5) "More than anything, he wanted to return to the house with the same look of peace that he'd seen on
Harris's face, but he trudged through the sand, he couldn't help feeling like an amateur, someone searching for God's truths like a child searching for seashells.","Nicholas Sparks, The Last Song"
6) "One of the most amazing and perplexing features of mainstream Christianity is that seminarians who learn the historical-critical method in their Bible classes appear to forget all about it when it comes time for them to be
pastors. They are taught critical approaches to Scripture, they learn about the discrepancies and contradictions, they discover all sorts of historical errors and mistakes, they come to realize that it is difficult to know whether Moses existed or what Jesus actually said and did, they find that there are other books that were at one time considered canonical but that ultimately did not become part of Scripture (for example, other Gospels and Apocalypses), they come to recognize that a good number of the books of the Bible are pseudonymous (for example, written in the name of an apostle by someone else), that in fact we don't have the original copies of any of the biblical books but only copies made centuries later, all of which have been altered. They learn all of this, and yet when they enter church ministry they appear to put it back on the shelf. For reasons I will explore in the conclusion,
pastors are, as a rule, reluctant to teach what they learned about the Bible in seminary.","Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible & Why We Don't Know About Them"
7) "As you gave the ring to one another and have now received it a 2nd time from the hand of the
pastor, so love comes from you, but marriage from above, from God. As high as God is above man, so high are the sanctity, the rights, and the promise of love. It is not your love tht sustains the marriage, but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love.","Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison"
8) "When you suffer, you are being conformed to the image of Jesus. When you pray, you are being made holy in the image of Jesus. When you quietly serve a person in need, you are being shaped into the image of Jesus. When you generously give, your heart is being remade into the image of Jesus, our Lord and Savior.","Allen R. Hunt, Confessions of a Mega Church
pastor: How I Discovered the Hidden Treasures of the Catholic Church"
9) "Suffering often draws us closer to God. Instead of being a sign of God's punishment or distance, suffering can purify us, lead us into the heart of God, and transform our souls.","Allen R. Hunt, Confessions of a Mega Church
pastor: How I Discovered the Hidden Treasures of the Catholic Church"
10) "If you cannot treat everyone with same respect as you give to your
pastor, then you are a fake person.","Sunday Adelaja, Create Your Own Net Worth"
11) "The years lay spread out before her, spacious untouched canvases on which she was presently going to paint the picture of her life. It was to be a very beautiful picture, she said to herself with an extraordinary feeling of proud confidence; not beautiful because of any gifts or skill of hers, for never was a woman more giftless, but because of all the untiring little touches, the ceaseless care for detail, the patient painting out of mistakes; and every touch and every detail was going to be aglow with the bright colours of happiness.","Elizabeth von Arnim, The
pastor's Wife"
12) Those who have eyes…do not know their happiness.,"André Gide, La symphonie
pastorale"
13) "Why do people go to church on Sundays? A question that is very complicated because I know what the answer is supposed to be but I do not really know the answer.. I think people go because it is a kind of tradition. I think some goes because someone told them if tgey do not they might go to hell. Maybe some go to look for a wife or husband ☺. Maybe some go to church to display their latest designer shoes or handbags. Some goes just to please their
pastor. Some people go to church because they love the music or the preaching. Some goes because of some social reasons and friendship. Some have it in their mind that they will experience the presence of God in the church. Some goes to church because of miracle. Some goes to church when they are expecting something maybe child, comfort, marriage, work etc.. Some felt it is an obligation to give God a day out of the seven days he createdLet me tell you that church is not there to entertain you, Ephesians 3:20... there are things going on in the church that some people barely know about.Ask yourself today why do I go to church. I am sure a sincere answer will help you.","Patience Johnson, Why Does an Orderly God Allow Disorder"
14) "That can happen when people die, the argument with them drops away and people so flawed while they were drawing breath that at times they were all but unbearable now assert themselves in the most appealing way, and what was least to your liking the day before yesterday becomes in the limousine behind the hearse a cause not only for sympathetic amusement but for admiration","Philip Roth, American
pastoral"
15) "This kindly unjudging judgment of the Swede could well have been a new development in Jerry, compassion a few hours old. That can happen when people die--the argument with them drops away and people so flawed while they were drawing breath that at times they were all but unbearable now assert themselves in the most appealing way, and what was least to your liking the day before yesterday becomes in the limousine behind the hearse a cause not only for sympathetic amusement but for admiration. In which estimate lies the greater reality--the uncharitable one permitted us before the funeral, forged, without any claptrap, in the skirmish of daily life, or the one that suffuses us with sadness at the family gathering afterward--this even an outsider can't judge. The sight of a coffin can effect a great change of heart--all at once you find you are not so disappointed in the person who is dead--but what the sight of a coffin does for a mind in its search for the truth, this I don't profess to know.","Philip Roth, American
pastoral"
16) "From the
pastor who has an affair with his secretary, to the jerk at the office who happens to be a deacon, to the overbearing boss who can’t miss his Monday night Bible study, Christians today cause more problems for the gospel than all the devil’s demons put together.","Wes Moore, Forcefully Advancing"
17) I once heard a Chicago-area
pastor put it this way: we don't need more Americans bowing down to the Democrat donkey or the Republican elephant. We need more Americans bowing down to the Lion of Judah.,"Todd Starnes, God Less America: Real Stories From the Front Lines of the Attack on Traditional Values"
18) "Throwing down your staff is letting go and letting God. And that's counterintuitive for those of us who are control freaks. As our executive
pastor Joel Schmidgall likes to say, ""You can have faith or you can have control, but you cannot have both."" If you want God to do something off the chart, you have to take your hands off the controls.","Mark Batterson, All In: You Are One Decision Away From a Totally Different Life"
19) "I see no reason why church services have to be standard. I've discussed this with the man who used to be a
pastor here at the Methodist Church in Sebastopol. I told him I saw no reason why, on a certain Sunday morning, if a minister has felt during the week the burden of a topic upon his heart and he knows that it is going to take more than the standard twenty minutes to discuss this thing, why he can't rise at the beginning of the service and say 'I have something of special importance this morning so let's sing just one song, and if you'll forgive me, I think I'm going to need about an hour to explain it to you.' I think the congregation would appreciate his candor and give him their attention. If, on the other hand, he does not feel that a definite message has been given him, why not admit it from the pulpit and say, 'This morning, I'm not going to try to make up something to fill the time. We'll sing a few extra hymns and go home!' Why do the services have to begin and end at the same time, and why does everything have to be so rigid?","Charles M. Schulz, Charles M. Schulz: Conversations"
20) Christianity contains within itself a germ hostile to the Church (Dietrich Bonhoeffer),"Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer:
pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy"
21) "For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew--or a Quaker--or a Unitarian--or a Baptist. It was Virginia's harassment of Baptist preachers, for example, that helped lead to Jefferson's statute of religious freedom. Today I may be the victim- -but tomorrow it may be you--until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped at a time of great national peril. Finally, I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end--where all men and all churches are treated as equal--where every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choice--where there is no Catholic vote, no anti-Catholic vote, no bloc voting of any kind--and where Catholics, Protestants and Jews, at both the lay and pastoral level, will refrain from those attitudes of disdain and division which have so often marred their works in the past, and promote instead the American ideal of brotherhood. That is the kind of America in which I believe. And it represents the kind of Presidency in which I believe--a great office that must neither be humbled by making it the instrument of any one religious group nor tarnished by arbitrarily withholding its occupancy from the members of any one religious group. I believe in a President whose religious views are his own private affair, neither imposed by him upon the nation or imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding that office....This is the kind of America I believe in--and this is the kind I fought for in the South Pacific, and the kind my brother died for in Europe. No one suggested then that we may have a ""divided loyalty,"" that we did ""not believe in liberty,"" or that we belonged to a disloyal group that threatened the ""freedoms for which our forefathers died.",John F. Kennedy