Richard Harvey & Martin Luther

My encounter with Martin Luther brought into sharp focus the place of Luther in the tradition of Christian anti-Judaism and popular anti-semitism in a way that has challenged my own faith perspective, my ability to forgive Luther and Lutherans for the sufferings brought about by him on my people, and a strong desire to see reconciliation between Lutherans, Jews and Jewish Christians today.

Source: Richard Harvey  -  "A Messianic Jew Looks at Luther", https://lutherandthejews.com/2017/02/09/a-messianic-jew-looks-at-luther/

Catholics, Presbyterians, Church of Ireland and Methodists

With the benefit of hindsight, Fr Magill (53), one of the region’s best known priests and a regular broadcaster and tweeter, thinks that his love for ecumenical endeavour stems from his upbringing in the religiously mixed townland of Ballymacilhoyle close to the international airport at Aldergrove.

“Where I grew up it was normal for Catholics, Presbyterians, Church of Ireland and Methodists to live side by side.”

Source: Martin O'Brien  -  "A Quiet Peacemaker", The Irish Catholic, 11 Dec 2014, http://www.irishcatholic.ie/article/quiet-peacemaker

Father Matthew, Orthodox Priest

Dreher left Catholicism in 2006; after covering the Catholic sex-abuse scandal for the Post and The American Conservative, he found it impossible to go to church without feeling angry. He and his wife converted to Eastern Orthodoxy, and, with a few other families, opened their own Orthodox mission church, near St. Francisville, sending away for a priest. It was Dreher’s Orthodox priest, Father Matthew, who laid down the law. “He said, ‘You have no choice as a Christian: you’ve got to love your dad even if he doesn’t love you back in the way that you want him to,’ ” Dreher recalled. “ ‘You cannot stand on justice: love matters more than justice, because the higher justice is love.’ ” When Dreher struggled to master his feelings, Father Matthew told him to perform a demanding Orthodox ritual called the Optina Rule. He recited the Jesus Prayer—“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner”—hundreds of times a day.

Two life-changing events occurred after Dreher began the regimen of prayer. He was alone at home one evening, lying in bed, when he sensed a presence in the room. “I felt a hand reach inside my heart and put a stone there,” he said. “And I could see, in some interior way, that the stone said, ‘God loves me.’ I’d doubted all my life that God really loved me.” A few months later, Dreher stopped by his dad’s house to organize his medications. Ray was sitting on the porch, reading the newspaper and drinking coffee. When Dreher leaned down to kiss him on the cheek, his father grabbed him by the arm. Tears were in his eyes. “He was stammering,” Dreher recalled. “He said, ‘I—I—I spent a long time talking to the Lord last night about you, and the transgressions I did against you. And I told him I was sorry. And I think he heard me.’ ” Recounting the story in the back seat of the car en route to D.C., Dreher still seemed astonished that this had happened. “I kissed him, and said, ‘I love you.’ ”

Dreher’s father died in 2015. The next summer, the mission lost its priest and one of the founding families moved away. To be near an Orthodox church, Dreher and his family moved to Baton Rouge. Looking back on his time in St. Francisville, Dreher thinks that, if he hadn’t moved there and then forced himself to follow the rules—prayer, proximity, love—he would have stayed an angry child forever.

Source: Joshua Rothman  -  "Rod Dreher's Monastic Vision", The New Yorker, 1 May 2017, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/05/01/rod-drehers-monastic-vision

“I’m so grateful ..."

“I’m so grateful that an evangelical seminary [Fuller] received a Catholic Benedictine brother,” he says. “The way I was loved and cared for and inspired and encouraged and challenged—my goodness! I wouldn’t replace it with anything else.”

Source: Michael Wright  -  https://fullerstudio.fuller.edu/a-voice-from-narnia/?utm_campaign=fuller-studio-email&utm_medium=email&utm_source=2016-july-newsletter&utm_content=narnia-tile&utm_term=

Rhiannon Lloyd, Welsh reconciler in Rwanda

Finally Rhiannon tells them a personal story.  "I come from a nation where two tribes have hurt each other," she says.  "One day I was in a prayer meeting when an English Christian knelt at my feet.  'We have often made the Welsh our servants,' she said.  'Please forgive us.' And she proceeded to wash my feet.  A deep healing took place in my heart that day because of the humility of one person who chose to identify with the sins of her people against my people."  Rhiannon's simple story contains a key ... Each believer must take up the cross and apply it to their own identity.  Even now God is looking for people like Rhiannon's humble English friend.  He's looking for those who will express the humility of Christ and bring healing to the nations.

Source: John Dawson  -  What Christians Should Know About Reconciliation, p. 8

Protestant Theologian in a Catholic Community

Until these matters could be clarified, Bonhoeffer needed a place of shelter, a haven from the ever-watchful eye of the Gestapo. His “nomadic existence” was becoming less tenable. “[I need] to plant myself somewhere a little more permanently,” he wrote to his parents. Ettal was first suggested by Paula Bonhoeffer, Dietrich’s mother, who was familiar with the area from vacations she and her husband had spent in the nearby village of Oberammergau. In this way, the Protestant theologian found himself living in a Catholic community.
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Bonhoeffer found spiritual nourishment at Ettal in the daily rhythms of Scripture, prayer, silence, and song. This pattern resembled, in some respects, Bonhoeffer’s organization of community life at Finkenwalde, with its antiphonal reading of the Psalms, stated hours of prayer, hymn singing, and silence. This form of spiritual life was dubbed by some of his critics as “a new kind of monasticism.” Now ensconced in a rather “old” form of monasticism based on the Rule of St. Benedict, Bonhoeffer reflected on the inherent value of monastic life for the entire church: “It would certainly be a loss (and was indeed a loss in the Reformation!) if this form of communal life preserved for 1500 years were destroyed, something those here consider entirely possible.”

Source: Timothy George  -  "Bonhoeffer at Ettal: Advent", First Things, 12 Dec 2016, https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2016/12/bonhoeffer-at-ettal-advent-1940

Jimmy Carter - First Breakthrough

One Sunday when I was traveling, our deacons at our Plains Baptist Church (where I was a member and a deacon) voted not to admit any African American worshipers into the building.  I came home for a church conference, and I made a speech about how we should let them come into God's house.  My family and one other, six people, voted to integrate the church and let black people come in and worship at least.  All the rest of them voted against it.  But almost 100 people didn't vote. That was the first time I saw we really had a breakthrough.  The majority of the members who were in conference agreed with me, although they wouldn't vote with me.

Source: Jimmy Carter  -  Christianity Today, October 2016, "Jimmy Carter:  Pursuing an Arc of Reconciliation", pp. 66-69

From Jeff Fountain

As we walked back to our apartment, we passed a large neo-gothic building as a couple emerged from a side door. Curiosity drew us inside. To our amazement we discovered a huge ornately-decorated church buzzing with several hundred worshippers. Was there something special happening here? we asked. ‘Oh no,’ we were told, ‘this church is filled every week with Protestant and Catholics worshipping together.’ Over 800 had recently come there for a Christmas meal, we learned.

Source: Jeff Fountain  -  "A Godly City?", Weekly Word eNewsletter, 5 Mar 2018, https://us9.campaign-archive.com/?e=0b86898e11&u=65605d9dbab0a19355284d8df&id=14bc9e9338

“Could we not also have prayed along with them?”

Bonhoeffer was clearly charmed by the place, but as a Protestant pastor he was not completely at ease with everything he saw and experienced. “The Catholic Advent seems somewhat strange to me,” he wrote to Bethge. At Finkenwalde, the Lord’s Supper had been celebrated once each week. At Ettal, Bonhoeffer could go to Mass and share in the prayers and readings, but, as he was not a member of the Catholic Church, he could not partake of the bread and wine at communion. “I am longing for the Lord’s Supper,” he said. Still, Bonhoeffer’s presence at what he called “quite a wonderful Mass” did bear witness to a kind of broken unity, a sanctorum communio not yet fully realized in the visible church of the undivided Christ here and now. Several weeks before Bonhoeffer arrived in Ettal, as war raged across Europe, Pope Pius XII had issued a Motu Proprio calling for a “crusade of prayer,” inviting Catholics around the globe to join in a prayer for world peace. In a letter to Bethge, Bonhoeffer referred to the Pope’s decree: “Today the pope has ordered a prayer for peace in the whole church. Could we not also have prayed along with them? I did.”

Source: Timothy George  -  "Bonhoeffer at Ettal: Advent", First Things, 12 Dec 2016, https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2016/12/bonhoeffer-at-ettal-advent-1940

Bold Prophets

But there were women and men who, in times when this joint commemoration was still unimaginable, already gathered together to pray for unity or to form ecumenical communities. There were theologians, women and men, who already entered in dialogue, seeking to overcome doctrinal and theological differences. There were many, who together offered themselves to serve the poor and the oppressed. There were even some who suffered martyrdom for the sake of the Gospel.


I feel deep gratitude for those bold prophets. As they lived and witnessed together they began to see one another no longer as separated branches but as branches united to Jesus Christ. Even more, they began to see Christ in their midst and to acknowledge that even in those periods of history when dialogue was broken between us, Christ continued talking to us. Jesus never forgot us, even when we seemed to have forgotten him, losing ourselves in violent and hateful actions.

Source: Rev. Dr Martin Junge  -  Rev. Dr Martin Junge, General Secretary of the Lutheran World Federation, Sermon on the occasion of the Joint Commemoration of the Reformation, Lund Cathedral, Sweden, October 31, 2016, https://www.lutheranworld.org/sites/default/files/joint_commemoration_mj_sermon_final_en.pdf

Nate Bacon & Robert Aderholt

This week (as occurred two years ago) I was graciously invited by my Republican Congressman friend from Alabama, Robert Aderholt, to attend the National Prayer Breakfast activities.  Robert and I met and became friends on a summer mission in 1985, when we were roommates in London, England. It was that summer that I felt my call to ministry. Later when I began making more frequent trips to DC for faith-based community organizing events through PICO/ Faith in Action, we renewed our friendship, which has been quite remarkable.  Though we sharply disagree on many political issues, he has consistently listened attentively to stories from our ministry, and to the prophetic implications of the plight of the poor, He has been very supportive, gracious and hospitable to countless friends who have visited DC.  We can talk civilly around the divisive issues that are rending the very fabric of our families and our nation.  Our friendship gives me hope that difference does not necessitate dehumanization.

Source: Nate Bacon  -  Recounted in a personal prayer letter, 5 Feb 2020

"Ecumenical Tithing" by Fr. Martin Magill

Fr Magill’s determination to push the boundaries in terms of ecumenical outreach is evident from his practice of what the late Michael Hurley SJ called “ecumenical tithing”.

This means that part of his time each week, usually on a Sunday afternoon or evening is devoted to worshipping in another Christian denomination, sometimes St George’s Church of Ireland in Belfast “a very beautiful very high church”.

He believes this commitment comes from “the imperative I get from Jesus Christ in John 17”.

Fr Magill reveals that it is “only a matter of time before I will worship in a Free Presbyterian church as part of ecumenical tithing”.

He is also working on a list of ten things that Catholics can learn  from other denominations and “top of the list is welcoming because 90% of churches do welcoming better then we Catholics”, followed by singing.

Source: Martin O'Brien  -  "A Quiet Peacemaker", The Irish Catholic, 11 Dec 2014, http://www.irishcatholic.ie/article/quiet-peacemaker

Martin Luther

The scene is dramatic: in 1517 young monk and professor, Dr. Martin Luther, stands barefoot in the snow, leaning against the wind to hold up a roll of parchment with one hand while driving nails into the wooden church door with the other.  But today (2013) the small print on a brass plaque at the actual Schlosskirche site issues only a disclaimer, stating: “The historicity of the act is disputed.” Did the historic victory for freedom of conscience ever occur at all? Some scholars dispute it; others defend it based on near-contemporary evidence from Luther’s friends and confidants. Although it is known that Luther sent copies of his 95 complaints (or theses) to the Bishop of Mainz before October 31st, 1517, the modern debate over exactly when and where he made them public has revealed some unexpected turns.

Born to peasant parents in 1483, Luther had been an excellent and serious student of music and Latin, paving the way to his studies at the University in Erfurt. He was on track to study law and pursue a life of public service when he had the terrifying experience of being caught in a violent thunderstorm.  He cried out to St. Anne for deliverance and vowed to become a monk if he survived. He did, and made good on that vow, much to the chagrin of his father and his close friends. Joining what was considered a particularly strict Augustinian monastery in 1505, nothing in his prior life would have led anyone to expect him to challenge the authority of the Pope . . . except his extraordinary piety and love of the Bible. He took the biblical injunctions against greed, acquisitiveness, and love of power to heart and was outraged by the corruption he saw in the church of his day. This outrage drove him to invite the Church’s bishops to debate him publicly on ninety-five questions concerning the nature of salvation and the role of indulgences: The 95 Theses.
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At first Luther hoped only to serve as a corrective voice, a goad to the church’s conscience that would prompt the church to inner reform. In particular, he wanted to see the church put an end to accepting money for religious services, a practice that had led to widespread corruption.  What surprised him and drove him to greater and greater antipathy in his disillusionment was that many of the men entrusted with the spiritual leadership of the Church did not want to be challenged to reform. Cardinal Cajetan, who interrogated Luther in Augsburg in 1518, one year after the issue of the theses, began by showing real concern for Luther’s fidelity to the Bible, but became incensed by Luther’s refusal to submit to the Pope’s authority.  Rather than reforming the suspect practices, the Pope ultimately denounced the would-be voice of conscience as “The damned heretic Martin Luther, son of Perdition.” Luther, who wrote so eloquently of grace, failed to give any grace when the Catholic Church rejected him.  His view of the Pope eroded, changing from his “Blessed Father,” who Luther thought was a persuadable victim of bad counsel from corrupt courtiers, to being “The Anti-Christ in Rome.” 

With this turn in his writings, Luther laid the groundwork for centuries of animosity and mistrust between the new Protestant Christians (called ‘Evangelicals’ in his day in Germany), and Catholic Christians. Several of his most important writings, the commentary On Good Works, On the Lord’s Prayer, The Freedom of the Christian, and Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation were issued during a period of intense conflict between November of 1517 and January of 1521, when he was finally excommunicated. The writings of this period show a relentless devotion to the message of salvation through the grace of God, a passionate concern for the spiritual welfare of the everyday man, and an increasingly uncompromising, almost dualistic view of the moral natures of the Reformers who were joining his cause and the Catholic authorities arrayed against them.  The lasting good that came from this period is the establishment of freedom of conscience, an element in modern nation-states, while the enduring harm has been the readiness of each group to deny that very freedom to members of the other.

Lamentably Luther’s relationship with the Jews of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation followed a parallel course, so much so that Luther is now viewed by many as “the father of modern anti-Semitism.” His relationship with the Jews of the Holy Roman Empire did not begin with hostility, though.  In 1523 he published a best-selling pamphlet entitled That Jesus Christ was Born a Jew, denouncing the degrading and cruel treatment of Jews by Christians in Europe. “If the Jews of the early church had treated us [pagans] the way that we treat the Jews today, no pagan would have ever become a Christian,” he wrote. He called for Christians to treat Jews with love and respect with the aim that they convert.

Encouraged by his pamphlet, Josel von Rosheim, Commander of Jewry of the Holy Roman Empire, wrote to Luther and asked him for a personal meeting. Luther refused brusquely. “It was not my intention to encourage you in your errors,” he wrote, rejecting the request for dialogue. From there, Luther’s attitude toward the Jews deteriorated over the years, reaching its nadir in his last sermon, von Schem Hamphoras und sein Geschlecht, a hate-filled tirade that paved the way for modern anti-Semitism. Again, in Luther’s character, disillusionment and bitterness took and held the upper hand over perseverance in grace, a central irony in the life of the man whose name is synonymous, to many, with the words “sola gratia” (grace alone). In both his relationship with the Catholic leadership and between the Jews of Germany and Christians, his legacy has shaped the world we live in for five centuries now.

Approaching the 500th anniversary of the act that began the Reformation, it is clear that Luther’s undeniable, world-shaping influence has been alternately beneficial and harmful to civilization. The reforms he sought in the church did come, but only later, at great cost, and with no contemporary admission that many of his criticisms had been accurate- these only came later as well. Reparation of the division in Christianity that his preaching brought about has only recently begun, through documents such as the Lutheran-Catholic Statement on the Eucharist from 1967 and the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification from 1999.  The work is on-going, and the sincere prayer of this author is that leaders in the Catholic Church and Protestant churches be moved by the Holy Spirit toward the fulfilment of Jesus’ High Priestly prayer of John 17 as they travel together into the next 500 years of Christian witness on earth.

Source: Wittenberg 2017  -  "Martin's Story", from the Wittenberg 2017 (US) website, written by John D. Martin
http://www.wittenberg2017.us/martins-story.html

Fr. Ignatius Spencer

In 1838, Father Spencer instituted a great “Crusade of Prayer for the Conversion of England” and soon after being appointed as the chaplain to the seminarians at Oscott College in Birmingham, preached at St. Chad’s in Manchester on the need for unity between Catholics and Anglicans in England. He went to Oxford to talk to John Henry Newman, Vicar of St. Mary’s the Virgin, Fellow at Oriel, and leader of the Oxford Movement to discuss the goal of unity in truth but Newman refused to meet with him.
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His zealous efforts in the cause of unity between Catholics and Protestants, and his desire for England’s conversion, have earned him the title of “Apostle of Ecumenical Prayer”.

Source: Stephanie Mann  -  Blog post 6 Sept 2016, "Servant of God Ignatius Spencer: Apostle of Ecumenical Prayer", http://www.ncregister.com/blog/stephaniemann/servant-of-god-ignatius-spencer-apostle-of-ecumenical-prayer

The Apostle Paul

I want you to know how hard I am struggling for you and for those believers in Laodicea (one of the seven churches of Revelation; see Revelation 3:14-22), and for everyone I have not met in person.

Source: The Apostle Paul  -  Colossians 2:1