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The "Pray Around The World" project has moved to p-a-t-w.blogspot.com but this blog may continue with news and thoughts on church, state and social media.

Fact-list for Paraguay

WCC

FIDES

CIA


(Wikipedia is pretty disappointing on this front, so I'm leaving them off.)

Uruguay fact-links

WCC

CIA

Wikipedia

FIDES - Most recent story appears to be about the theological virtue of the World Cup.  I didn't mention that 3 of the last 4 countries the WCC has prayed for were in the World Cup, and I think they are all advancing to the round of 16.  Just sayin'.

Argentina fact-links

WCC

News stories from FIDES on Argentina

A little bit in Wikipedia

And the granddaddy of them all, the CIA

What does the WCC think we should pray for

The World Council of Churches (link at the top of my blog) has a list of pray-fors for all three countries:

Intercessions

Give thanks for:

• Lay persons who participate in local communities of faith, church leaders who continue to nurture congregations, and instructors who educate and nurture pastors.
• Composers and poets who have brought new songs to the churches of these countries and to Christians all over the world.
• Bishops and pastors who take courageous stands on behalf of their people.

Pray for:

• Families and friends of those who were murdered or disappeared in Argentina and Uruguay.
• Guidance to those in the government of Paraguay as they work to remove corruption and bring justice to those who have abused power.
• Those who experience poverty and struggle for daily bread, who live without security, safety and shelter.
• Those who must live far from their families and homes in order to make a living and provide for their families.

Prayer

God of life, 
you put in human beings 
the imprint of your image and likeness 
and made us to participate with you in your creation. 
Forgive our incapacity to respect and protect life in all its forms. 

God of justice, 
you call us to travel this path 
which is the only route leading to true peace. 
Forgive our daily acts of injustice 
which condemn many, many persons to death 
     by hunger, exclusion and war, 
and lead us to the abyss of endless violence. 

God, incarnate in history, 
forgive us because we imprison you in our dogmas, 
limiting you to our religious institutions 
and crucifying you alongside the vulnerable of our time. 

O God, strengthen us in our daily work for a world more just, 
accepting differences, built on diversity. 
Renew our commitment to peace with justice, 
a commitment which denounces the arrogance 
     of those who believe that they are powerful 
     and own the lives of all the rest. 
Give us a vision to banish violence in all its forms. 
Establish as the foundation of our lives, 
and the lives of our people, 
respect, equality, truth and justice.

(prayer text for 2007)

O God, Lord of the wind and the sea,
of the mountains and the valleys,
of the world and of the church:
in the midst of fear and insecurity
give us trust and hope in you. 

We live in a world
  where the gales of power
    blow strong enough to shake life itself,
      where from the arrogant and the interests of the powerful
        roll the waves of injustice and violence. 

We pray for those suffering
  because of their poverty, their ignorance,
    their limitations,
      because of their colour or status, social or sexual.
We think of your church sailing on a sea
where the waves of racism, militarism, sexism
and economic marginalization hurt human life. 

Take care of your church and put in it
  a sincere love for those who suffer,
  a clear vision of your will,
  healing, pastoral words for the needy,
  and a valiant, prophetic proclamation
  against those who create violence and pain. 

O God, rebuke the uncontrolled wind of terrorism and war.
Turn it towards peace and human development
so that in place of lies, truth is strengthened,
in place of weapons, there are schools for all children,
in place of luxury, the world adorns itself
  with bread for the hungry
and life blossoms everywhere. 

O God, Lord of the wind and the sea,
may your strong mercy calm the whole earth.
In the name of Jesus Christ.

© Bishop Aldo M. Etchegoyen, Evangelical, Methodist Church of Argentina.

A letter from Argentina

I've been away from my computer this week, so I've been unable to do much research about Uruguay, Argentina and Paraguay; I'll try to catch up tonight, but I'll warn you, it will be quantity over quality.

I did e-mail the bishops' conferences of all three churches, and I finally got a reply!  I asked them what we should pray for, and they gave me a laundry list.  It's an interesting challenge for me - I'd like to be able to pick and choose what I pray for, but at the same time, one of the points here is to actually love the people of another country to find out who they are.  So here is what they asked for:

Mr. Jeff Johnson:

We have received your kind e-mail.

For Mons . Enrique Eguía Seguí´s indication, I say to you that currently the Catholic Church in Argentina

is praying for the following intentions:

- The decrease of poverty.

- The rejection of the project of gay marrige act which is now at the Congress.

- The rejection of any project of abortion act.

- The social peace.

- The unity of families.

- The fruitfulness of the labour of goverment authorities.

- To encourage a missionary style especially from the parish.

- To prioritize the pastoral missionary one from the catechizing of Christian initiation.

- To promote the missionary commitment towards a just society and responsible initiation christens.

- To recover the respect to the family and to the life in all his forms.

- To advance in the reconciliation between different social sectors and in the capacity of dialog.

- To encourage the formation of responsible citizens who construct a nation.

- To strengthen the republican institutions, the State and the organizations of the society.

- To improve the political system and the quality of the democracy.

- To guarantee the education and the work as keys of the integral development.

- To promote the federalism.

- To deepen the integration of the region.

We look forward to the success of your project.

Sincerely, 

Valeria Retondo

Secretaría Privada CEA

Brazil to an outsider

This is a process.  This week, I started by loading up on information from various sources, reading them over, and trying to take them all in.  I've also tried to e-mail a couple people in the Brazilian Catholic council of bishops, but they haven't responded (the fact that I don't write in Portugese only complicates things, I'm sure).  If I get a response about what to pray for, I'll post it.  In the meantime:

Brazil sounds like an amazing country with a great need for prayer.  On the one hand, it has a strong Christian tradition - of the 200 million or so Brazilians, 90% are Christian (including 73.6% Catholic; if I read it right, Brazil has more Catholics than any other country).  On the other hand, there are still many tribes of indigienous people in the Amazon who have never heard the gospel.  So we can pray for the spiritual awakening of those in the cities, who like America suffer from the softening of the Spirit that comes when membership in a religion is the cultural norm and acknowledging membership in the church doesn't necessarily translate into a relationship with God.  We can also pray for the success of missionaries being trained to take the gospel into the Amazon jungle.

I didn't know that Brazil is the 5th largest country in the world, both in size and in population.  It boasts one of the most promising economies in the developing world, although there are many poor including children who live and work on the streets or in shantytowns.  They also are challenged by issues that Floridians can relate to - one of their strengths is the beauty of their land, but development threatens to destroy that beauty, both by deforesting the Amazon and extinguishing unique animal species and by directly harming human life through land and water pollution and severe oil spills.  So praying for the leaders of the country in their stewardship of God's creation and care for each other also seems called for. 

Brazilian culture seems in some ways like American culture amplified.  Their Carnival sounds a lot like Mardi Gras, but bigger.  The cultural emphasis on superficial beauty is strong, as is the cocaine trade.  And they love their sports!  So we can pray that like Americans, Brazilians will recognize the superficiality of these things and the reach for the sure promise of lasting happiness that comes with focusing on what is truly important.

More on Brazil

Here's a story from FIDES on missionary efforts in the Amazon:

FIDES, a Catholic news agency devoted to missionary efforts, is a great resource in learning about the Church in different countries.  The Society for the Propagation of the Faith put me onto it.

Praying for Brazil: resources

Here's a link to the prayer intentions the WCC raises.

Here's a link to the CIA World Factbook page on Brazil

Here's a link to Wikipedia's entry on Roman Catholicism in Brazil

Here's a link to the CNBB - the National Conference of Bishops of Brazil (unfortunately, I don't know any Portugese).

Global Catholic Church Project

It started in O'Hare Airport.  I was coming back from a business trip, and as always, I miscalculated how much reading material I would need for the flight.  Usually, I bring way too much.  This time, not enough.  So I walked through the bookstore and grabbed what looked like an interesting book in the Religion section, David Platt's Radical. 

It is a very good book that I recommend.  I am in the midst of studying Forgotten God by Francis Chan with a Facebook group, and Radical is very similar in outlook but with different emphases.  One of them is on our calling and responsibility as Christians to serve and witness to the entire world.  He has tons of stories about traveling on foreign missions and make a compelling case that we all have a role to play in spreading the gospel globally. 

Not to give the book away, but one of his challenges to readers is to pray, over the course of the year, for the people of every country in the world.  He offers a great resource, Operation World, which is devoted to this and includes a daily country (or region of a country) with scads of information about it.

I don't consider myself an evangelical.  I won't go into why, but my evangelical friends will agree with my self-assessment.  And I am Catholic.  So looking at the Operation World site left me wanting something different.  So I went searching.

I found the World Council of Churches, a mainline Protestant organization, has a rotating weekly calendar of countries to pray for (which seemed more manageable than the daily thing), and some good information, and like Operation World has prayer requests. 

But what I wanted to know is, not what people in the US think we should pray for, but what the people who are members of the universal Church in that country want us to pray for.  And because one of the reasons I am Catholic is the knowledge that there are brothers and sisters in every country on the planet celebrating the same faith, I wanted to find out what Catholics in those countries arethankful for and what they are struggling with. 

This week, the WCC countries are Angola and Mozambique.  Know what I know about Angola? '92 Dream Team destroyed them in Barcelona.  Mozambique?  Nada.  I have already benefited more in a couple days of praying for these two countries than I have in a lifetime of praying for vague concepts like global missions or the church universal.  Throughout my day, I keep being struck by questions: I wonder what time it is in those countries?  I wonder what people are doing there?  What are the problems that have them both ranked so terribly high in mortality rates, and what can we do to change that?  What can be done to address the incredible poverty there?  What are their church services like?  What is the mood of the faithful, the priests, religious groups that are serving there?

To underscore that the Spirit is really in this, I got an e-mail this week from a friend who is, I guess, a social media pastor.  He was e-mailing a big list saying he would miss a prayer meeting due to travel and did anyone have a request for the group.  And one person hit "reply all".  There's always one.  This one, though, is a missionary in Myanmar who gave a brief assessment of the work there and the trouble they are encountering and asking for prayers.  I know less about Myanmar than Mozambique.  My daughter knows more than me, I'm pretty sure, about Myanmar, and she is in first grade.  But this underscored for me that this global vision was real, Spirit-led, and immediate in need.
So I'm hoping to find some help in a project.  I'd like to build a resource on each country that coincides with the WCC schedule, that has that kind of information.  Some of it is readily available (ironically, I guess, the CIA has great info on its website about each country that these other sites pull from).  Some, I think, we'd have to ask people who serve in that country.  It seems to me the easiest way to do this is set up a website called a wiki (as in wikipedia) in which collaborators can post pages and information as they find it.

I have looked on the USCCB site, the Vatican site, and several others that popped up in Google searches, and it does not exist.  I e-mailed the folks at the USCCB who are responsible for the national collection for supporting the global church, and they said such a project, chronicalling everything the Church does in every country, was way too big.  But if there are a few people willing to give a little time over an extended period working together to learn a little more about what life is like in Brazil (next week's country), and what the Church is thankful for and needs there, it seems to me it isn't an impossible task.  What do you think?

God in the night

I always thought that the parallel of God as the sun made sense.  Now I'm not so sure.
Looking up at the night sky and marveling at the beauty of the stars on the canvas of black, it was hard not to see the hand of the Creator.  Then as the stars faded with the rising of the sun, I realized that maybe God is closer to us in the night than in the day.

The sun works better as a metaphor for the distractions of the world.  It is less significant than the whole universe, but it burns so bright that it makes it impossible to see the broader canvas of stars for its brightness.  And it empowers us to do - much of what we do with our time, all the busyness and business that captures our thoughts - requires light and energy.  We even talk about harnessing the power of the sun for more energy to do our work.  And when there is no light, if we move too boldly, we stub our toes.

In the dark, by yourself, there's a need to do less and be more.  To look hard for the beauty in the night.  To spend time in contemplation.  And with less distraction, maybe it's easier to come closer to God.

Christianity, pop culture, and Armando Galarraga's imperfect game

Here's what Armando Galarraga's imperfect game means, and what it doesn't.  Sports is a part of pop culture, much like politics and entertainment.  None of pop culture is ultimately important; whatever importance these things have is ascribed to it by us.  At the end of days, and likely much sooner, the details of what happens in these realms will not matter.

That said, pop culture is a spotlight, shining public attention on whatever is in its path.  For the moment that something is in that spotlight, what happens gets a lot of attention, and it says a great deal not only about the subjects who are in the spotlight but about the people who pay attention.

Most of what the pop culture spotlight exposes is not pretty.  I think you could argue that whether the spotlight is positive or negative, it is revealing of character.  Celebrities who seek the attention because they are egocentric.  Criminals being exposed for their misdeeds.  When someone ends up in the spotlight and behaves with grace, humility, and honesty, when they reveal good character, when they act like what we would hope we would act like, it is a surprise.  And that is what happened in the Galarraga incident: the umpire was honest and remorseful about his mistake, and the pitcher was gracious and comforting in response.

There is a temptation for Christians to seize these rare signs of good character and say "That's true Christianity!  That's what our faith is all about!" It is perhaps a reflection of how rare these signs are, and how eager Christians are to help others see how we aspire to live, that this happens.  But it's not necessarily true, and it's not at all fair.

I don't know Galarraga or Joyce.  I don't know why they acted the way they did.  It could be that their character arises from Christian faith, but it might be that they acted that way because they learned from parents or other role models that this is what good behavior is.  It might be that their integrity and their values stem from another faith, or from no faith at all.  And if Christians want to be taken seriously by non-believers, we need to acknowledge that up front.

What Christians can do, and should do, is use these opportunities to talk about why we think these men did God would have wanted them to do.  And maybe Galarraga or Joyce themselves have said or will say such things, I don't know.

Maybe Galrarraga will say "It's easy to be forgiving of Joyce's mistake, not just because I know we're all human and make mistakes, but because I know how important God's forgiveness of my sins is to me and want to do what I can to show others that same sort of grace."  Or "This perfect game would have meant a lot to me, but it's not as important as the fact that God loves me. I work hard as a pitcher because God gave me the gift of throwing a ball fast for some reason, but God gave all of us the ability and the charge to put the needs of others before our own.  And Jim Joyce needs to know I forgive him more than I need to prove I threw a perfect game."

Now that would be something Christians could point to and say, "This is what we're about."