Philip Yancey Church Quotations

You are free to reject God. Make sure that you're really rejecting God, not some caricature of God that the church has shown you. But I, one, respect a God who not only allows us to reject Him but includes the arguments we can use against Him in the Bible. I respect that.

In China, where you can be arrested and imprisoned for your faith, getting together with other Christians is a lifeline and you'll risk anything for the privilege. No one attends church in China casually, or for a social advantage - quite the opposite.

The borderlanders are people who are kind of caught in the middle. They think there must be another world out there. There probably is a God, but they are either turned off by the church or wounded by the church or wary of the church for whatever reason.

If your church conveys that spirit of condescension or judgment, it's likely not a place where grace is on tap.

[...]women much like this prostitute fled toward Jesus, not away from him. The worse a person felt about herself, the more likely she saw Jesus as a refuge. Has the church lost that gift?

Our best efforts at changing society will fall short unless the church can teach the world how to love.

Christ bears the wounds of the church, his body, just as he bore the wounds of crucifixion. I sometimes wonder which have hurt worse.

All too often the church holds up a mirror reflecting back the society around it, rather than a window revealing a different way.

We admit that we will never reach our ideal in this life, a distinctive the church claims that most other human institutions try to deny.

In no other arena is the church at greater risk of losing its calling than in the public square

We in the church have humility and contrition to offer the world, not a formula for success. Almost alone in our success-oriented society, we admit that we have failed, are failing, and always will fail.

The church is, above all, a place to receive grace: it brings forgiven people together with the aim of equipping us to dispense grace to others.

What would a church look like that created space for quietness, that bucked the celebrity trend and unplugged from noisy media, that actively resisted our consumer culture? What would worship look like if we directed it more toward God than toward our own amusement?

I go to church as an expression of my need for God and for God's family.

We can’t expect the nation to operate by Christian principles… but we can expect this of the church.

I rejected the church for a time because I found so little grace there. I returned because I found grace nowhere else.