by | Aug 13, 2024 | Uncategorized
A number of high-profile Christians have converted to Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. What is driving them away?
In recent decades, there has been a significant and sustained trend of Protestants converting to Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. The most notable figure recently is J. D. Vance, the vice-presidential running mate of former president Donald Trump.
But he’s not alone. Vance is just one name in the growing list of high-profile, theologically conservative Christians who have made public shifts away from their Protestant backgrounds (often evangelical) to these more liturgical or “high church” traditions.
A previous president of the Evangelical Theological Society, Francis Beckwith, became a Catholic in 2009, and former Anglican Bishop Nazir Ali, has lately returned to the Catholicism of his youth. Other recent Catholic converts include Cameron Bertuzzi of Capturing Christianity (a popular YouTube channel), historian Joshua Charles, and John Richard Neuhaus, founder of First Things journal. Past prominent converts to Eastern Orthodoxy include Hank Hanegraaff (the “Bible Answer Man”), Lutheran scholar Jaroslav Pelikan, and English bishop Kallistos Ware.
Of course, there are always exceptions to every trend—as is the case with former Eastern Orthodox priest Joshua Schooping, author of Disillusioned: Why I Left the Eastern Orthodox Priesthood and Church, and the Catholic-turned-Protestant Chris Castaldo, who published Why Do Protestants Convert? with Brad Littlejohn last year.
This phenomenon appears less notable in nondenominational churches, since a previous CT article reports that former Roman Catholics have gone from comprising 6 percent of unafilliated congregations to 17 percent in the past 50 years. Also, a 2014 Pew Research Center study highlighted a reverse trend of Catholics converting …
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by | Aug 12, 2024 | Uncategorized
Natural disaster costs have overwhelmed the market for carriers, which are raising rates or dropping policies for congregations in high-risk areas.
John Parks was taking his first sabbatical in 40 years of ministry when he got a call from his church’s accountant with some bad news.
Church Mutual, the church’s insurance company, had dropped them.
“This does not make sense,” Parks, the pastor of Ashford Community Church in Houston, recalls thinking at the time. “We’ve never filed a claim.”
Five months and 13 insurance companies later, the church finally found replacement coverage for $80,000 per year, up from the $23,000 they had been paying.
“It’s been an adventure,” said the 69-year-old Parks from his home in Houston, where the power was out after Hurricane Beryl. “That’s putting it politely.”
Parks and his congregation are not alone. An ongoing wave of disasters—Gulf Coast hurricanes, wildfires in California, severe thunderstorms and flooding in the Midwest—along with skyrocketing construction costs post-COVID have left the insurance industry reeling.
As a result, companies such as Church Mutual, GuideOne and Brotherhood Mutual, which specialize in insuring churches, have seen their reserves shrink. That’s led them to drop churches they consider high risk in order to cut their losses.
Hundreds of United Methodist churches in the Rio Texas Annual Conference learned they’d lost property insurance in November last year, leaving church officials scrambling. More than six months later, some churches have found new insurance, often at a steep increase. Others still have none, said Kevin Reed, president of the conference board of trustees.
Reed said the conference had about a month’s notice that its property insurance policy, which local congregations could buy into, was being …
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by | Aug 12, 2024 | Uncategorized
How athletes are sharing their faith and pointing to God.
For most spectators, the Olympics are a display of the highest level of athletic skill. But for many Christian athletes, they provide an opportunity to express their faith to each other and to the world.
A shared faith brings athletes together with teammates and across nations. This group of Olympians from Australia, Nigeria, Portugal, and other countries sang “Waymaker” in a video posted by Cindy Sember, a British hurdler, who praised God for the other Christian athletes she met at the Olympics.
Elsewhere, gold medalist Yemisi Ogunleye (more on her below) and silver medalist Malaika Mihambo sang “Gratitude,” while their coach, Ulrich Knapp, played guitar and harmonized. The athletes posted the video shortly before the shot put and long jump events, crediting the song with preparing their hearts and minds for competition.
Below are more of the most memorable moments of Christian expression at the Paris Olympics.
Gospel Music Invades Press Conference After German Christian Wins Shot Put
German shot-putter Yemisi Ogunleye got off to a rough start in her competition on August 9, slipping and falling in rainy conditions on her first throw.
Despite a sore knee, Ogunleye recovered with an excellent second throw to qualify for the finals and was in second place entering her last attempt. She rose to the occasion with a throw of exactly 20 meters (65 feet, 7.5 inches), her best ever in outdoor competition, to win gold.
Asked how she approached that decisive final throw, Ogunleye replied, “Before the …
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by | Aug 12, 2024 | Uncategorized
My return to the United States brought grief and loneliness as I realized I was different from my peers.
On an early morning flight out of the country, I claimed the window seat. Alongside the usual anticipation that accompanies travel, I felt joy and fear and sadness. I don’t remember if I cried. What I do remember are the mountains, the wobbly takeoff in the rundown plane, and the small comfort of knowing that I didn’t forget anything. Everything we owned sat in the belly of the plane, packed neatly into a dozen trunks and a few suitcases.
That was almost four years ago.
Most people would never guess now that I spent my childhood as a homeschooler in northern Iraq. Our family moved to the country to serve the Kurdish church when I was six; we moved back just before I turned 18. And when we returned, I did my best to erase every trace of those years from myself.
But their impact, of course, has remained. I still blank when someone asks where I’m from. I have struggled to find an identity outside of “the girl who lived in Iraq.”
I have a tattoo of the mountains on my right forearm now, and a reference to Joshua 1:9 in Kurdish: “Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.” The tattoo is a tether to the place that was both home and foreign, the place that I love and hate, fear and miss; the place that elicits just about every possible emotion.
That first fall back in the United States, after I graduated from high school, I moved to the Northwoods of Wisconsin for nine months to attend a gap year program. It was one of the worst years of my life. I know now that no matter where in the United States I’d been, this season would have been a dark one. I was anxious, depressed, and lost, …
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by | Aug 12, 2024 | Uncategorized
I never thought I’d be a homeschool parent, not least because I support public education. An improbable shift changed my perspective.
I am an educator. I believe in the good of education for everyone and that public schools should be amply funded and resourced. I believe in contributing to the common good even when it doesn’t directly benefit me. And in the summer of 2020, my wife and I found ourselves in what I’d once have called a most improbable situation: We became homeschool parents.
Let me explain.
One of the attractive parts about moving to Abilene, Texas, five years prior was the well-loved public school system. We bought our house near one of the many excellent elementary schools and expected an ordinary educational path for our two children. We’ve long known public school teachers, happily paid taxes for schools our children didn’t attend, and looked back fondly on our own days of bus rides, locker conversations, and school cafeterias.
Then COVID-19 came. Suddenly, we realized our our oldest would be going to kindergarten masked, unable to see his teacher’s face, distanced from other children—or else staring at a screen for hours a day in virtual kindergarten. Guidance from the school board was minimal, and the deadline to register our child for COVID kindergarten ticked ever closer.
We couldn’t do it—but we realized we could handle homeschooling, at least for a while. Both my wife and I could do some of our work remotely, and we could convert part of our living room into a classroom. It would be hard, but we could make it work.
“One year,” we said. “We can do one year.”
Let me say, now, that making this decision was not a brave one. It was simply the only one we felt was available to us. Had COVID not forced our hand, I’m not sure we’d ever …
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