Bethel Church Quotes

Working for love is a curse. Working from love is a ministry.

If you watch what you think about, you won't have to watch what you talk about.

When you forget who you are and whose you are, you start to compromise.

So many of us have believed that we need to labor and perform for God so that we can gain an identity, so that we might be accepted. But in the Kingdom, we start off accepted.

Faith doesn’t deny a problem’s existence. It denies a problem a place of influence.

It was not the Prophet who bore Bethel, bound to his back like a millstone. It was all of the innocent girls and women—like Miriam and Leah—who suffered and died at the hands of men who exploited them. They were Bethel’s sacrifice. They were the bones upon which the Church was built.

Immanuelle stared at him—this man who’d used his lies to make himself a martyr. He thought he was the one who made the true sacrifice, but he couldn’t be more wrong. It was not the Prophet who bore Bethel, bound to his back like a millstone. It was all of the innocent girls and women—like Miriam and Leah—who suffered and died at the hands of men who exploited them. They were Bethel’s sacrifice. They were the bones upon which the Church was built. Their pain was the great shame of the Father’s faith, and all of Bethel shared in it. Men like the Prophet, who lurked and lusted after the innocent, who found joy in their pain, who brutalized and broke them down until they were nothing, exploiting those they were meant to protect. The Church, which not only excused and forgave the sins of its leaders but enabled them: with the Protocol and the market stocks, with muzzles and lashings and twisted Scriptures. It was the whole of them, the heart of Bethel itself, that made certain every woman who lived behind its gate had only two choices: resignation, or ruin. No more, Immanuelle thought. No more punishments or Protocols. No more muzzles or contrition. No more pyres or gutting blades. No more girls beaten or broken silent. No more brides in white gowns lying like lambs on the altar for slaughter. She would see an end to all of it.

Mother Bethel, the mother church of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) denomination

Among colleges, the evangelical feminist position is the dominant position at Wheaton College, Azusa Pacific University, and several other Christian colleges. Among seminaries, evangelical feminism is the only position allowed at Fuller Seminary, and it is strongly represented on the faculty at Denver Seminary, Gordon-Conwell Seminary, Bethel Seminary, Asbury Seminary, and Regent College–Vancouver. Even among seminaries that are committed to a complementarian position, some have begun hiring women to teach Bible and theology classes to men, arguing that “we are not a church” (see discussion in chapter 11 above).2 But it seems to me that having a woman teach the Bible to men is doing just what Paul said not to do in 1 Timothy 2:12. And I don’t think such a position will remain stable for very long, but will lead to further movement in an egalitarian direction.

Rashi was trained to wrestle with God like Jacob at Bethel, to bargain with him like Moses at Mt. Sinai. Rashi's people have an ancient tradition of questioning God "face-toface, as a man speaks with his friend." [Exodus 33:11] Conversely, I abandoned my faith because it seemed I had no right to question the difficulties, much less expect answers. I had been taught to accept ready-made dogma rather than to personally take my doubts to God. Make no mistake; I do not blame the church for my lost time. I might well have fallen away no matter what. But it is just possible that several years of painful isolation from the Lord might have been avoided had I learned at an early age this simple truth that most Reform Jews know: God loves an honest question.

One of the most compelling pieces of evidence, though, for the use of “Nearer, My God, to Thee” was the fact that it was the best-loved hymn of Wallace Hartley and had been introduced to the Bethel Chapel by Wallace’s father, Albion Hartley, when he was choirmaster. A friend from Colne told the British Weekly: “It was the custom of the Bethel church choir leader to choose the hymn or chant after prayer and Mr. Albion Hartley often selected ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee.’ The hymn was also a great favourite with his son, the bandmaster of the Titanic, for a cousin mentioned that he would often be kept waiting for Wallace to go and play cricket because he was practicing ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee’ in variations on the violin.

I recall how upset Josie was. Ready to gouge and fight that-there time over at Bethel Church.’ ‘A man’s that got it in head to own a place… got get-up in his hide… Beyond that under their shirts they’re all just alike. In the dark you couldn’t know one from the next.