Christ Our Center – Fr. Edward T. Oakes

On Thursday, April 18, the first ever Lausanne Catholic-Evangelical conversation on mission and evangelism took place at Mundelein Seminary in suburban Chicago. In planning this meeting our Lausanne committee, a group of five which I serve as chairman, agreed that we should have a public lecture/dialogue to begin the private meeting for the three days that we were together, April 18-20. We further agreed that we wanted to address the subject: “Christ Our Center.” The idea for this comes from Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his emphasis upon finding our unity in Christ as Lord of all. I devote an entire chapter in my book, Your Church Is Too Small, to this same topic. So we invited Fr. Edward Oakes, of the Mundelein faculty, to speak to this topic. Dr. Oakes is the author of the excellent book: Infinity Dwindled to Infancy: A Christology for Catholics and Evangelicals (Eerdmans, 2011).

Dr. Hans Boersma, professor at Regent College in Vancouver, was invited to respond. Boersma is the James I. Packer Professor of Theology at Regent. His presentation will be posted next week on this site.

After Oakes and Boersma each spoke Fr. Robert Barron and I offered comments and response. Then we opened the discussion up to the gathered audience. The crowd was smaller than we had expected because we had just endured serious storms in the Chicago region the day before the event (April 17).

The first part of our evening is thus the lecture that you can view here as given by Fr. Oakes. You will be able to view the entire presentation in high quality video within two weeks. Next week we will post Hans Boersma’s presentation and the comments of Fr. Barron and myself. Then the week after that we will post the Q & A from the audience. Thus the entire two-plus hours will then be completely available on this site two weeks from today, June 3.

Please encourage your friends to watch this amazing presentation and please consider helping ACT3 Network do more of these kinds of presentations by supporting us financially. We need your support if we are to produce high quality videos of this sort. We function on a very small budget. This production was costly but the end result is very good as I think you will agree after seeing it. Your response is warmly welcomed.