Posted on 06/27/2014 3:58:36 PM PDT by NYer
Two prominent Fort Worth-based Christian ministers led a delegation of Evangelical Christian leaders to Rome to meet privately with Pope Francis.
James and Betty Robison, co-hosts of the Life Today television program, and Kenneth Copeland, co-host of Believer’s Voice of Victory, met the Roman Pontiff at the Vatican on Tuesday. The meeting lasted almost three hours and included a private luncheon with Pope Francis.
Mr. Robison told the Fort Worth Star Telegram, “This meeting was a miracle…. This is something God has done. God wants his arms around the world. And he wants Christians to put his arms around the world by working together.”
Mr. Robison said he was impressed by Pope Francis’ humility and courtesy to the visiting delegation of Evangelical Protestant Christian leaders.
In a written statement, Mr. Robison said he believes “the prayers of earnest Christians helped lead to the choice of Pope Francis.” He described Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the Argentine Archbishop chosen as Pope, as “a humble man…filled with such love for the poor, downtrodden…”
In addition to Mrs. Betty Robison, the high-profile Protestant delegation included Kenneth Copeland, co-founder of Kenneth Copeland Ministries in Newark, TX; Reverend Geoff Tunnicliff, CEO of the World Evangelical Alliance; Rev. Brian Stiller and Rev. Thomas Schirrmacher, also from the World Evangelical Alliance; and Rev. John Arnott and his wife, Carol, co-founders of Partners for Harvest ministries in Toronto, Canada. Gloria Copeland did not travel to Rome because of a previously scheduled commitment.
The ecumenical meeting in Rome was organized by Episcopal Bishop Tony Palmer. Rev. Palmer is an ordained bishop in the Communion of Evangelical Episcopal Churches, a break-away alliance of charismatic Anglican-Episcopal churches. Bishop Palmer is also the Director of The Ark Community, an international interdenominational Convergent Church online community, and is a member of the Roman Catholic Ecumenical Delegation for Christian Unity and Reconciliation.
Bishop Palmer developed a friendship with Pope Francis when the future Roman Pontiff was a Catholic official in Argentina. Prior to becoming a CEEC bishop, Rev. Palmer was the director of the Kenneth Copeland Ministries’ office in South Africa. He is married to an Italian Roman Catholic woman. He later moved to Italy and began working to reconcile Roman Catholics and Protestants. Kenneth Copeland Ministries was one of Mr. Palmer’s first financial contributors over 10 years ago in support of his ecumenical work in Italy.
Earlier this year, Pope Francis called Bishop Palmer to invite him to his residence in Vatican City. During the meeting, Bishop Palmer suggested that the Pope record a personal greeting on Mr. Palmer’s iPhone to be delivered to Kenneth Copeland. Mr. Copeland showed the Papal video greeting to a conference of Protestant ministers who were meeting at Mr. Copeland’s Eagle Mountain International Church near Fort Worth, TX. In the video, Pope Francis expressed his desire for Christian unity with Protestants.
Later, James Robison telecasted the video on his daily TV program, Life Today. “The pope, in the video, expressed a desire for Protestants and Catholics to become what Jesus prayed for — that Christians would become family and not be divided,” Mr. Robison said the response to the video was very positive, and that Pope Francis asked Bishop Palmer whether a meeting could be arranged with Evangelical Protestants seeking Christian unity in the world.
In his written statement released after the Papal meeting, Mr. Robison said he was “blessed to be part of perhaps an unprecedented moment between evangelicals and the Catholic Pope.” He described the Protestant delegation’s private meeting with the leader of the Roman Catholic Church as “an intimate circle of prayerful discussion and lunch to discuss not only seeing Jesus’ prayer answered, but that every believer would become a bold, joy-filled witnesses for Christ.
In describing the ecumenical gathering as a miracle, Mr. Robison said, “This is something God has done. God wants his arms around the world. And he wants Christians to put his arms around the world by working together.”
During the luncheon on Tuesday, Mr. Robison got a high-five from Pope Francis after the Pope and Protestant guests talked about the need for all people to have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. According to the Life Today host, the Roman Pontiff did not know what a high-five was until Bishop Palmer explained it to him in Italian. Mr. Robison said, “The Pope made it very clear that he wanted every believer to become Spirit-filled, joy-filled witnesses.”
Mr. Robison said Pope Francis had written recently, “Too many Catholics look like they’ve been to Lent with no Easter. It’s a mistake for them to look like they’ve been to a funeral” as he challenged Catholics to witness and never try to control the Holy Spirit, but yield to Him.
Mr. Robison said he received a divine call from God to seek Christian unity while he was hospitalized several years ago with a serious staph infection following hip surgery. Robison recalled, “[I] was so weak I could not lift a cup of water to my lips…God got my full attention…He spoke to me through Isaiah 58:6-12 and I saw the importance of living in freedom, touching the suffering, the hungry, poor, and downtrodden. I recognized the promise that our prayers would be answered quickly and we would become a free-flowing stream and a well-watered garden, restoring the foundations upon which we must build. During that time God instructed me to focus my attention on Jesus’ prayer and encouraging others to begin fulfilling it through us in our day.”
During that time, he said, he was impressed by a prayer of Jesus in John 17:21, pleading that all Christian believers be one. “We’ve tried to focus on being an answer to Jesus’ prayer,” Robison said. “We want to see Jesus’ prayer for unity answered in our day.”
Aware that the meeting with the Pope will be troublesome among staunch Protestants, Mr. Robison said he and the other visiting Evangelical Christian leaders talked about diversity and their belief that Roman Catholics and Protestants could work together without compromising their beliefs.
“The world is suffering,” said Robison. “We as Christians have too much love to share without fighting one another.”
Mr. Robison said he and other “respected Evangelical leaders and Spirit-filled Catholics began meeting together to pray for God’s will to be done and to bring true believers together in supernatural unity….We have been commanded to love God with all of our heart and our neighbors as ourselves. The enemy has kept many Christians from loving one another as Christ loves us and have failed to recognize the importance of supernatural unity even with all of the unique diversity.”
Mr. Robison, whose ministry digs water wells and supplies food for impoverished people in third-world nations, recounted that he was christened as a fatherless boy in an Episcopal Church. As an adult, he joined the Southern Baptist Church. In the 1980s, he became one of the first prominent Southern Baptist ministers to openly proclaim he had received the baptism o
Well!
Ain't THAT special!!
Kinda...
Galatians 3:24
Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith.
The Old Law is a preparation for the Gospel. "The Law is a pedagogy and a prophecy of things to come." It prophesies and presages the work of liberation from sin which will be fulfilled in Christ: it provides the New Testament with images, "types," and symbols for expressing the life according to the Spirit. Finally, the Law is completed by the teaching of the sapiential books and the prophets which set its course toward the New Covenant and the Kingdom of heaven.
There were . . . under the regimen of the Old Covenant, people who possessed the charity and grace of the Holy Spirit and longed above all for the spiritual and eternal promises by which they were associated with the New Law. Conversely, there exist carnal men under the New Covenant still distanced from the perfection of the New Law: the fear of punishment and certain temporal promises have been necessary, even under the New Covenant, to incite them to virtuous works. In any case, even though the Old Law prescribed charity, it did not give the Holy Spirit, through whom "God's charity has been poured into our hearts."
I'm sure you will recognize the excerpts above as taken from the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
You left out Sacraments and Rituals!
--Catholic_Wannabe_Dude(Hail Mary!)
Elsie:
I see you got my response removed. Nevertheless, I stand by it 100%.
et: Never heard of that one. Do you have a source?
I'm not surprised. People like to teach that by keeping the Law we can be made right with God, but that was never the intent. It was God's way of dealing with sin until Christ came, in the fullness of time.
The Law revealed sin for what it was, foreshadowed Christ, and showed us our need for atonement
Galatians 3:24 Therefore the Law has become our tutor to lead us to Christ, so that we may be justified by faith.
http://biblehub.com/galatians/3-24.htm
All the book of Galatians deals with faith and the Law and the relationship. The problem is, one sin, and we're toast. So even if someone could keep all the Law perfectly except for ONE sin, they still wouldn't get into heaven.
James 2:10-11 10 For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it. For he who said, “Do not commit adultery,” also said, “Do not murder.” If you do not commit adultery but do murder, you have become a transgressor of the law.
God's requirement is perfection. Be ye holy as I am holy. ANY sin is enough to condemn someone, just as it did with Adam and Eve.
I’m sure the RM is perfectly capable of reading the RF postings himself.
If your comment was removed, it wasn’t Elsie’s doing. He didn’t write it and I doubt anyone was holding a gun to your head when you typed it.
Man up and take responsibility instead of blame shifting.
metmom:
I agree, nobody held a gun to my head when I posted it. I freely posted it. You guys have insider information who the mods are, in fact, there was a theory than one of the active FR prots here was also the a mod.
I am not blaming anyone. I stand by the post I wrote. I had one of your fellow FR prots call me a “cultist” once and I responded to that person that he should go to his KKK rally. My post was removed his wasn’t. That is how the game is played here, I am well aware of it.
after reading the FR religion forum, doesn’t that sound like an absolutely FOREIGN concept? LOL!
Unfortunately..
it is a scandal.
Not sure what you’re referring to?
Application of any law requires discretion. For example, if 6 year old shoots his brother out of anger, the killing is objectively wrong. However, the wiggle room is the child is considered to lack full knowledge of right and wrong.
One can come up with other countless examples where there is an objective evil, but is mitigated by some circumstance (wiggle room).
The challenge regarding remarriage and Holy Communion is whether any discretion exists, and to what degree it should be exercised.
You think God sits there and looks at a clock? How long is a day in Heaven? For their to be time, there has to be location. Heaven is a spiritual dimension, not a physical location.
You can reason to the fact there is no time in Heaven.
Not necessarily. It could have been a simple meeting where both sides agree they are pro-life, pro-family, and desiring to help the poor.
Preach the Gospel daily, use words if necessary.
Trying to bring a person to a new way of thinking often requires several iterations of questioning. If this group of non-Catholics thought the Pope had horns and a tail, then the meeting would have demonstrated their preconceived notions were wrong. They would then be more willing to challenge other notions.
Not every conversion happens on the road to Damascus.
Where does Catholic teaching teach this?
OH?
Which one?
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