When you decide to be something, you can be it. That's what they don't tell you in the church. When I was your age, they would say we can become cops or criminals. Today, what I'm saying to you is this: when you're facing a loaded gun, what's the difference?
— Frank Costello
Powerful Church Today quotations
The church today is riddled with fad doctrines and new sounds that distract from the clear message of the Great commission in the New Testament. Any message that attracts you which does not bring glory to Christ is the message of a seducing spirit and the man giving it is in deception.
The reason why men do not look to the Church today is that she has destroyed her own influence by compromise.
The early Church was married to poverty, prisons and persecutions.
Today, the church is married to prosperity, personality, and popularity.
My ordination in the Church of God in Christ was at age 9, and I later became a Baptist minister, which I am today.
The greatest weakness in the church today is that the servants of God keep looking over their shoulder for the approval of men.
Much of today’s church relies more on a book the early church didn't have, than the Holy Spirit they did.
Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our church. We are fighting today for costly grace.
Women today leave the house in animal prints and six inch stilettos, what does that say? I'm going to church? They're saying I want you to hang me by my tits from your ceiling and bite my ass. You know what I mean? That's what it says to me anyway.
In this context, the church supports and favors every effort today to seek the full development of the personality of all human beings, and to promote their fundamental rights, their dignity and liberty.
Within evangelicalism is a distressing drift toward accepting a Christianity that does not demand a life-changing walk with God. Many evangelicals (today) do not realize that the church has always been an island of righteousness in a sea of paganism, but as a result they turned the world upside-down.
For over forty years, in a spirit of love, members of the Church have been counseled to be thrifty and self-reliant; to avoid debt; pay tithes and a generous fast offering; be industrious; and have sufficient food, clothing, and fuel on hand to last at least one year. Today there are compelling reasons to reemphasize this counsel.
In some Churches today and on some religious television programs, we see the attempt to make Christianity popular and pleasant. We have taken the cross away and substituted cushions.
Since strict obedience is demanded and harshly enforced, only the least talented, least articulate, least nuanced thinkers, least likely to take a stand against abuse, and the least courageous people thrive in the Church today.
A revival does two things. First, it returns the Church from her backsliding and second, it causes the conversion of men and women; and it always includes the conviction of sin on the part of the Church. What a spell the devil seems to cast over the Church today!
We live in an age in which only one prejudice is tolerated - anti-Christian bigotry... Today, the only group you can hold up to public mockery is Christians. Attacks on the Church and Christianity are common.
One of the greatest priorities of the church today is to mobilize the laity to do the work of evangelism.
What does it say about our churches today that God birthed the church in a prayer meeting, and prayer meetings today are almost extinct?
Today five out of six non-Christians in our world have no hope unless missionaries come to them and plant the church among them.
I think that the church in America today is so obsessed with being practical, relevant, helpful, successful, and perhaps well-liked that it nearly mirrors the world itself. Aside from the packaging, there is nothing that cannot be found in most churches today that could not be satisfied by any number of secular programs and self-help groups.
If the Holy Spirit was withdrawn from the church today, 95 percent of what we do would go on and no one would know the difference. If the Holy Spirit had been withdrawn from the New Testament church, 95 percent of what they did would stop, and everybody would know the difference.
Against the State, against the Church, against the silence of the medical profession, against the whole machinery of dead institutions of the past, the woman of today arises.
One of the best ways to improve men's behaviour is to enlighten their minds: and today, against the strong opposition of the Church and the Establishment, Scientific Humanism is attempting to do just that.
Revival precedes evangelism. The church must first repent. This is the blind spot in our eye today.
... what I believe to be one of the major tragedies in the Church today. Namely, that evangelicals are biblical, but not contemporary, while liberals are contemporary but not biblical, and almost nobody is building bridges and relating the biblical text to the modern context
All over this nation, all over this world there are people going to church today and they say they are believers, but until you can take what you've been taught and bring it to the place you gave up - you will never be the radical believer that you need to be for the times in which we live.
The fundamental problem in the evangelical world today is that God rests too inconsequentially upon the church. His truth is too distant, His grace is too ordinary, His judgment is too benign, His gospel is too easy, and His Christ is too common.
Tell me what the world is saying today, and I'll tell you what the church will be saying in seven years.
The church as we know it today seems a million miles from the New Testament church. That may be a great generalization, but I will stand on it. There is a gulf between our average Christianity and the church of New Testament that makes the Grand Canyon look like a cavity in someone's tooth.
Only the Catholic Church protested against the Hitlerian onslaught on liberty.
Up till then I had not been interested in the Church, but today I feel a great admiration for the Church, which alone has had the courage to struggle for spiritual truth and moral liberty
The Church is where it is today because it has decided that the advertising agents know better than the Holy Spirit of God.
Rock concerts are the churches of today.
Yesterday I had a Shaker visitor, and today a Catholic;
and the more I see and hear, the less do I care about church doctrines.
Against the backdrop of people who avoid work, cut corners, and do half-hearted jobs, a diligent man stands out. Practicing diligence is an excellent way to stand out for Christ at home, in the workplace, and even at church. Today, complete each one of your tasks, however big or small, with diligence.
There is nothing the Church of today needs so much as Spiritual Power;
and there is nothing which we can have so easily, if only we are prepared to pay the price.