The more sects we have the better. They are all getting somebody in (to the Church) that the others could not: and even with the numerous divisions we are all doing tolerably well.
I think by eighth grade I knew I wanted to be an actor. I'd done church plays and stuff, but my first actual acting class was in eighth grade. I was obsessed with it.
As a former Catholic, and as someone who even today is not opposed to being called a Christian, I felt I had every right to use the symbols of the Church and resented being told not to.
What God says to His Church at any given period depends altogether upon her moral and spiritual condition and upon the spiritual need of the hour.
'Phantom of the Opera' started in my little 100-seater converted church in Britain with a stage where we did what we did. But it was the score itself was what made it.
My Methodist upbringing was very formative in my politics. I was born in 1969, and there was all this ecumenical 'we're in this together' sensitivity that was part of the United Methodist Church in the 1970s.
I ask the educational system, the parents, the church, and pillars of the community to help shape a new culture of honesty, patriotism, respect, discipline and service for young Filipinos.
I personally believe, as church law sets out, that sanctions are an absolute last resort, particularly penal sanctions of depriving people of the sacraments.
The required cheerfulness that characterizes many of our churches produces a suffocating environment of pat, religious answers to the painful, complex questions that riddle the lives of hurting people.
An institution theoretically devoted to providing comfort to those in need (the church) is in trouble because it has embraced the same pressure cooker we find everywhere else.
The exaltation of human reason and its capabilities, a commitment to rigorous and rational debate, a promotion of intellectual inquiry and scholarly exchange--all sponsored by the Church--provided the framework for the Scientific Revolution.
Every European goes on the streets and sees medieval churches. Not if you live in Indianapolis. The most exciting letters I received were from people in places like that.
Christians well know that the much-decorated statue of the Church, as it now stands, is not of pure chiseled marble, but of clay, cemented together by blood and tears and hardened in the fires of hatred and persecution.
My children have absolutely no interest in my fame. They're very sophisticated, and they have a spiritual perspective on material things because we go to church.
My mother told me once that she and my father agreed that I would not be brought up Jewish in Chicago. She had me going to a Methodist church.
It bums me out tremendously what the church has become, and if it's got me bummed, imagine what Jesus Christ must be feeling.
I believe the collapse of the House of Windsor is tied in with the collapse of the Church of England.
You know how the church has been hit so hard by the sexual misconduct by clergy, and what's that's done to Catholics, especially here in Boston but elsewhere as well.
Argue not concerning God,…re-examine all that you have been told at church or school or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your soul…
Inviting others to help us with our work in the Church helps them feel needed and helps them feel the Spirit. When these feelings come, many people often then realize that something has been missing from their lives.
I would say that social work began in my mind in the Unitarian Church when I was ten or twelve years old, and I started to do things that I thought would help other people.
