Blog - Page 63 of 318 - John H Armstrong

The Role of Catechesis, Adult Conversions and Assimilation

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:15:42-05:00April 17th, 2013|Categories: ACT 3, American Evangelicalism, Church Tradition, Discipleship, Evangelism, Liturgy, Missional Church, Missional-Ecumenism, The Church, The Future, Unity of the Church|

The National Workshop on Christian Unity (NWCU) adopted as its theme for this year’s gathering in Columbus, Ohio, “What Does God Requires of Us?” (Micah 6:6–8). A variety of speakers addressed plenary sessions including Dr. Karen Westerfield Tucker, Professor of Worship at Boston University School of Theology; Ms. Kathryn Lohre, Director for Ecumenical and Inter-Religious for the ELCA and the President of the National Council of Churches; Bishop Emeritus Don McCoid (ELCA) and Rev. Leo Walsh (Catholic). Nine different seminars were also offered. (Attenders could only go to three over the course of two full days.)

The various denominational networks, listed in yesterday’s post, met during the day on Monday. The opening session of the NWCU was on Monday evening, April 8, at St. Joseph’s Cathedral. St. Joseph’s is the cathedral church of the diocese of Columbus. This magnificent service of worship was one of the best ecumenical liturgical services of worship I have ever attended. Representatives of many churches contributed. The sermon, based on the theme text in Micah, was delivered by the Rev. Elizabeth Eaton, the […]

The National Workshop on Christian Unity

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:15:42-05:00April 16th, 2013|Categories: ACT 3, Missional-Ecumenism, Personal, Protestantism, Renewal, Roman Catholicism, The Church, The Future, Unity of the Church|

Last week I attended the National Workshop on Christian Unity (NWCU) in Columbus, Ohio. The NWCU exists for “Equipping Church Leaders in the Quest for Christian Unity.” Until the fall of 2012, when my friend Fr. Tom Ryan, C.S.P., invited me to attend this event, I had never heard of the NWCU. What is this annual meeting and why did I decide to attend it in Ohio last week?

In 1963 a group of Roman Catholics, in the context of Vatican II, saw a need to equip local leadership for the task of ecumenical ministry. They held their first workshop in 1964 in Baltimore. The theme was: “Vatican II and the Ecumenical Movement.” Some of the issues addressed in that first meeting were inter-confessional scholarship, evangelism and ecumenism, Eastern Orthodoxy and ecumenism, joint worship, social problems and ecumenism and the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, an event that has now taken place around the world for over one hundred years. In 1965 the workshop was held in Boston and addressed developments in Protestant theology, religious education and […]

The Lausanne Catholic-Evangelical Conversation This Week

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:15:42-05:00April 15th, 2013|Categories: ACT 3, Christ/Christology, Discipleship, Gospel/Good News, Missional Church, Missional-Ecumenism, Personal, Protestantism, Roman Catholicism, The Church, The Future|

This new week might well bring about one of the most important ministry opportunities I’ve every been asked to lead as the president of the ACT3 Network. I referred to a public part of this opportunity in a blog I posted a few weeks ago. Today I would like to tell you much more and ask, with great earnestness, for your prayers. On April 18 we convene the first-ever Lausanne Catholic-Evangelical Conversation, to be held here in the Chicago area. Today I share more of how this event came about and why I desperately need your prayer for me and all who attend.

In March of 2010 my book, Your Church Is Too Small: Why Unity in Christ’s Mission Is Vital to the Future of the Church (Zondervan), was released. At the time it was published I understood that it would never be a big-seller. I also knew that it had incredible potential to touch lives and to bring about small changes that could have wide-scale consequence. I never imagined how my story would unfold through the book […]

My Sisters the Saints (6) – An Inspiring Journey in Faith

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:15:42-05:00April 13th, 2013|Categories: Books, Church Tradition, Contemplation, Discipleship, Faith, Feminism & Women, Friendship, Marriage & Family, Mysticism, Prayer, Roman Catholicism, Sexuality, Spirituality, The Church, The Future, Women in the Church|

Colleen Carroll Campbell’s journey to femininity did not lead her to embrace a kind of Catholic “fundamentalism” with regard to the social, professional and economic gains that she had previously experienced because of feminism. John and Carroll Campbell clearly share a marriage of mutuality. They have just as clearly learned how to sacrifice and give up their personal agendas, one for the other. For those on the far right, who think the only way to respond to modern feminism is to throw “the baby out with the dirty bathwater” her conclusion will not satisfy you. At the same time if you want a radical feminist perspective that leads to a profound fear and loathing of men and motherhood then you must look elsewhere.

As Colleen read Edith Stein, and Pope John Paul II, she concluded that men are called to loving communion with others just as much as women. But Edith Stein believed that a man was called, more than a woman, to “action, work, and objective accomplishments. A man is less concerned with problems of being, whether […]

My Sisters the Saints (5) – An Inspiring Journey in Faith

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:15:42-05:00April 12th, 2013|Categories: Books, Church Tradition, Contemplation, Discipleship, Faith, Feminism & Women, Marriage & Family, Mysticism, Prayer, Roman Catholicism, Sexuality, Spirituality, The Church, The Future|

As Colleen Carroll Campbell tried to settle into her new work at the White House she found that she had never been so profoundly challenged in her work but so deeply dissatisfied with her life in general. She writes:

I wanted to blame patriarchy for my conundrum., blame my job, blame John. Deep down, though, I knew something else was pulling me home [i.e. back to St. Louis]. It was the force of my own desires, desires that sprang form a soft, passionate, feminine part of me that I thought I had smothered with résumés and credentials long ago. Decades of perfectionism and compulsive achievement had not managed to kill her off. Now she was daring me to reject the smart move and take a chance on love (79).

Trying to work her way out of this she turned to prayer. She turned to the Divine Mercy chaplet, the prayers that came from the journals and insights of Faustina. Don’t misunderstand. She was reading Scripture daily and meditating in the written words of the Holy Bible. Psalm […]

My Sisters the Saints (4) – An Inspiring Journey in Faith

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:15:42-05:00April 11th, 2013|Categories: Books, Church Tradition, Contemplation, Discipleship, Faith, Feminism & Women, Marriage & Family, Mysticism, Prayer, Roman Catholicism, Sexuality, Spirituality, The Church, The Future, Women in the Church|

In the spring of 2001, five years after Colleen Carroll Campbell had moved from Memphis to St. Louis to write for the St. Louis Post Dispatch, she fell in love with John Campbell, a young physician in training who would become her husband. Their love story is endearing and genuinely sweet. During this same time, in 2001, she took a year-long leave from the newspaper to write her book titled: The New Faithful: Why Young Adults Are Embracing Christian Orthodoxy (Chicago: Loyola Press, 2002). She describes this project as a “labor of love . . . a young writer’s dream” (55). She received a grant to travel around the country interviewing hundreds of her peers, mostly Catholics and evangelicals. Her desire was to track and reveal a growing trend among younger adults who were embracing more orthodox expressions of the Christian faith. Her interest grew out of her own experience of faith and astute professional observations. The book is not based on a poll, or the gathering of scientific data. It is anecdotal and profoundly fun to […]

My Sisters the Saints (3) – An Inspiring Journey in Faith

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:15:43-05:00April 10th, 2013|Categories: Books, Church Tradition, Contemplation, Discipleship, Faith, Feminism & Women, Love, Marriage & Family, Mysticism, Prayer, Roman Catholicism, Spirituality, The Church, The Future|

As Colleen Carroll Campbell’s spiritual memoir, My Sisters the Saints, evolves we begin to understand how her relationship with men was being changed profoundly. These changes clearly grew out of the spiritual formation that was now powerfully shaping her life as a growing Catholic Christian.

She writes that before Christmas break was over she did not want to make long-term plans with a man who regarded God as a competitor for her loyalty (22). She, in her own words, “surrendered her relationship [to] take a chance on God instead” (22). Her attempts to enter into a relationship with God was, at first, one of fits and starts. She was grasping for something, anything, that would “help her get her bearings” but the journey was not easy. (Is is ever? If it is then it will likely not last.) She finished college with many more questions but writes: “Teresa’s example convinced me that my journey to understand who I was and how I should live as a woman was inextricably bound with my journey toward God” (24). The party […]

My Sisters the Saints (2) – An Inspiring Journey in Faith

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:15:43-05:00April 9th, 2013|Categories: Books, Church Tradition, Contemplation, Discipleship, Faith, Marriage & Family, Mysticism, Roman Catholicism, Sexuality, The Church, The Future|

Colleen Carroll Campbell’s new spiritual memoir informs the reader, very early in the book, of how her reading St. Teresa’s biography brought deep change. She understood anew why her parents read the lives of the saints as she found in Teresa a woman of passion and purpose whose journey was deeply compelling for its many detours. What she describes as Teresa’s “spicy, messy, and meandering spiritual journey cast my own struggles in a new light” (19). She saw huge differences between her life and that of Teresa but she wondered if the aching hunger that she knew, and her boredom with worldly pleasures, could find an answer in such a deep spiritual experience.

Before Christmas break was over she realized that she did not want to make long-term plans with a man who regarded God as a competitor for her loyalty (22). In her words, she “surrendered her relationship [to] take a chance on God instead” (22). Her attempts to enter into a relationship with God was, at first, one of fits and starts. She was grasping for […]

My Sisters the Saints (1) – An Inspiring Journey in Faith

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:15:43-05:00April 8th, 2013|Categories: Church Tradition, Contemplation, Discipleship, Faith, Feminism & Women, Marriage & Family, Mysticism, Prayer, Roman Catholicism, Sexuality, Spirituality, The Church, The Future|

Collen Carroll Campbell is an accomplished, award-winning author, as well as a print and broadcast journalist. I have followed her writing and professional career, at least from a distance, since I read her first book, The New Faithful: Why Young Adults Are Embracing Christian Orthodoxy, back in 2002. I later quoted from that hopeful book in my own book, Your Church Is Too Small (Zondervan, 2010). I admit that Colleen has become one of my favorite religion writers in America. She writes an op-ed column on religion, politics, and women’s issues for the St. Louis Post Dispatch; blogs on those subjects for the New York Times and the Washington Post; comments on them on such networks as Fox News, CNN, and PBS; and discusses them as a host of Faith & Culture, a weekly television and radio show that airs on EWTN, the Catholic network. Colleen Carroll Campbell’s new book, My Sisters the Saints: A Spiritual Memoir, is an intensely readable and highly evocative book. As a college student, at a fairly secular Catholic university, she was […]

Two Unique Opportunities to Consider the Question of Unity & the Gospel

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:15:43-05:00April 5th, 2013|Categories: ACT 3, Church History, Church Tradition, Faith, Gospel/Good News, Missional-Ecumenism, Roman Catholicism, The Church, Unity of the Church|

On Tuesday, April 30, ACT3 Network will host a Leaders Luncheon beginning at 11:45 a.m. The meeting will end at 1:30 p.m. This event will be at Alberto’s Restuarant at the Holiday Inn in Carol Stream, Illinois. The topic is: “Calvin & Aquinas: Friends or Foes in Understanding Paul’s Letter to the Romans?” John Calvin and Thomas Aquinas are, arguably, the greatest theological representatives of the Reformed Church and the Catholic Church in history. The popular narrative has been that these two giants of faith and doctrine are avowed theological enemies who preached a different gospel message. In this unique luncheon, open to anyone who registers, Dr. Charles Raith II, Assistant Professor of Religion & Philosophy at John Brown University, will speak on the theology of Calvin and Aquinas, asking the question: “How Did These Two Great Theologians Understand Paul’s Epistle to the Romans?” A time for Q & A will be part of the event.

Dr. Charles Raith received his Ph.D. from Ave Maria University, doing a doctoral dissertation on the theology of John Calvin and Thomas Aquinas in […]