Churches Family Quotes & Sayings

This much freedom leaves you on your own. More Americans than ever before live alone, but even a family can exist in isolation, just managing to survive in the shadow of a huge military base without a soul to lend a hand. A shiny new community can spring up overnight miles from anywhere, then fade away just as fast. An old city can lose its industrial foundation and two-thirds of its people, while all its mainstays - churches, government, businesses, charities, unions - fall like building flats in a strong wind, hardly making a sound. — George Packer

Fuck hope and all the tiny little towns, one-horse towns, the one-stoplight towns, three-bars country-music jukebox-magic parquet-towns, pressure-cooker pot-roast frozen-peas bad-coffee married-heterosexual towns, crying-kids-in-the-Oldsmobile-beat-your-kid-in the-Thriftway-aisles towns, one-bank one-service-station Greyhound-Bus-stop-at-the-Pepsi-Cafe towns, two-television towns, Miracle Mile towns, Viv's Double Wide Beauty Salon towns, schizophrenic-mother towns, buy-yourself-a-handgun towns, sister-suicide towns, only-Injun's-a-dead-Injun towns, Catholic-Protestant-Mormon-Baptist religious-right five-churches Republican-trickle-down-to-poverty family-values sexual-abuse pro-life creation-theory NRA towns, nervous-mother rodeo-clown-father those little-town-blues towns. — Tom Spanbauer

One changed child eventually changes a family. A changed family will influence change in its church. Enough changed churches will transform a community. Changed communities change regions. Changed regions will in time change an entire nation. — Wess Stafford

Do you and I believe him (Christ) enough to obey him and to follow him wherever he leads, even when the crowds in our culture - and maybe in our churches - turn the other way? ... For the sake of an increasingly marginalized and relatively ineffective church in our culture, I want to risk it all. For the sake of my life, my family, and the people who surround me, I want to risk it all. — David Platt

So we went on what we now call "The Beck Family Church Tour" and man did we see some churches. — Glenn Beck

Church members as well should realize that persistent divisive grumbling and complaining can cost them their church family. Paul put it this way in Romans 16:17, "Watch out for those who cause divisions and put obstacles in your way that are contrary to the teaching you have learned. Keep away from them. " Notice that it says of them, "Such people are not serving Christ, but their own appetites." In other words, these individuals who tear up churches and who teach doctrines contrary to what they learned are selfish, self-centered, self-indulgent individuals with whom believers are to have no fellowship. Unity in Christ doesn't mean that you have Christian fellowship with everyone, but only those who are biblical. — Richard L. Ganz

I want to stress again the importance of really living what we claim to believe. That needs to be a priority-not just in our personal and family lives but in our churches, our political choices, our business dealings, our treatment of the poor; in other words, in everything we do. — Charles J. Chaput

Pastors, we have to ask ourselves honestly whether the divorce culture and family breakdown inside the churches have not been fueled in part by our own preaching and teaching. When we reduce marriage to endless sermon series on "Putting the Sizzle Back in Your Spouse" and "Ten Tips for Couples for a Hotter, Holier Romance," are we not contributing to the very same emphasis on hormonally-driven acquisitiveness as the culture, rather than on the model of a Christ who displays not just affection but cross-carrying fidelity to his Bride? — Russell D. Moore

Lots of my friends and family belong to churches, and some of them are part of the so-called Christian Right. In this preacher, I wanted to show a good man struggling to reconcile his commitment to the community with the political agenda of his church. He does not see that as a dilemma, but I do. — Lanford Wilson

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

Our Eternal Father lives. He stands as the great God of the universe, ruling in majesty and power. And yet He is my Father, to whom I may go in prayer with the assurance that He will hear, listen, and answer. — Gordon B. Hinckley

Our fights should really be for the mission of the church and the mission of the family instead of trying to have bigger churches or better families. When it comes to entities that god has created specifically to make disciples and accomplish His mission (of influencing a generation to have a stronger, deeper, and more authentic relationship with God), there is the church ... the family ... and nothing else. — Reggie Joiner

Perfect Valor is to do, without a witness, all that we could do before the whole world. — Francois De La Rochefoucauld

Nearly everyone has had a box of secret pain, shared with no one. Will [Hamilton] had concealed his well, laughed loud, exploited perverse virtues, and never let his jealousy go wandering [ ... ] He was always on the edge, trying to hold on to the rim of the family with what gifts he had - care, and reason, application. He kept the books, hired the attorneys, called the undertaker, and eventually paid the bills. The others didn't even know they needed him. — John Steinbeck

Many churches approach ministry to people through the lens of an educational system instead of through the analogy of the family. — Ross Parsley

I listened so hard because it felt like, while she was telling me stories, she was massaging my soul, letting me know that I was not alone, that I will never have to be alone, that there are friends and family and churches and coffee shops. I was not going to be cast into space. — Donald Miller

Close to a billion people - one-eighth of the world's population - still live in hunger. Each year 2 million children die through malnutrition. This is happening at a time when doctors in Britain are warning of the spread of obesity. We are eating too much while others starve. — Jonathan Sacks

While the official church was moribund, the house churches kept alight the flame of Christian witness. The church survived as a lay movement, often led by poorly educated Bible women who memorized Scripture and passed on the faith to family members and (if they dared) to neighbors and friends. — Kim-Kwong Chan

She had no right to live there. She doesn't belong there. It took those people a long time to build that country; hundreds of years, years and years of war and bloodshed. Everyone who lives there has earned his right to be there with blood: with their brother's blood and their father's blood and their son's blood. They know they're a nation because they have drawn their borders with blood. Regimental flags hang in their cathedrals and all their churches are lined with memorials to men who died in wars, all around the world. War is their religion. That's what it takes to make a country. Once that happens people forget they were born this or that, Muslim or Hindu, Bengali or Punjabi: they become a family born of the same pool of blood. That is what you have to achieve for India, don't you see? — Amitav Ghosh

There's a bunch od huge churchs clustered together, trying to blend in with all the family-themed restaurants, because salvation is as easy as chicken wings, I guess. — Patrick Ness

Our wives, our families, and our churches need godly men who have discernment
discernment to deal with life and life-issues on a spiritual level. — Jim George

If all those magnificent cathedrals with their valuable lands in Boston, Philadelphia and New York were taxed as they should be, the taxes of women who hold property would be proportionately lightened ... I cannot see any good reason why wealthy churches and a certain amount of property of the clergy should be exempt from taxation, while every poor widow in the land, struggling to feed, clothe, and educate a family of children, must be taxed on the narrow lot and humble home. — Elizabeth Cady Stanton

I can respect a murderer, and a thief, but I have no respect for someone who lies straight to my
face. — J.M. Darhower

Rockwood didn't have a movie theater or an IHOP or a strip mall. But it did have two churches, a ramshackle bar, and last (but certainly not least) Wacky Willie's Deluxe Goofy Golf, a barren landscape of wilted ferns and plastic flamingos with peeling paint. Wacky Willie had added the 'Deluxe' when finally ridding the thirteenth hole windmill of a stubborn family of bats after a great and terrible struggle that would forever be known as 'The Fearsome Bat War of Rockwood County' by Willie, but was usually referred to as 'That Time Willie Had to Get Rabies Shots' by everyone else. — A. Lee Martinez

An amusing, if rather pathetic, case study in miracles is the Great Prayer Experiment: does praying for patients help them recover? Prayers are commonly offered for sick people, both privately and in formal places of worship. Darwin's cousin Francis Galton was the first to analyse scientifically whether praying for people is efficacious. He noted that every Sunday, in churches throughout Britain, entire congregations prayed publicly for the health of the royal family. Shouldn't they, therefore, be unusually fit, compared with the rest of us, who are prayed for only by our nearest and dearest?* Galton looked into it, and found no statistical difference. — Richard Dawkins

THE MYTH OF THE GOOD OL BOY AND THE NICE GAL
The good of boy myth and the nice gal are a kind of social conformity myth. They create a real paradox when put together with the "rugged individual" part of the Success Myth. How can I be a rugged individual, be my own man and conform at the same time? Conforming means "Don't make a wave", "Don't rock the boat". Be a nice gal or a good ol' boy. This means that we have to pretend a lot.
"We are taught to be nice and polite. We are taught that these behaviors (most often lies) are better than telling the truth. Our churches, schools, and politics are rampant with teaching dishonesty (saying things we don't mean and pretending to feel ways we don't feel). We smile when we feel sad; laugh nervously when dealing with grief; laugh at jokes we don't think are funny; tell people things to be polite that we surely don't mean."
- Bradshaw On: The Family — John Bradshaw

It appears that Wall Street is not acting as a force for economic expansion, providing access to capital for companies that make things. Rather, it seems, Wall Street is using government bailouts to lever up. — Maria Cantwell

She considered compassion the highest virtue, but that night on Obstetric Ward B, it had had a twin sister whose face was invisible to Carla. The suffering women, however, had recognized it immediately: condemnation. — Erik Valeur

You know what, I'm probably one of the most blessed people there's ever been, and I thank God for it. — Smokey Robinson

This I need to be told?" she'd snapped. As if, sitting in this kitchen where she felt the disapproving presence of his dead mother, she could forget where he'd grown up. Cole was the youngest of six children, with five sisters who'd traveled no farther than the bottom of the hollow, where Dad Widener had deeded each daughter an acre on which to build a house when she married, meanwhile saving back the remainder of the sixty-acre farm for his only son, Cole. The family cemetery was up behind the orchard. The Wideners' destiny was to occupy this same plot of land for their lives and eternity, evidently. To them the word town meant Egg Fork, a nearby hamlet of a few thousand souls, nine churches, and a Kroger's. Whereas Lusa was a dire outsider from the other side of the mountains, from Lexington - a place in the preposterous distance. And now she was marooned behind five sisters-in-law who flanked her gravel right-of-way to the mailbox. — Barbara Kingsolver

Perhaps one day, all these conflicts will end, and it won't be because of great statesmen or churches or organisations like this one. It'll be because people have changed. They'll be like you, Puffin. More a mixture. So why not become a mongrel? It's healthy. — Kazuo Ishiguro

People come to this country from all over the world to pursue their dreams of driving a taxi or selling hot dogs or working in a sweatshop. — Greg Giraldo

Going to church is a beautiful act of humility. You are saying to the world, "I need God and His family. — Carlos A. Rodriguez

Being a monk was the strangest and most perverted way of life imaginable. Monks spent half their lives putting themselves through pain and discomfort that they could easily avoid, and the other half muttering meaningless mumbo jumbo in empty churches at all hours of the day and night. They deliberately shunned anything good - girls, sports, feasting and family life. — Ken Follett

In the United States, if one family out of every four churches adopted a child, there would be no orphans in the country — Kay Warren