The first time I sang in the church choir; two hundred people changed their religion.
~ Fred A. Allen

He was of the faith chiefly in the sense that the church he currently did not attend was Catholic.
~ Kingsley Amis

I have no objections to churches so long as they do not interfere with God's work.
~ Brooks Atkinson

It is indolence... Indolence and love of ease; a want of all laudable ambition, of taste for good company, or of inclination to take the trouble of being agreeable, which make men clergymen. A clergyman has nothing to do but be slovenly and selfish; read the newspaper, watch the weather, and quarrel with his wife. His curate does all the work and the business of his own life is to dine.
~ Jane Austen

It will, I believe, be everywhere found, that as the clergy are, or are not what they ought to be, so are the rest of the nation.
~ Jane Austen

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 Church cannot be content to live in its stained-glass house and throw stones through the picture window of modern culture.
~ Robert Mcafee Brown

The church exists to train its member through the practice of the presence of God to be servants of others, to the end that Christlikeness may become common property.
~ William Adams Brown

Wherever we find the Word of God surely preached and heard, and the sacraments administered according to the institution of Christ, there, it is not to be doubted, is a church of God.
~ John Calvin

I believe with all my heart that the Church of Jesus Christ should be a Church of blurred edges.
~ George Carey

People have described me as a ''management bishop'' but I say to my critics, ''Jesus was a management expert too.''
~ George Carey

The old cathedrals are good, but the great blue dome that hangs over everything is better.
~ Thomas Carlyle

A Church which has lost its memory is in a sad state of senility.
~ Henry Chadwick

We praise Him, we bless Him, we adore Him, we glorify Him, and we wonder who is that baritone across the aisle and that pretty woman on our right who smells of apple blossoms. Our bowels stir and our cod itches and we amend our prayers for the spiritual life with the hope that it will not be too spiritual.
~ John Cheever

An instinctive taste teaches men to build their churches with spire steeples which point as with a silent finger to the sky and stars.
~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The parson knows enough who knows a Duke.
~ William Cowper

A woman's asking for equality in the church would be comparable to a black person's demanding equality in the Ku Klux Klan.
~ Mary Daly

And of all plagues with which mankind are cursed, ecclesiastic tyranny's the worst.
~ Daniel Defoe

His creed no parson ever knew, for this was still his ''simple plan,'' to have with clergymen to do as little as a Christian can.
~ Sir Francis Doyle

There is not in the universe a more ridiculous, nor a more contemptible animal, than a proud clergyman.
~ Henry Fielding