, let's elect officers, establish hierarchy, set standards of professionalism ─ Jesus quietly picked up a towel and basin of water and began to wash their feet.”
― Philip Yancey, Church: Why Bother?: My Personal Pilgrimage

“As I look around on Sunday morning at the people populating the pews, I see the risk that God has assumed. For whatever reason, God now reveals himself in the world not through a pillar of smoke and fire, not even through the physical body of his Son in Galilee, but through the mongrel collection that comprises my local church and every other such gathering in God’s name. (p. 68, Church: Why Bother?)”
― Philip Yancey, Church: Why Bother?: My Personal Pilgrimage

“Family is the one human institution we have no choice over. We get in simply by being born, and as a result we are involuntarily thrown together with a menagerie of strange and unlike people. Church calls for another step: to voluntarily choose to band together with a strange menagerie because of a common bond in Jesus Christ. I have found that such a community more resembles a family than any other human institution. Henri Nouwen once defined a community as “a place where the person you least want to live with always lives.” His definition applies equally to the group that gathers each Thanksgiving and the group that congregates each Sunday morning. (p. 64-65, Church: Why Bother?)”
― Philip Yancey, Church: Why Bother?: My Personal Pilgrimage

“Many churches offer more entertainment than worship, more uniformity than diversity, more exclusivity than outreach, more law than grace.”
― Philip Yancey, Church: Why Bother?

“Christianity is not a purely intellectual, internal faith. It can only be lived in community.”
― Philip Yancey, Church: Why Bother?

“Taken as a whole, the Bible clearly puts the emphasis on what pleases God—the point of worship, after all. To worship, says Walter Wink, is to remember Who owns the house.”
― Philip Yancey, Church: Why Bother?

“We should leave a worship service asking ourselves not “What did I get out of it?” but rather “Was God pleased with what happened?”
― Philip Yancey, Church: Why Bother?

“God is the ultimate judge of hypocrisy in the church, I decided; I would leave such judgment in God’s capable hands. I began to relax and grow softer, more forgiving of others. After all, who has a perfect spouse, or perfect parents or children? We do not give up on the institution of family because of its imperfections—why give up on the church?”
― Philip Yancey, Church: Why Bother?

“the New Testament holds up the model of a church whose activities exist primarily for the sake of outsiders. What keeps us from becoming the church God had in mind?”
― Philip Yancey, Church: Why Bother?

“The atheistic philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was once asked what made him so negative toward Christians. He replied, “I would believe in their salvation if they looked a little more like people who have been saved.”
― Philip Yancey, Church: Why Bother?

“Our need to give is every bit as desperate as the poor’s need to receive.”
― Philip Yancey, Church: Why Bother?