75+ Inspirational Church Quotes and Sayings to Surprise You

Inspirational Church Quotes

  • “The Church is not a gallery for the exhibition of eminent Christians, but a school for the education of imperfect ones.” —Henry Ward Beecher
  • “The perfect church service, would be one we were almost unaware of. Our attention would have been on God.” —C.S. Lewis
  • “There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being.” —James Joyce
  • “Wherever we see the Word of God purely preached and heard, there a church of God exists, even if it swarms with many faults.” —John Calvin
  • “Yes, I see the Church as the body of Christ. But, oh! How we have blemished and scarred that body through social neglect and through fear of being nonconformists.” —Martin Luther King, Jr.
  • “Where God builds a church the devil builds a chapel.” —Martin Luther
  • “Nearly all the evils in the Church have arisen from bishops desiring power more than light. They want authority, not outlook.” —John Ruskin
  • “The root of almost every schism and heresy from which the Christian Church has suffered, has been because of the effort of men to earn, rather than receive their salvation; and the reason preaching is so commonly ineffective is, that it often calls on people to work for God rather than letting God work through them.” —John Ruskin
  • “Church is the only place where someone speaks to me and I do not have to answer back.” —Charles de Gaulle
  • “A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.” —H. L. Mencken
  • “We sing in a church, why can we not dance there?” —George Bernard Shaw
  • “It is one of the ironies of the ministry that the very man who works in God’s name is often hardest put to find time for God. The parents of Jesus lost Him at church, and they were not the last ones to lose Him there.” —Vance Havner
  • “Though the church has many critics, it has no rivals.” — Anonymous
  • “He who is near the Church is often far from God.” —French Proverb
  • “The day we find the perfect church, it becomes imperfect the moment we join it.” —Charles H. Spurgeon
  • “I want get across to not just the church world. I want to get outside those walls to everyday people.” —Joel Osteen
  • “Christians are not limited to any church.” —Billy Graham
  • “Clearly the person who accepts the Church as an infallible guide will believe whatever the Church teaches.” —Thomas Aquinas

Church Quotes and Sayings to Inspire You

  • “The True Church can never fail. For it is based upon a rock.” —T.S. Eliot
  • “In the Church, considered as a social organism, the mysteries inevitably degenerate into beliefs.” —Simone Weil
  • “The Church is the one institution that exists for those outside it.” —William Tyndale
  • “Teenagers who do not go to church are adored by God, but they don’t get to meet some of the people who love God back.” —Anne Lamott
  • “I never weary of great churches. It is my favorite kind of mountain scenery. Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral.” —Robert Louis Stevenson
  • “I like the silence of a church, before the service begins better than any preaching.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • “A good church is a Bible-centered church. Nothing is as important as this–not a large congregation, a witty pastor, or tangible experiences of the Holy Spirit.” —Alistair Begg
  • “The Church must be intelligible to the simple as well as to the shrewd.” —Robert Hugh Benson
  • “The Church is not a gallery for the better exhibition of eminent Christians, but a school for the education of imperfect ones.” —Henry Ward Beecher
  • “He who does not have the church as his mother, does not have God as his father.” —Augustine of Hippo
  • “Church attendance is as vital to a disciple as a transfusion of rich, healthy blood to a sick man.” —Dwight L. Moody
  • “For where God built a church, there the Devil would also build a chapel.” —Martin Luther
  • “Those who would renegotiate the boundaries between church and state must therefore answer a difficult question: why would we trade a system that has served us so well for one that has served others so poorly?” —Sandra Day O’Connor
  • “The operation of the Church is entirely set up for the sinner; which creates much misunderstanding among the smug.” —Flannery O’Connor
  • “The Church has always been willing to swap off treasures in heaven for cash down.” —Robert G. Ingersoll
  • “The Reformation did not directly touch the question of the true character of God’s church.” —John Nelson Darby
  • “The church is so subnormal that if it ever got back to the New Testament normal it would seem to people to be abnormal.” —Vance Havner
  • “In a church of my own we’re perfect together I recognize you in the stained glass.” —Heather Nova
  • “You can be committed to Church but not committed to Christ, but you cannot be committed to Christ and not committed to church.” —Joel Osteen
  • “Nothing doth so much keep men out of the Church, and drive men out of the Church, as breach of unity.” —Francis Bacon
  • “The style of God venerated in the church, mosque, or synagogue seems completely different from the style of the natural universe.” —Alan Watts
  • “We need to avoid the spiritual sickness of a church that is wrapped up in its own world: when a church becomes like this, it grows sick.” —Pope Francis
  • “There is one grand, all-comprehending church; and if I am a Christian, I belong to it, and no man can shut me out of it.” —William E.Channing
  • “I think the church and the religion right now have a lot more to be worried about than SLAYER.” —Kerry King
  • “It would be far better to be of no church than to be bitter of any.” —William Penn
  • “There has never been a meaningful life built on easy street.” —John Paul Warren
  • “I believe there are too many practitioners in the church who are not believers.” —C. S. Lewis
  • “The old cathedrals are good, but the great blue dome that hangs over everything is better.” —Thomas Carlyle
  • “The nearer the Church the further from God.” —Lancelot Andrewes
  • “Many come to bring their clothes to church rather than themselves.” —Thomas Fuller
  • “The perfect church service, would be one we were almost unaware of. Our attention would have been on God.” —C.S. Lewis
  • “The Church must be forever building, for it is forever decaying within and attacked from without.” —T.S. Eliot
  • “A glorious Church is like a magnificent feast; there is all the variety that may be, but every one chooses out a dish or two that he likes, and lets the rest alone: how glorious soever the Church is, every one chooses out of it his own religion, by which he governs himself, and lets the rest alone.” —John Selden
  • “It’s about time we quit playing church in these services that start at eleven o clock sharp and end at twelve o clock dull.” —Vance Havner
  • “Leave the matter of religion to the family altar, the church, and the private school, supported entirely by private contributions. Keep the church and state forever separate.” —Ulysses S. Grant
  • “Don’t give your money to the church. They should be giving their money to you.” —George Carlin
  • “Churchgoers are like coals in a fire. When they cling together, they keep the flame aglow; when they separate, they die out.” —Billy Graham
  • “No church can be prospered in which all the ministration comes from the pulpit.” —Henry Ward Beecher
  • “Some keep the Sabbath going to church; I keep it staying at home, with a bobolink for a chorister, and an orchard for a dome.” —Emily Dickinson
  • “Church was doing what he often did when dropped – lying on his back with all four legs in the air, pretending to be dead in order to induce guilt in his owners.” —Cassandra Clare
  • “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.” —Tertullian
  • “I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.” —Thomas Paine
  • “Your body is the church where Nature asks to be reverenced.” —Marquis De Sade
  • “Bombs have kill-radiuses; churches should have love-radiuses–anyone within twenty miles of a church should know it.” —Tyler Edwards
  • “I think if the church did what they were supposed to do we wouldn’t have anyone sleeping on the streets.” —Michael W. Smith
  • “Every day people are straying away from the church and going back to God.” —Lenny Bruce
  • “The church is precisely that against which Jesus preached — and against which he taught his disciples to fight.” — Friedrich Nietzsche
  • “There is no one true church, no one chosen people.” —Terry Tempest Williams
  • “The church has been so seduced by psychological counseling for so long that anything that seems at odds with the current counseling practices is usually considered a consequence of ignorance.” —T.A. McMahon
  • “One hundred religious persons knit into a unity by careful organization do not constitute a church any more than eleven dead men make a football team. The first requisite is life, always.” —A. W. Tozer