Congregation Quotes - Page 3

I certainly think so, and I argue so, and I give talks on that. Are there risks by putting people together? Absolutely. Is there value in the black church? Absolutely. Is there value in having immigrant churches? Absolutely. But if we don't have congregations gathering with people of different races, what we're doing is we are redefining racial division, a racial inequality.

Michael Emerson

Thinking, Race, People

Source: www.pbs.org

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Collections of books and other documents, either printed or electronic, are a form of congregation.

Tom Peters

Book, Form, Collections

Source: www.researchgate.net

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The loudest psalm singer in the congregation always is a reformed sinner.

Elsa Maxwell

Singers, Psalms, Righteousness

Elsa Maxwell (1954). “R.S.V.P.: Elsa Maxwell's own story”

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I should not like to preach to a congregation who all believed as I believe. I would as lief preach to a basket of eggs in their smooth compactness and oval formality.

Edwin Hubbel Chapin

Believe, Eggs, Oval

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There are congregations on nearly every corner. I'm not sure we need more churches. What we need is a church. I say one church is better than fifty. I have tried to remove the plural form churches from my vocabulary, training myself to think of the church as Christ did, and as the early Christians did. The metaphors for her are always singular - a body, a bride. I heard one gospel preacher say it like this, as he really wound up and broke a sweat: "We've got to unite ourselves as one body. Because Jesus is coming back, and he's coming back for a bride not a harem.

Shane Claiborne

Christian, Jesus, Thinking

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I couldn't give you a count of the number of single women I have in our congregation that are serving in very significant ways in the community. Our desire is for them to live all of life to the glory of God whether God calls them to be a wife or a mother or not.

Ligon Duncan

Mother, Numbers, Giving

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So these are the kind of things that now when people are trying to move towards multiracial congregations that they're stressing. They're talking about these scriptures that say we ought to come together, and that at Pentecost, when that the Holy Spirit is said to have come upon the first Christians, they were given the ability to speak in different languages, and so that no matter who the people were, they could all worship together.

Michael Emerson

Christian, Stress, Moving

Source: www.pbs.org

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In the context of Quaker worship, it is perfectly appropriate for any person in the congregation to speak a timely word from the Lord.

Richard J. Foster

Worship, Speak, Lord

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Of all persecuted sects, the Baptists stand forth as most prominent, simply and only because they aim at a more complete and thorough reform than any others ever attempted. They teach that Christ's kingdom is not of this world; that the church is not a national, political, or provincial establishment; but a congregation of holy men, separated from the world by the receiving of the Holy Spirit.

John Quincy Adams

Men, Political, Church

John Quincy Adams (1876). “Babtists, the Only Thorough Religious Reformers”, p.21

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This new large-scale spiritual awakening is occurring primarily not within the confines of the established religions, but outside of those structures. Some of it, however, is also happening within the existing churches and religious institutions wherever the members of those congregations do not identify with rigid and exclusive belief systems whose unconscious purpose is to foster a sense of separation on which the egoic mind structures depend for their survival.

Eckhart Tolle

Spiritual, Religious, Survival

Source: www.qiwithoutborders.org

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...the Bible itself is less read than preached, less interpreted than brandished. Increasingly, pastors may drape a limply bound Book over the edges of the pulpit as they depart from it. Members of the congregation carry Bibles to church services; the paster announces a long passage text for his sermon and waits for people to find it, then reads only the first verse of it before he takes off. The Book has become a talisman.

Harold Bloom

Book, Past, Church Service

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Prayer less pulpits will produce prayer less and powerless congregations.

Wesley L Duewel

Prayer, Pulpit, Produce

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I want it so that every minister will be not a parrot, not an owl sitting upon a dead limb of the tree of knowledge and hooting the hoots that have been hooted for eighteen hundred years. But I want it so that each one can be an investigator, a thinker; and I want to make his congregation grand enough so that they will not only allow him to think, but will demand that he shall think, and give to them the honest truth of his thought.

Robert Green Ingersoll

Thinking, Years, Giving

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His throne is the pulpit. He stands in Christ's stead. His message is the Word of God. Around him are immortal souls. The Savior, unseen, is beside him. The Holy Spirit broods over the congregation. Angels gaze upon the scene, and heaven and hell await the issue. What associations and what vast responsibility!

Matthew Simpson

Responsibility, Angel, Issues

Matthew Simpson (1879). “Lectures on Preaching: Delivered to the Students of Yale College in 1879”

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To me, there was an interesting movie to be made about two people who had been on that whirlwind romance and what happens after the fairy tale wedding. And this thought coincided or coalesced when I was at a wedding of a friend who got married to somebody that literally everybody in the congregation thought that you definitely should not get married to. This was the worst idea either of you have ever had.

Dan Mazer

Ideas, Two, People

Source: collider.com

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One of the things we find when we talk to people that attend these congregations, they all have social cost to it. People want to know why they're doing that. Sometimes they're questions about selling out on their race or "Are we not good enough that you have to go to this kind of congregation and not ours?" So there are costs to it, and I think they're a little bit higher in the South because of its history.

Michael Emerson

Thinking, Race, People

Source: www.pbs.org

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[A novel by Henry James] is like a church lit but without a congregation to distract you, with every light and line focused on the high altar. And on the altar, very reverently place, intensely there, is a dead kitten, an egg-shell, a bit of string.

H. G. Wells

Eggs, Light, Church

'Boon' (1915) ch. 4

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I'm honestly not sure that I've ever tried to talk as a theologian about "homosexual acts," per se. My disagreement with the current teaching of the Roman Congregations is about what I consider to be their fundamentally flawed premise of the objectively disordered nature of the inclination.

James Alison

Teaching, Currents, Homosexual

Source: www.commonwealmagazine.org

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A group is as healthy as its 'social contract' is clear; a congregation as faithful as its covenant is mutually understood; a pastor as effective as the pastor's and people's commitment to trust and integrity is honored, guarded, and fulfilled.

David W Augsburger

Integrity, Commitment, Past

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They could never go back to being a uniracial congregation again. It brings excitement. It brings life. It allows them to be able to know people they would never know, to meet people that are outside the congregation they would have never connected with, you know, through the networks that they developed in the congregation.

Michael Emerson

People, Able, Excitement

Source: www.pbs.org

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Once in a while you get people that maybe because of economic reasons, or have a social network, they get attracted. But it's a very tiny percent so that when we look at, you know, who are pastors and who are the head clergy of these congregations, they're overwhelmingly white, just a few African Americans, and those folks are usually called to what were formerly white congregations, or they started interracial church from the get-go.

Michael Emerson

White, People, African American

Source: www.pbs.org

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It's one of the things we find in these congregations is that they are much more likely to be sort of up-beat worship styles, more likely that people in these congregations say "Amen," maybe get up and dance some, tend to be a little bit more lively than a typical white service would be, but not as lively as a typical black service would be.

Michael Emerson

White, People, Black

Source: www.pbs.org

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So you find a lot of these sixth Americans congregate in these interracial congregations. They hang out together at work, at school, wherever.

Michael Emerson

School, Together, Hanging Out

Source: www.pbs.org

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It can be difficult to be an introvert in church, especially if you happen to be the pastor. Liking to be alone can be interpreted as a judgment on other people's company. Liking to be quiet can be construed as aloofness. There is so much emphasis on community in most congregations that anyone who does not participate risks being labeled a loner.

Barbara Brown Taylor

Past, People, Community

Barbara Brown Taylor (2009). “An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith”, p.88, Hymns Ancient and Modern Ltd

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The consequences of these institutions (The towns or districts, the congregations, the schools,and the militia.) have been, that the inhabitants, having acquired from their infancy the habit of discussing, of deliberating, and of judging of public affairs, it was in these assemblies of towns or districts that the sentiments of the people were formed in the first place, and their resolutions were taken from the beginning to the end of the disputes and the war with Great Britain.

John Adams

Education, War, Taken

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