Pastoral Resources

There is a continuum of values between the churches and the general community. What distinguishes the handling of these values in the churches is mainly the heavier dosage of religious vocabulary involved.

Praying privately in churches, I began to discover that heaven was my true home and also that it was here and now, woven into this life.

Yet through history gays have always dominated religious life and churches.

While attendance at traditional churches has been declining for decades... the evangelical movement is growing, and it is changing the way America worships.

All churches and all religions contain aspects of the truth, but only God is truth.

Political organizations have slowly substituted themselves for the Churches as the places for believing practices. Politics has once again become religious.

There are no small churches, just small people.

Institutions - government, churches, industries, and the like - have properly no other function than to contribute to human freedom; and in so far as they fail, on the whole, to perform this function, they are wrong and need reconstruction.

I know that those who esteem these little organised associations to be the churches of God, see nothing but mere meetings of men in every other gathering of God's children.

If real churches exist, such persons are not called on to make them.

Some respected and beloved brethren insist that the forming and organising of churches is, according to God's will, the only means of finding blessing in the midst of that confusion which is acknowledged to exist.

The more I do bookstores, the more people come up to me from church groups. I spoke at Pittsburg State College and had 2 or 3 ministers and book groups from a couple of churches.

The result has been that although few conservative Presbyterian churches actually worship in the Puritan way, the Puritan theology of worship remains the standard orthodoxy among them. This discrepancy sometimes leads to guilty consciences.

I sang with Anita Bryant in the Southern Baptist churches.

Artists like Bach and Beethoven erected churches and temples on the heights. I only wanted... to build dwellings for men in which they might feel happy and at home.

The Christian churches were offered two things: the spirit of Jesus and the idiotic morality of Paul, and they rejected the higher inspiration... Following Paul, we have turned the goodness of love into a fiend and degraded the crowning impulse of our being into a capital sin.

The Church, during the apostolic age, did not consist of isolated, independent congregations, but was one body, of which the separate churches were constituent members, each subject to all the rest, or to an authority which extended over all.

Those churches have closed down or have been merged with a church that has a more positive vision.

Ten years ago, 15 years ago, I think the church would have been asleep at the switch. This level of activism and engagement with the needs of society by local churches I never thought I'd see it in my lifetime.

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!