Author: My Catholic Country
Life is hard and the wounds left by its treacherous journey of valleys and mountaintops can be deep. Most of us have faced more battles than we know what to do with, as we swing against rejection, loneliness, financial ruin, loss, and pain. Family wounds, heartbreak, and financial challenges can leave us limping. Repeated broken hearts leave us mutilated, emaciated, and weak. The wounds left by those battles can sometimes leave a bitter root that, if left unattended, can develop a full-fledged tree of offense. Some of us aren’t even aware of how deep or offensive our offense actually is. We…
Physician Deborah Birx has led the US government’s effort against HIV/AIDS for decades. An army colonel who worked on HIV/AIDS and vaccine research, she went on to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s arm of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). She later led PEPFAR itself as the US Global AIDS Coordinator. Starting at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, she served as the head of the US coronavirus response under President Donald Trump. Through her many White House briefings, she became famous for her variety of scarves. Birx is a graduate of Houghton College,…
I was recently asked to teach a two-hour workshop on navigating shame. As with any such invitation, I pray, read the Word, and reference other notes and materials I may have written or taught through the years. As I began to prepare for the workshop, I researched many binders of notes. I was surprised to find that even after fifteen years of teaching ministry, I had almost nothing in the way of content on shame. I was shocked. I began researching our ministry’s website and found that it, too, lacked in-depth teaching on shame. I have been teaching single mothers…
Exhausted and emotionally spent at the end of a full week surveying the damage from Turkey’s massive earthquake last February, Ali Kalkandelen needed hope. As chairman of his nation’s Association of Protestant Churches (TeK), he felt the weight of responsibility to help his colleagues in 27 affected congregations. Eventually, he found a template for moving forward in the biblical figure of Tabitha. Scattered over 11 cities in a geographic area the size of England, local Turkish Christian leaders had already launched into service, supported by the larger body of 186 affiliated churches with aid, funds, and volunteers. Kalkandelen set out…
Scripture writing plans are incredibly simple, yet incredibly effective for helping us read, interpret and absorb the Word of God. Rather than simply letting our eyes pass over a verse and perhaps miss its full meaning, writing Scripture down helps us absorb each word and really think through what the passage before us is saying.Click the Download button below to access your challenge! Photo Credit: ©SWN Source link
More than 1 in 10 Americans—around 40 million of us—stopped attending church in the last 25 years. New research using cell phone location data suggests weekly church attendance (defined as 36 weeks of the 47 studied) is at just 3 percent. And even where church attendance has rebounded since pandemic shutdowns, congregational involvement still lags. A shift of this scale is impossible to ignore, but it’s certainly possible to misunderstand. What if there’s an explanation we’ve overlooked, asked author and Mere Orthodoxy editor Jake Meador at The Atlantic last week—a reason apart from the usual headline-making factors like church corruption,…
A Prayer to Meditate on God’s WordBy Laura Bailey “Blessed is the one who does not walk in step with the wicked or stand in the way that sinners take or sit in the company of mockers, but whose delight is in the law of the LORD, and who meditates on his law day and night.” – Psalms 1:1-2, NIVThis summer, our pastor encouraged our church to read the Psalms together. At first, I was disappointed we wouldn’t be studying one of the Bible’s more “theologically deeper” books. Yet, as I opened my reading plan and turned to the first Psalm, the Holy Spirit…
The last Soul Survivor festival, led by popular British evangelist Mike Pilavachi, marked the end of an era. What began as a gathering of around 2,000 young people at a campsite in southwest England had grown into a movement of tens of thousands, with 32,500 people—mostly teens—attending the final event in 2019. Pilavachi was the founder and figurehead of Soul Survivor and the driving force behind a movement that had embraced charismatic gifts and inspired a generation of young Brits to pursue Christianity in an age when the country’s churches struggled to retain teenage worshippers. Before this year, the first…