Church Relevance Quotes

Why create churches for 50-year-olds and let culture have the students?

people say churches are half empty, they're not, they're too big

If Satan wasn't around, churches would go out of business.

It can be exalting to belong to a church that is five hundred years behind the times and sublimely indifferent to fashion; it is mortifying to belong to a church that is five minutes behind the times, huffing and puffing to catch up.

Unfortunately, the Church's position on most contemporary issues makes it hard to take them seriously.

I prefer a church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security.

[We need reforms] to make the Negro church a place where colored men and women of education and energy can work for the best things regardless of their belief or disbelief in unimportant dogmas and ancient and outworn creeds.

It's all so verbal in the Protestant church. You've heard these words a million times before. Maybe people are leaving the church because they find the church has nothing that they're looking for.

The Gospel lives in conversation with culture, and if the Church holds back from the culture, the Gospel itself falls silent. Therefore, we must be fearless in crossing the threshold of the communication and information revolution now taking place.

A Church without Youth is a Church without a future. Moreover, Youth without a Church is Youth without a future.

The church that will not give up will be outdated and passed by, quicker than they realize.

No church that panders to the zeitgeist deserves respect, and very shortly it will not get respect, except from those who find it politically useful, and that is less respect than disguised contempt.

I am convinced that if we lose kids to the culture of drugs and materialism, of violence and war, it's because we don't dare them, not because we don't entertain them. It's because we make the gospel too easy, not because we make it too difficult. Kids want to do something heroic with their lives, which is why they play video games and join the army. But what do they do with a church that teaches them to tiptoe through life so they can arrive safely at death?

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 church of today does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authentic ring, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century.

A lot of churches have not moved with the times.

Among our own people also the church sorely needs clergy in close touch with the ordinary life of the laity, living the life of ordinary men, sharing their difficulties and understanding their trials by close personal experience.

Here, the churches seemed to shrink away into eroding corners. They seem to have ceased to be essential parts of American life. They no longer give life. It is the huge buildings of commerce and trade which now align the people to attention. These in their massive manner of steel and stone say, Come unto me all ye who labor, and we will give you work.

The church must acclimate to a changing world, or she will destine herself to irrelevance or even extinction. ...One of those dramatic changes in our environment is the shift from words to images. To do church in a way that is entirely text driven is the kiss of death.

For me, and maybe for many religious kids of the '60s, the church lost relevance the more it became a surrogate in the movement for social and political change.

The kind of sermon which is preached in most colored churches is not today attractive to even fairly intelligent men.

A Church that has lost its voice for justice is a Church that has lost its relevance in the world.

There is a real hunger for spiritual things in today's culture; people are seeking something spiritual, something beyond themselves. That's the good news. The bad news is people are not getting it at church because the church is singing songs, preaching messages, doing programs, and taking offerings for itself.

I believe that the most important thing...is to revive in the whole Church that positive tension, that yearning to announce Christ again to contemporary man.

The questions of today's average young person, who is the product of America's intellectual bastions, have been virtually unaddressed by the church.