Healing Ministry Symposium Lectures Night Two

AN ADVOCACY FOR THE USE OF WESTERN RITES IN CONTEMPORARY ORTHODOX CHURCH: FOCUS ON THE FILIOQUE-CLAUSE AND THE EPICLESIS , 2010

While Christian Brethren theology can hardly be limited to their approach to the Lord’s Supper, it is nevertheless clear that their ecclesiology, spirituality and theology are reflected in their Remembrance Meeting to a degree that is perhaps unusual in non-sacramentalist evangelical churches. This multi-faceted significance of the Lord’s Supper in the Brethren movement testifies to the crucial importance of a robust theology of the sacraments for authentic Christian faith and practice.

Calvin Theological Journal, 2011

This book shows from Scripture and history that the Mass and its Eucharist were designed to be an appeasement to God for the sins of man, and was to be offered to him on a continual basis.

From 2000 to 2010, every domestic diocese in the Episcopal Church declined in average Sunday attendance. This decline is attributed in part to a lack of theological and liturgical identity rooted in the Holy Eucharist. Using the mystagogical homilies of Church Fathers as inspiration, this project uses social media to teach the Eucharistic doctrines of Real Presence and Sacrifice through video and social media. This project utilized the Internet, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube to produce, share, and collect data on two videos on Real Presence and Eucharistic Sacrifice. Focus Groups based in St Swithun’s Episcopal Church in the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina were used to gather responses on the effectiveness of the videos and the reception of Eucharistic doctrine. Data was also collected from the social media websites. The focus group responses showed high receptivity to the use of YouTube videos in liturgical and Eucharistic catechesis. Responses also showed a general lack of understanding of Real Presence and Eucharistic Sacrifice before viewing the videos and a greater understanding after viewing, suggesting success in the mystagogical method. Online data gatherings show that viewers have a short attention span and that the videos must be short in length and make the catechetical case in the first thirty seconds. The value of this project is to show that members of the Episcopal Church are not averse to catholic teaching regarding the Holy Eucharist and that social media is a valuable tool in catechesis and hopefully in discipleship and church growth.

Research for this study was served by the hypothesis that the Christian’s lifestyle and witness in a postmodern world will depend on the definition and practice of worship and spirituality. The Old Testament reveals a spirituality that has ‘Yahweh’ involved in all aspects of life. Awareness and experience of the presence of God is linked to obedience to God. New Testament spirituality implies imitation of Christ and an effort to obey Christ's twofold command: to love God and neighbor as self. Christian exhortation (contemplation/meditation) and adoration never take place in isolation from the world because God is active in the world. Adoration leads to action in the world which, in turn, leads to adoration of God. All work done and all life lived for God's sake is, in essence, worship. Being a Christian implies living a life of sacrifice, making a gift of your life to God. As the Christian strives with the Spirit's guidance and empowerment to love God with his/her heart, soul, mind, body - and his/her neighbor as him/her self, in a moment by moment way; as he/she worships God with adoration and action; then he/she is living a true Biblical Christian life and experiencing and practicing true Biblical worship and spirituality. For the postmodernist, religious relativism is incompatible with the objective truth claims of Christianity and the words ‘Christian’ and ‘Church’ mean either empty tradition or abusive totalizing metannarrative. To maintain its identity and practice effective and relevant ministry, the Church should reflect an internal unity in desire, in life, in purpose, and in love. The Church must be the incarnate and engaged love and glory of God to a world that judges Christian truth claims by the lifestyle and witness of Christians. A praxis-orientated apologetic of an incarnational engaged worship and spirituality will demonstrate Christians truth claims. This gives Christianity integrity, credibility, and intelligibility to postmodernists that seek an experiential spirituality in the postmodern era of deconstruction. Evangelism is founded in who God is and what God has done for humanity through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Christian’s demonstrate the Gospel as they love their God and their neighbor with devotion and conduct. They proclaim God’s love with plausibility when they reveal God’s love in action as a visual aid for Gods truth. As Christian worship and spirituality produce the actions that give voice to the nature and will of God, Jesus Christ will ‘rise again’ in the postmodern world through an incarnational and engaged Christian faith. Point summary: i. Authentic Biblical Christian worship is a lifestyle that takes place in an interdependent rhythm of both adoration (joyful praise of God) and action (obedient service to God). ii. Holistic spirituality is the lived moment by moment experience of Christian belief in both general and specialized forms (the Christian faith), and the reaction that the Christian’s belief system arouses in religious consciousness and practice moment by moment (the Christian faith). iii. Biblical worship and spirituality is thus conformity of heart and life with the confession and character of Jesus Christ. It is living life in the coram Deo (the presence of God) in obedience to His will out of gratitude for salvation. iv. Worship, spirituality, and the Christian faith become equivalent terms for each other and as defined in i-iii above reflect an incarnational engaged approach to evangelism. v. Worship and spirituality as a praxis-orientated apologetic presented as an incarnational engaged approach (that tells God’s story and your story) in a postmodern world, will be a more effective method of evangelism than rational apologetics and program/method based evangelism.

This paper articulates the challenges facing the persons-with-disabilities (PWD) ministry within the Catholic Church, both local and universal. It further explores possibilities that the Church may consider looking into so that She may be a more inviting, healing, and reconciling community of faith, where a "culture of encounter" thrives. In the first part, we discern some cultural patterns of our Filipino spirituality and in so doing identify some characteristic of PWD ministry. We then present five major patterns of Filipino popular spirituality: the spirituality of the body, the spirituality of the many and the spirituality of celebration (Alejo), the spirituality of narratives and the spirituality of imperfections (Legaspi). My working thesis here is that if indeed the Filipino is inherently spiritual, then our Filipino PWDs share these typical Filipino spiritual characteristics too, individually and socially. In the second part we will affirm the fact that our Filipino spiritual culture already possesses vast grounds that are ripe for cultivating the "culture of encounter" that Pope Francis exhorts us to. We re-assert the fact that our own Filipino PWD socio-spiritual life is so ready to receive this "culture of encounter." The concluding part offers some practical considerations and/or recommendations to facilitate the work of planting the "culture of encounter" and the subsequent stewardship of these "gardens of encounter." These will ascertain that these initial fervors will not remain as concepts nor archived documents labelled as "Acts and Decrees" but be translated into the very fabric of the life of the Philippine Catholic Church where the "culture of encounter" with Christ perpetuates.