From Christendom to Apostolic Mission: Pastoral Strategies for an Apostolic Age
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EVERY HUMAN society possesses with more or less strength a moral and spiritual imaginative vision, a set of assumptions and a way of looking at things
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Christianity is not natural to a fallen world,
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institutional and ecclesiastical strategies that are suited to Christendom do not work well in an apostolic setting.
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Jesus, the greatest and most talented preacher of the Gospel in history, did not gain a good reception from all his hearers; sometimes even a majority rejected his message. This was not because his preaching, to the extent that it did not produce conversion, failed. Rather, it succeeded perfectly in what it was meant to do: it tested the hearts of those hearing such that they either rose or fell when confronted by his message.
Daniel Jasek liked this
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Saint Augustine once said that it was a greater miracle for God to save one sinner than to have created the whole world.
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“We sent them to Catholic schools; we took them to Mass. We did everything our own parents did! What went wrong?”
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apart from the understanding of the world that Christ and the Church bring, the priest is an ambiguous figure and his role in life does not make sense.
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the Church’s primary stance before an unbelieving world is not the imposition of law, which assumes knowledge of its existence and purpose, but the invitation, under an attitude of mercy and hope, into a relationship with the living God and incorporation into the new humanity, to an entirely new way of being and of seeing, one that liberates and that brings meaning and joy.
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The Blessed Mother was immaculately conceived, not the American Republic.
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Preaching in an apostolic age needs to begin with the appeal to a completely different way of seeing things; it needs to offer a different narrative concerning the great human drama;
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To be apostolic in vision (to repeat an earlier point) is to recognize that Christians don’t see some things differently than others: they see everything differently in the light of the extraordinary drama they have come to understand.
Daniel Jasek liked this
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After the horrors of the twentieth century, to conclude that the human race is inevitably becoming morally better is to shut one’s eyes to mountains of evidence.
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G. K. Chesterton once famously responded to a London newspaper’s request for essays on the question, “What’s wrong with the world?” with a two-word reply: “I am.”
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The modern vision involves what might be called practical atheism, whatever the personal belief of many of its possessors might be.
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It is not coincidental that so much of the entertainment eagerly pursued by the young minds among us involves epic dramas, cosmic battles among powerful spiritual forces for good and evil that demand of the young hero or heroine extraordinary character, commitment and sacrifice for the saving of the world.