Benjamin the Red
Recovering Calvinist
High Elder
 Offline
Faith: Orthodox Catholic
Jurisdiction: Orthodox Church in America, Diocese of Dallas and the South ||| American Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Diocese
Posts: 1,594
Have mercy on me, O God, have mercy on me.
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« on: April 05, 2011, 01:04:52 PM » |
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I would like to request prayer for my uncle. Outside of my mother (who is my uncle's sister), he is the closest family member to me. He became a "born again" Christian in the '80s, and has vascillated between the Pentecostal and Baptist traditions, having received no Christian upbringing prior, and influenced heavily from these camps with anti-Catholic gobbledegook. He attended a small Baptist bible college and received a B.A. from there. The experience left him disenchanted with the Baptists. He took a position as a pastor with the First-Day Adventists (the samewhat more sane cousins to the Seventh-Day Adventists), but the congregation was essentially one big family that wanted to keep it that way. His evangelistic fervor was not appreciated, and he finally had to leave.
He's been accepted as a pastor with the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), and has been there for several years. He remains an evangelical in a very mainstream-to-liberal denomination. He's disenchanted there, too. His studies have lead him to look more into Jewish traditions and how they are carried out in the New Testament church, but he has so far avoided many traditional Christian practices, as they are "too Catholic", and his formation 30 years ago in those anti-Catholic churches has stuck with him. I have kept in touch with him as I am coming to Orthodoxy, and he has been intrigued by the insights I've given him and what I've shared with him concerning Orthodoxy. He has a long way to go, but he is interested in learning more about the church. I've recommended to him The Orthodox Church by Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware), which I will be giving him to read tomorrow, because he is coming to visit me and attend the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts at my parish. We have our Orthodoxy 101 (catechism) class after Liturgy, as well as a soup and salad Lenten meal to break the Eucharistic fast.
Again, he has a long way to go (he just admited to me the other day that he didn't have a problem with the idea of liturgical worship...so, yeah...small steps), but I believe Orthodoxy contains the historicity and spiritual life that he's seeking, and he only has to experience and embrace it. And so, tomorrow he will be introduced to Orthodox worship and I'm sure will spend time speaking with me about Orthodoxy. I also hope he will get to speak a little with my priest, aside from attending catechism. And so, my request is that you pray for my uncle, his name is Michael, as well as for myself, my priest and all the others he may encounter at my parish tomorrow. I want him to have a good experience that leaves him with a good impression of Orthodoxy, and a lot of things to think about.
Thank you all for your prayers.
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Logged
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"Hades is not a place, no, but a state of the soul. It begins here on earth. Just so, paradise begins in the soul of a man here in the earthly life. Here we already have contact with the divine..." -St. John, Wonderworker of Shanghai and San Francisco, Homily On the Sunday of Orthodoxy
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