Quotes about Church

"I never let church interfere with my spirituality."

A warm breeze blew through my window like a gentle wave lapping the sandy shore in summer at low tide, and as I took in a breath of air that blanketed my body like tall grass in a field I felt for just that moment in time, like I did when I was a child. I felt that I had not one worry, not one burden, nothing was on my mind accept that breeze that made the curtains swell like balloons.

Empedocles said that God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. If that is true, then I don't need to go to church. And I don't need to believe the same things as you do to see that you have a purpose. Now let's smoke and drink our coffee in peace.

The church is not here to meet our needs. We are the church here to meet the needs of the world.

I still say a church steeple with a lightning rod on top shows a lack of confidence.

"Already from earliest childhood it was my deepest wish to understand nature and through this to come closer to the truth I could not find at school or at church. I was repeatedly drawn to the forest where I could watch the flow of water for hours on end without getting tired or irritable. At that time I did not yet know that water is the bearer of life or the source of what we call consciousness. Totally oblivious, I let water flow past my searching eyes and only years later did I become aware that this running water attracts our consciousness magnetically, takes a piece with it, with a force that is so strong that one loses consciousness for a while and involuntarily falls into a deep sleep. And so, gradually I began to play with these forces in water and I gave up this so-called free consciousness and left it to the water for a while. Little by little this game turned into a very serious matter because I saw that it was possible to release my own consciousness from my body and attach it to the water. When I took it back again, the consciousness borrowed from the water told me things that were often very strange. And so the searcher became a researcher who could send his consciousness on expeditions, so to speak, and this way I found out about things the rest of mankind has missed because they do not know that people are able to send their free consciousness everywhere, even where the seeing eye cannot look. This so-called sight practiced with blindfolded eyes finally gave me ties to the secrets of nature which I slowly began to recognize and understand in their own fabric. And in due course it became clear to me that we human beings are used to seeing everything backwards and wrong. The biggest surprise, however, was that we human beings let the most valuable part drain off as useless and from all the great intellectuality that flows through us, we retain only the feces."

The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool. If the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority.

The Redeemed never allow the redeemer, to redeem all.

This is how I see most "churches", the church kids who grew up in the church, look upon the outsiders who come to their church. seeing the newcomers as sins that are more than theirs.

Every day, people are straying away from the church and going back to God.

The task of the church, for example, becomes less that of indoctrinating or relating people to an external divine power and more that of providing opportunities for people to touch the infinite center of all things and to grow into all that they are destined to be.

If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men's cottages princes palaces. It is a good divine that follows his own instructions: I can easier teach twenty what were good to be done, than be one of the twenty to follow mine own teaching.

But whate'er you are That in this desert inaccessible, Under the shade of melancholy boughs, Lose and neglect the creeping hours of time; If you have ever looked on better days, If ever been where bells knoll'd to church, If ever sat at any good man's feast, If ever from your eyelids wiped a tear, And know what 'tis to pity and be pitied, Let gentleness my strong enforcement be. . . .

Mysticism has been in the past and probably ever will be one of the great powers of the world, and it is bad scholarship to pretend the contrary. You may argue against it but you should no more treat it with disrespect than a perfectly cultivated writer would treat (say) the Catholic Church or the Church of Luther no matter how much he disliked them.

Our government has become too responsive to trivial or ephemeral concerns, often at the expense of more important concerns or an erosion of our liberty, and it has made policy priorities more dependent on where TV journalists happen to point their cameras. . . . As a nation we have lost our sense of tragedy, a recognition that bad things happen to good people. A nation that expects the government to prevent churches from burning, to control the price of bread or gasoline, to secure every job, and to find some villain for every dramatic accident, risks an even larger loss of life and liberty.

For here the religion that languishes in crowded cities or steals shame-faced to hide itself in dim churches, flourishes greatly, filling the soul with a solemn joy. Face to face with Nature on the vast hills at eventide, who does not feel himself near to the Unseen?

I suppose a fellow can worship on the golf course - but it's almost as unhandy as playing golf in church.

As Easter time approaches, let me share with you the tender story of an eleven-year-old boy named Philip, a Down's syndrome child who was in a Sunday School class with eight other children. Easter Sunday the teacher brought an empty plastic egg for each child. They were instructed to go out of the church building onto the grounds and put into the egg something that would remind them of the meaning of Easter. All returned joyfully. As each egg was opened there were exclamations of delight at a butterfly, a twig, a flower, a blade of grass. Then the last egg was opened. It was Philip's, and it was empty! Some of the children made fun of Philip. "But, teacher," he said, "teacher, the tomb was empty." A newspaper article announcing Philip's death a few months later noted that at the conclusion of the funeral eight children marched forward and put a large empty egg on the small casket. On it was a banner that said, "The tomb was empty."

Be prepared spiritually for things that will interrupt your spirituality . . . at home, at church meetings . . . in any situation.

The Church is for the perfecting of the members not a rest home for the perfect.

Church ain't over till the fat lady sings.

Men don't believe in the devil now, as their fathers used to do? They've forced the door of the broadest creed to let his majesty through; There isn't a print of his cloven foot, or a fiery dart from his brow, To be found in the earth or air today, for the world has voted so. But who is mixing the fatal draught that palsies heart and brain, And loads the earth of each passing year with ten hundred thousand slain? Who blights the bloom of the land today with the fiery breath of hell. If the devil isn't and never was? Won't somebody rise and tell? Who dogs the steps of the toiling saint, and digs the pits for his feet? Who sows the tares in the field of Time wherever God sows his wheat? The devil is voted not to be, and of course the thing is true; But who is doing the kind of work the devil alone should do? We are told he does not go about as a roaring lion now. But whom shall we hold responsible for the everlasting row To be heard in home, in church, in state, to the earth's remotest bound, If the devil, by a unanimous vote. is nowhere to be found? Won't somebody step to the front forthwith and make his bow and show How the frauds and crime of the day spring up, for surely we want to know. The devil was fairly voted out, and of course the devil's gone; But simple people would like to know who carries his business on.

Folks are quick to condemn a man who does wrong . . . Unless he's a church member and then they condemn the church.

There are stowaways in church, too, who hide out, hoping to make the journey without either paying or earning their way.

We are to be more than mere church members, for church membership alone will not save us. It is what we do with our membership that counts.

Having the church full of members is like the wood-box full of sticks - it's a handy place to have them but they don't do any good till they catch fire.

A man has invented a chair that can be adjusted to eight hundred different positions. It is designed for a boy to sit in when he goes to church.

Words of an Unknown Martin Handcart Company Pioneer. We suffered beyond anything you can imagine and many died of exposure and starvation, but did you ever hear a survivor of that company utter a word of criticism? Not one of that company ever apostatized or left the Church, because everyone of us came through with the absolute knowledge that God lives, for we became acquainted with him in our extremities. I have pulled my handcart when I was so weak and weary from illness and lack of food that I could hardly put one foot ahead of the other. I have looked ahead and seen a patch of sand or a hill slope and I have said, I can go only that far and there I must give up, for I cannot pull the load through it. I have gone on to that sand and when I reached it, the cart began pushing me. I have looked back many times to see who was pushing my cart, but my eyes saw no one. I knew then that the angels of God were there. Was I sorry that I chose to come by handcart? No. Neither then nor any minute of my life since. The price we paid to become acquainted with God was a privilege to pay, and I am thankful that I was privileged to come in the Martin Handcart Company.

It was not just the Church that resisted the heliocentrism of Copernicus. Many prominent figures, in the decades following the 1543 publication of De Revolutionibus, regarded the Copernican model of the universe as a mathematical artifice which, though it yielded astronomical predictions of superior accuracy, could not be considered a true representation of physical reality: "If Nicolaus Copernicus, the distinguished and incomparable master, in this work had not been deprived of exquisite and faultless instruments, he would have left us this science far more well-established. For he, if anybody, was outstanding and had the most perfect understanding of the geometrical and arithmetical requisites for building up this discipline. Nor was he in any respect inferior to Ptolemy; on the contrary, he surpassed him greatly in certain fields, particularly as far as the device of fitness and compendious harmony in hypotheses is concerned. And his apparently absurd opinion that the Earth revolves does not obstruct this estimate, because a circular motion designed to go on uniformly about another point than the very center of the circle, as actually found in the Ptolemaic hypotheses of all the planets except that of the Sun, offends against the very basic principles of our discipline in a far more absurd and intolerable way than does the attributing to the Earth one motion or another which, being a natural motion, turns out to be imperceptible. There does not at all arise from this assumption so many unsuitable consequences as most people think."

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.

When called to the Council of the Twelve, October 4, 1963, he said in the Salt Lake Tabernacle: I think of a little sister, a French-Canadian sister, whose life was changed by the missionaries as her spirit was touched. As she said good-by to me and my wife in Quebec, she said, "President Monson, I may never see the Prophet. I may never hear the Prophet. But President, far better, now that I am a member of this Church, I can obey the Prophet."