Saturday, March 25, 2006

Evangelization -- in the New York Times!

An amazingly positive story in the NYT on the Church's evangelization efforts. A must read (before it disappears to the paid archives. I do have a .pdf if anyone is interested later on ...)

Huge kudos to Fr. Robert Baron (who is simply fantastic) who features prominently in the piece (check out the links to some audio files of his at Open Book).

The CSPs get a mention:
"You just can't assume that people will be Catholic because of cultural influences," said the Rev. Kenneth Boyack, president of the Paulist National Catholic Evangelization Association. "This is one of the elements that leads to this sort of urgency of evangelization."

Some of the efforts are taking a cue from evangelical Protestants.

"A good percentage of people who are in the megachurches are former Catholics," Father Boyack said. "They're really attentive to try to connect to people exactly where they are. And the language they're using is not great theological language."
As do the excellent folks at Evangelical Catholic:
"They're not leaving because they don't like the Catholic Church," said Tim Kruse, executive director of the Evangelical Catholic, a group in Madison, Wis., that helps campus ministries develop programs to foster evangelical life. "They're leaving because Protestant evangelicals have communicated the Gospel to them in a meaningful way."

"Protestant Eye for the Catholic Guy" is a workshop at the St. Paul's Institute of Evangelical Catholic Ministry next weekend in Madison that is expecting about 300 representatives from campus ministries, dioceses and parishes. In the workshop, an evangelical Protestant pastor will talk about how to make sermons more vibrant.
Yours truly, along with a nice little delgation from our Diocese will be in Madison next weekend. Yep, you can expect reports on here! :-) The folks at EC rock!

1 comment:

Heather said...

I really enjoyed the article and thank you for the link. I find it particularly interesting because last summer I went to church twice on Sundays - early to Catholic services (for my dose of religion) and later to a "megachurch" so that I could get pumped up about God and my faith. I thought it was pretty sad I had to go to two different services to get a balanced experience.

I encourage you and the team to open your hearts and take it all in at Madison. I'll be praying for you! (And anticipating your blogs on the subject!)

P.S. It will probably be colder than the 50's up there, so bring a sweater.