Collective Worship Quotes

The bible knows nothing of solitary religion.

You cannot pray at home, like you can at church, where there is a great multitude; where exclamations are cried out to God as from one great heart, and where there is something more: the unions of minds, the accord of souls, the bond of charity, the prayers of priests.

The joining of the whole congregation in prayer has something exceedingly solemn and affecting in it.

By prayer, community is created as well as expressed.

The Bible is not primarily a written or printed text to be scrutinized in private, in a scholar's study or a contemplative cell. It is a body of oral messages, announcements, prophecies, promulgations, recitals, histories, songs of praise, lamentations, etc., which are meant either to be uttered or at least read aloud, or chanted, or sung, or recited in a community convoked for the purpose of a living celebration.

This common prayer project has taken years of energy, but we see it not as a way to leave our individual churches, but as a movement we hope to see permeate the larger Church.

All religions lead to the same God, and all deserve the same respect. Anyone who chooses a religion is also choosing a collective way for worshipping and sharing the mysteries. Nevertheless, that person is the only one responsible for his or her actions along the way and has no right to shift responsibility for any personal decisions on to that religion.

Religion is the first sense of community. Your sense of community occurs by reason of mutual experience with others.

You are much more likely to have a holy experience in a quiet, focused, and communal context than you are when you are being entertained.

It is the right and duty of all men publicly, and at stated seasons, to worship the Supreme Being.

I don't attend church because I am a Meryl Streepist and we, her disciples, have not organized a place of worship yet. We just watch 'Sophie's Choice' in our homes once a month and sing praise together in a collective cry of shock and awe and devotion.

We are so accustomed to think of religion as a thing between individual men and God that we can hardly enter into the idea of a religion in which a whole nation in its national organisation appears as the religious unit.

The core of common culture is religion. Tribes survive and flourish because they have gods, who fuse many wills into a single will, and demand and reward the sacrifices on which social life depends.

A congregational prayer is a means for establishing essential human unity though common worship.

It is the voice of the Church that is heard in singing together. It is not you that sings, it is the Church that is singing, and you, as a member of the Church, may share in its song.

Has it ever occurred to you that one hundred pianos all tuned to the same fork are automatically tuned to each other? They are of one accord by being tuned, not to each other, but to another standard to which each one must individually bow. So one hundred worshipers met together, each one looking away to Christ, are in heart nearer to each other than they could possibly be, were they to become 'unity' conscious and turn their eyes away from God to strive for closer fellowship.

Nothing can be more sublime this side of heaven than the singing of this noble Psalm by a vast congregation. It is all ablaze with grateful adoration.

We neither laugh alone, nor weep alone, why then should we pray alone?

In worship we have our neighbors to right and left, before and behind, yet the Eternal Presence is over all and beneath all. Worship does not consist in achieving a mental state of concentrated isolation from one’s fellows. But in depth of common worship it is as if we found our separate lives were all one life, within whom we live and move and have our being.

In public worship all should join. The little strings go to make up a concert, as well as the great.

In better times the religion of the tribe or state has nothing in common with the private and foreign superstitions or magical rites that savage terror may dictate to the individual.

I started off singing in church as a child. The sound of voices coming together, that was my first moment of touching something outside of myself.

If a prayer is the way we talk to God, if a million people pray, that's got to be one big message.