Pastor Andrew Responds to Criticism from his Congregation

But what made their situation truly remarkable is what Andrew did the Sunday after Susan and Elaine came to talk with him.

With Susan’s permission, he described their conversation to the entire congregation, commending Susan for her graciousness and courage as well as Elaine for her wisdom and advice.

And then he said this:

“As I’ve reflected on what Susan told me about my behavior toward her, I realized I’ve probably treated other people in our church with the same kind of pride, thoughtlessness and impatience. So I’m asking for your forgiveness today as well. If you need to talk with me about how I’ve treated you, my door is open. Please pray that God would help me to become more sensitive to how I’m treating others, and if you see me stumble, please do me the favor of pointing it out so I can continue to grow.”

Source: Ken Sande  -  "Public Confession is Counterintuitive", Relational Wisdom 360 eNewsletter, 7 August 2016, https://rw360.org/2016/08/07/public-confession-counterintuitive/

George and Hanna's Prayers

10 – Hanna (and I) began to pray prayers of blessing. “Come Lord Jesus. Redeem the past. Manifest your kingdom. Bless the Eifel and its people.”
11 – A Jewish follower of the Jewish Messiah had returned, in fulfillment of God’s calling to her people Israel—to bless the Gentiles. Genesis 12:3

Source: George Miley  -  Maturing Toward Wholeness in the Inner Life, Chapter 1, "Restore the Ancient Anointings", http://eifelfellowship.com/chapter-1-restore-the-ancient-anointings/, https://www.amazon.com/Maturing-toward-Wholeness-Inner-Life/dp/0578613719/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=maturing+toward+wholeness&qid=1579303032&sr=8-2

Jews & Muslims in Texas

Jewish people in a small Texas city handed Muslim worshippers the keys to their synagogue after the town's only mosque was destroyed in a fire.
The Victoria Islamic Centre burned down on Saturday and had previously been burgled—the cause is being investigated by federal officials.
...
One of the mosque's founders, Shahid Hashmi, said: "Jewish community members walked into my home and gave me a key to the synagogue."

Source: Jon Sharman  -  "Jewish people give Muslims key to their synagogue after town's mosque burns down", Independent, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/victoria-islamic-centre-mosque-fire-texas-jews-give-key-synagogue-muslims-worship-gofundme-a7556331.html?cmpid=facebook-post

Margarita's Story

When my son knocks on the door and I go to open it, I yell from the inside, “Who is it?”  He answers back, “its me!” His voice is so familiar.  Excitement and joy permeate my entire being, and as I open the door, the expression on my face reveals a welcoming smile, and an accepting embrace tells us both we are home. 

We are home! What a feeling!

On June 2012, I was invited to The Lausanne Catholic and Evangelical Dialogue on Christ’s Mission held in Chicago.  It was there that I first heard about the Wittenberg 2017 Initiative.  As time moved on, I started grasping the purpose of this event. This is to be the 500 years commemoration of Martin Luther’s nailing of the 95 theses to the door of All Saint’s Church; which began a chapter of history that has brought much brokenness, separation and isolation to Catholics and Protestants. So when I heard that the four-fold purpose of Wittenberg 2017 is “to gather Christians together for prayer, repentance, reconciliation and unity,” I felt committed to support.

As I read Psalm 23, the so common, but unique, and beloved Psalm, I experience a journey of reconciliation, healing and restoration.  It is a symphony about God’s assurance for those walking close by his side.  It is a poem that speaks directly to the joys and fears of us human beings who are committed to raising a prophetic voice. “Surely goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” (v 6) I believe God is calling us back home to that place.

When I was a little girl, growing up as a Latina Catholic in a town where there was little tolerance or acceptance of evangelicals and blacks, I heard conversations and witnessed a rage that existed in the minds of my community -- so I know a little about prejudice and racism. When I asked my grandmother why people were so mean, she would always say; “because of their ignorance.  So, let’s pray that one day we can see Christ in those who are different than us.” Then she and I would kneel and begin to pray the rosary. It was then that I recognized a need to develop a different type of conversation; one that appreciated the similarities and accepted the differences.  I was determined to see Catholics and non-Catholics become friends in the unity of worship and the symbol of the cross as representing a believer. 

When I first entered Fuller Theological Seminary for post-graduate studies, I was looking for a school that would provide me with the opportunity for a multicultural and mission experience.  The diversity of an interdenominational approach in ministry that Fuller presented was something that attracted me as part of my desire for higher education.  I believed then and now, that my mission and vision were to be dedicated to addressing and eliminating all socially constructed -ism’s, stereotypes, and prejudices that have historically been used to discriminate and segregate groups of people.  As a Roman Catholic and a Latina, I wanted to understand why, in many of our traditions, we still were not able to stay in conversation without bringing in our own arguments that separated us instead of finding items that would bring us together.  My questions at that time were: How can I bring a transformative and constructive language into my own sharing as I sought to live out 1 Peter 3:8:  “Finally, all of you, have unity of spirit, sympathy, love for one another, a tender heart, and a humble mind”?  How can I represent my tradition and be willing to learn from others?  How can I do and learn my Catholic theology in a different context of reflection?  These and other questions were part of my initial curiosity as I entered Fuller Seminary.

Achieving a Masters in Divinity (2007) gave me the ability to seek greater possibilities as a Latina and as a Catholic.  As a woman of color in an ever-changing Latino culture in America, I’ve had the opportunity to reach horizons never before opened in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, where the position of Parish Life Director was first made available in 2006 for lay ecclesial minsters. 

As Parish Life Director, I was a lay leader who was entrusted with the leadership of a parish. I am convinced that the opportunity and experience at Fuller equipped me, and from there, doors began to open.  It was not just an open door to the position of being appointed as a Parish Life Director, but also to an environment that continues providing me with the affirmation of my call and vocation.  I welcome the conversations, discussions and one-on-one’s with colleagues, professors and friends.  The possibilities for the future continue to expand.

I am a mother of six children, all grown and nearly finished with their higher education. As I entered into this new generation with its constant changes, my children are now teaching me the power of creating new possibilities.  And like my grandmother’s prayers, I pray that with every involvement, every encounter and opportunity, we can grasp throughout our conversations the unique presence of God in our everyday life journey.  As for my own journey, I have learned that there is often no place to really call home.  But in the larger context, home is where acceptance, reconciliation, and genuine encounters reflect God’s love. 

Source: Wittenberg 2017  -  "Margarita's Story", from the Wittenberg 2017 (US) website
http://www.wittenberg2017.us/margaritas-story.html

Father Symonds

Father Symonds was to be the first Catholic priest to give a sermon at Ballymena’s Methodist church for the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity Jan. 18-25.

“I love working here,” he said. “I’ve made great friendships, both within my own congregation and within the Protestant communities. Members of the Presbyterian Church have been particularly supportive of my ministry. I am convinced that I am doing what God has wanted me to do.”

Source: Catholic Review  -  "English priest receives awards for work in Northern Ireland", 5 Jan 2008, http://www.catholicreview.org/article/faith/vocations/english-priest-receives-award-for-work-in-northern-ireland#sthash.kh59mvOi.dpuf

Jaroslav Pelikan

In 1959, on the eve of the Second Vatican Council, [Jaroslav Pelikan] coined another phrase of continuing relevance when he wrote of “the tragic necessity of the Reformation.”

That phrase appeared in a book titled The Riddle of Roman Catholicism, published while Pelikan was still a Lutheran. Much later in his life, in 1998, he was received into the fellowship of the Orthodox Church in America. This decision represented an Eastward tilt in Pelikan’s own spirituality that had been long in the making. But he continued to believe that the great religious upheaval in the Christian West at the dawn of the modern era had involved both the necessity of reform and a division at once scandalous and tragic.

Source: Timothy George  -  First Things, "The Reformation: A Tragic Necessity", 11 July 2016, https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2016/07/the-reformation-a-tragic-necessity

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.
...
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