Quotes & Sayings About Black Churches

If the churches don't move, much of the community won't move. We've got a situation in which a black church is still a major institution in the black community where 55 percent of the black folk attend and over 75 pass through its doors. — Cornel West

There are three things, and it depends on the group that we're talking about, but there's history, there's culture, and then there's social networks. So, you know, historically black and white, they worship together until about the end of slavery, and people started moving out into separate churches. But it was because of discrimination and racism and such that blacks began to establish their own denominations and their own churches. — Michael Emerson

I happen to know at least a hundred Sudanese refugees in the United States, all of whom were taken in by white families and white churches, and they all tell me'Naima, you were blessed to be raised by Black Americans.' — Kola Boof

I moved along ancient streets, enchanted by names that sounded like songs: Rua da Agonia, Avenida dos Amores, Travessa de Chico Diabo. Our visit to Salvador took place during a period when the local government, or someone acting in its name, was trying to renew the old city, and was closing down the thousands of brothels. But the project was only at midpoint. At the feet of those deserted and leprous churches embarrassed by their own evil-smelling alleys, fifteen-year-old black prostitutes still swarmed, ancient women selling African sweets crouched along the sidewalks with their steaming pots, and hordes of pimps danced amid trickles of sewage to the sound of transistor radios in nearby bars. The ancient palaces of the Portuguese settlers, surmounted by coats of arms now illegible, had become houses of ill-repute. — Umberto Eco

The outside world told black kids when I was growing up that we weren't worth anything. But our parents said it wasn't so, and our churches and our schoolteachers said it wasn't so. They believed in us, and we, therefore, believed in ourselves. — Marian Wright Edelman

62. It is neither wise nor laudable to reduce everything to antiquity by every possible device. Thus, to cite some instances, one would be straying from the straight path were he to wish the altar restored to its primitive table form; were he to want black excluded as a color for the liturgical vestments; were he to forbid the use of sacred images and statues in Churches; were he to order the crucifixes designed that the Divine Redeemer's Body shows no trace of His cruel sufferings; lastly were he to disdain and reject polyphonic music or singing in parts, even where it conforms to regulations issued by the Holy See. — Pope Pius XII

Black women have not historically stood in the pulpit, but that doesn't undermine the fact that they built the churches and maintain the pulpits. — Maya Angelou

Faint traces of other black churches are tucked away in handwritten ledgers at the state archives at Morrow; in the collections at the University of Georgia in Athens; even in the basement of the Forsyth courthouse, where a cardboard box atop a metal filing cabinet still holds deeds for the land on which black residents once founded Mt. Fair, Shakerag, and Stoney Point - about which nothing is known but names and approximate locations. All that can be said for certain is that, again and again in the fall of 1912, white men sloshed gasoline and kerosene onto the benches and wooden floors of such rooms, then backed out into the dark, tossing lit matches as they went. All over the county, beneath the ground on which black churches stood, the soil is rich with ashes. — Patrick Phillips

People like Clyde McPhatter who came out of the black churches - like Sam Cooke and Aretha Franklin - were all church singers who became great pop singers because gospel singing is very close to the blues. — Ahmet Ertegun

Christians will support the people of Israel simply because they live in the land of Israel. But we all know Churches worldwide would not want to support Israel if Israel was full of African-Americans, Latinos and Native Americans. Christians frequently say "They (other countries) shouldn't mess with the JEWS, they are God's Chosen People". But nobody uses what's in the actual bible to figure out who the Real Children of Israel are today (according to scriptures). So if we still don't know the answer to this question then who are we? Imbeciles? Bastards? Canaanites? Gentiles? THE BRAINWASHING OF THE BLACK CHURCH STARTED IN SLAVERY AND IS PUSHED ONTO THE YOUNG — Ronald Dalton Jr

Religion can be a good thing. Churches did black folks good after Reconstruction. It was the only place people like Nat Turner and Douglass could hold meetings to unite our people. But the white man wanted to teach black folks about the by and by in the sky. He wanted to take their minds off the things here, so maybe they wouldn't notice who was kicking them in the head. I admit, since joining my brother, I've changed some of my views. But you have to be smart about religion. You have to look closely at who's claiming it and how they're using it. — Vaunda Micheaux Nelson

What more shall I say: born under light bulbs, deliberately stopped growing at age of three, given drum, sang glass to pieces, smelled vanilla, coughed in churches, observed ants, decided to grow, buried drum, emigrated to the West, lost the East, learned stonecutter's trade, worked as model, started drumming again, visited concrete, made money, kept finger, gave finger away, fled laughing, rode up escalator, arrested, convicted, sent to mental hospital, soon to be acquitted, celebrating this day my thirtieth birthday and still afraid of the Black Witch. Chapter 46, pg. 587 — Gunter Grass

Most people will not be persuaded to become Christians except in their "heart language. — Flavil R. Yeakley Jr.

Church? I wouldn't dare tell anyone at church.77 Far from being a place of comfort or refuge, churches can be a place where judgment, shame, and contempt are felt most acutely. Services in black churches frequently contain a strong mixture of concern for the less fortunate and a call to personal responsibility. — Michelle Alexander

Preaching styles and people being slain in the spirit and things like that. Now it doesn't happen in all black churches, and it happens sometimes in white churches, right? But on average they're quite a bit different. — Michael Emerson

We live in a country where Americans assimilate corpses in their daily comings and goings. Dead blacks are a part of normal life here. Dying in ship hulls, tossed into the Atlantic, hanging from trees, beaten, shot in churches, gunned down by the police, or warehoused in prisons: Historically, there is no quotidian without the enslaved, chained, or dead black body to gaze upon or to hear about or to position a self against. — Jesmyn Ward

Individual members of certain churches in black communities should protest when worship services become a platform for teaching anti-gay sentiments. Often individuals sit and listen to preachers raging against gay people and think the views expressed are amusing and outmoded, and dismiss them without challenge. But if homophobia is to be eradicated in black communities, such attitudes must be challenged. — Bell Hooks

Preachers at black churches are the last people left in the English-speaking world who know the schemes and tropes of classical rhetoric: parallelism, antithesis, epistrophe, synecdoche, metonymy, periphrasis, litotes - the whole bag of tricks. — P. J. O'Rourke

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

What's happening is that Asian and Latino and other groups without that history are more likely to end up in either black churches or white churches and then make them multiracial churches. I talk about that in the US we have two cultures. — Michael Emerson

Allen once recalled that even local blacks doubted the efficacy of an independent black church in Philadelphia, so fearful were they of a white backlash. But after segregated seating policies were instituted at white churches, Allen appeared to be a visionary, and many blacks soon joined his exodus from segregated Northern pews and galleries for independent black churches. For subsequent generations, Allen's act of defiance had all the meaning and power of Rosa Parks's sit-in during the mid-twentieth century. The comparison is not superficial. For while both events - Parks's sit-in and Allen's walkout of segregated pews - were courageous nonviolent acts in and of themselves, they also set the stage for new black freedom struggles. — Richard S. Newman

Black churches minister to social needs out of necessity. — Barack Obama

We call it hypocrisy, but it is schizophrenia, a modest ranch-house life with Draconian military adventures; a land of equal opportunity where a white culture sits upon a Black; a horizontal community of Christian love and a vertical hierarchy of churches
the cross was well-designed! a land of family, a land of illicit heat; a politics of principle, a politics of property; nation of mental hygiene with movies and TV reminiscent of a mental pigpen; patriots with a detestation of obscenity who pollute their rivers; citizens with a detestation of government control who cannot bear any situation not controlled. The list must be endless, the comic profits are finally small
the society was able to stagger on like a 400-lb. policeman walking uphill because living in such an unappreciated and obese state it did not at least have to explode in schizophrenia
life went on. Boys could go patiently to church at home and wait their turn to burn villages in Vietnam. — Norman Mailer

The little platoon of the black community is the church. Our Christian faith is based on individual freedom from sin and the personal decision to find spiritual liberty that leads to a better life here on Earth and for eternity. On Sundays in America, the most conservative people can be found in black churches. — Allen West

Black churches are very powerful forces in the African American community and always have been. Because religion has been that one place where you have an imagination that no one can control. And so, as long as you know that you are a human being and nobody can take that away from you, then God is that reality in your life that enables you to know that. — James H. Cone

And at that very moment ladies in black garments, scores of them, are scattered throughout St. Louis de France church, kneeling or sitting or some standing at the various special shrines, their lips muttering prayers for similar requests for similar troubles in their own poor lives and if indeed the Lord seeth all and saw all that is going on and all the beseechment in His name in dark earth-churches throughout the kingdom of consciousness, it would be with pain He'd attend and bend His thoughts to it. — Jack Kerouac

The next Republican that will win will campaign in the Latino community, will campaign amongst Asian-Americans, will campaign in the black churches, will campaign in college campuses. — Jeb Bush

What more can I say: born beneath light bulbs, interrupted my growth at the age of three, was given a drum, sangshattered glass, smelled vanilla, coughed in churches, stuffed Luzie with food, watched ants as they crawled, decided to grow, buried the drum, moved to the West, lost what was East, learned to carve stone and posed as a model, went back to my drum and inspected concrete, made money and cared for the finger, gave the finger away and fled as I laughed, ascended, arrested, convicted, confined, now soon to be freed, and today is my birthday, I'm thirty years old, and still as afraid of the Black Cook as ever - Amen. — Gunter Grass

I love going to black churches, and I love some of these black preachers. The best preacher I ever saw in my life was a 93-year-old in a black church in Hamilton, Virginia. What a preacher! — Robert Duvall

If Harvey had not been taken from us 30 years ago, I think he would want me to say to all the gay and lesbian kids out there tonight who have been told they are less than by the churches, by the government, by their families, that you are beautiful, wonderful creatures of value, and that no matter what anyone tells you, God does love you and that very soon, I promise you, you will have equal rights, federally, across this great nation of ours. — Dustin Lance Black

We have created Black, White, Asian, and other racial Churches; but we fail to understand that there is only one Church and one Gospel.It is the Church and Gospel of Jesus Christ. John 1:12 — Felix Wantang

For the Press has no band of critics who go the round of the churches and chapels, and are on the watch for a slip or defect in the preacher, to make a "feature" in their article: the clergy are practically the most irresponsible of all talkers. For this reason, at least, it is well that they do not always allow their discourses to be merely fugitive, but are often induced to fix them in that black and white in which they are open to the criticism of any man who has the courage and patience to treat them with thorough freedom of speech and pen. — Christopher Hitchens

Back then, Black churches were a small piece of peace. Church was a world where, even with its imperfections, the offer of equality and common humanity was the sustenance needed to make it through the rest of the week in a society that deemed them less than human. — Janelle Gray

Some of the most moving experiences I've had are just in black churches in the South, during the Civil Rights Movement, where people were getting beaten, killed, really struggling for the most elementary rights. — Noam Chomsky

Like most Istanbul Turks I had little interest in Byzantium as a child. I associated the word with spooky, bearded, black-robed Greek Orthodox priests, with the aqueducts that still ran through the city, with the Hagia Sophia and the red brick walls of old churches. To me, these were remnants of an age so distant there was little need to know about it. Even the Ottomans who conquered Byzantium seemed very far away. — Orhan Pamuk

It happens a little bit more in the West, where there's more fluid - where everybody's originally from somewhere else. So they have a little bit more permission to do it. It happens the least, at the individual level at least, in the South, because the South has very strong, you know, set up black churches and white churches and a long history of that, and so it's a bigger social cost. — Michael Emerson

To the Baptist Churches on Neal's Greek on Black Creek, North Carolina I have received, fellow-citizens, your address, approving my objection to the Bill containing a grant of public land to the Baptist Church at Salem Meeting House, Mississippi Territory. Having always regarded the practical distinction between Religion and Civil Government as essential to the purity of both, and as guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States, I could not have otherwise discharged my duty on the occasion which presented itself — James Madison