Rutherford B. Hayes Quotes

I love what the church offers to us as a culture - black people in particular. We would be nowhere without the black church.

I put forward as a general definition of civilization, that a civilized society is exhibiting the five qualities of Truth, Beauty, Adventure, Art, Peace.

The most creative social strategy we have to offer is the church. Here we show the world a manner of life the world can never achieve through social coercion or governmental action. We serve the world by showing it something that it is not, namely, a place where God is forming a family out of strangers.

If you're not looking forward to church this morning perhaps it's time to look for a church.

Religion is civilization, the highest.

Religion is fire which example keeps alive, and which goes out if not communicated.

Educated men - "civilized," as Fourier used to say with disdain - tremble at the idea that society might some day be without judges, police, or gaolers.

Without the restraints of religion and social worship, men become savages much sooner than savages become civilized by means of religion and civil government.

If reason dominates in man, he rises higher than angels. If lust overpowers man, he descends lower than the beast.

The best critique of what is wrong is the practice of something better. So let's stop complaining about the church we've experienced and work on becoming the church we dream of.

Every church needs to grow warmer through fellowship, deeper through discipleship, stronger through through worship, and larger through evangelism.

No one who has had a unique experience with prayer has a right to withhold it from others.

I go to a church here in New Jersey that is just a very exciting place, and I just love to be there on Sunday morning - I just sit there in a pew with my wife, that's all I do, but I'm very much a part of that congregation. We've got a fantastic rector,she brings in people from places like the United Theological Seminary in New Brighton, Minnesota, where you've got good teaching, and our people are being introduced to great material and they really respond. They're able to believe without crossing their fingers. And I think that's a real step forward.

Conversion must mean more than just being a 'card-carrying' member of the church with a tithing receipt, a membership card, a temple recommend, etc. It means to overcome the tendencies to criticize and to strive continually to improve inward weaknesses and not merely the outward appearances.

Though man's feeling for the other-worldly often has recourse to solitude, solitude does not foster its development; rather, it is nourished by communion, to which the church is more propitious than the cemetery.

We say then, that Christianity is adapted to the intellect, because its spirit coincides with that of true philosophy; because it removes the incubus of sensuality and low vice; because of the place it gives to truth; because it demands free inquiry; because its mighty truths and systems are brought before the mind in the same way as the truths and systems of nature; because it solves higher problems than nature can; and because it is so communicated as to be adapted to every mind.

I would say that now I'm somebody who goes to church.

What I miss [about church] is being forced to be in community with people that aren't the same as me.

The only sure rule is to remember that the Bible is indeed God's gift to the church, to equip that church for its work in the world, and that serious study of it can and should become one of the places where, and the means by which, heaven and earth interlock and God's future purposes arrive in the present.

The man who never fasts is no more in the way to heaven than the man who never prays.

Most people would not want to live where there are no churches but many people live as though there were no churches.

My theory is that church used to be that place. Instead of being a place where you went to look good, it was a place where you could risk going every week to look your worst.

Becoming a junior usher at a black church was my entry into the wonder of worship.

Orthodoxy, or right opinion, is, at best, a very slender part of religion. Though right tempers cannot subsist without right opinions, yet right opinions may subsist without right tempers. There may be a right opinion of God without either love or one right temper toward Him. Satan is a proof of this.