On October 6, 2024, fifteen Benedictine College students visited Church of the Resurrection (COR) in Kansas City. COR was founded over 30 years ago by the Rev. Adam Hamilton. It has since grown to be the largest mainline Protestant church in North America. The field trip was undertaken as part of a course on Protestant Traditions to serve as a direct ecumenical encounter with Wesleyan Protestantism. It ended up being that and so much more!
The students were generously hosted by Rev. Jeff and Michelle Kirby, longtime friends of Dr. Tory Baucum, the course instructor and director of Benedictine College’s Center for Family Life. Jeff recently retired as teaching pastor of COR having catechized 18,000 new or returning Christians during his tenure. Additionally, Jeff and Dr. Baucum have a long and shared history of teaching and leading the Alpha Course around the world. While Jeff worked mostly with Protestants, Tory Baucum worked with Catholics. This was not their first Catholic-Protestant rodeo.
However, for half of the students it was their first experience of Protestant worship. In a post-service discussion with Dr. Baucum and the Kirbys, the students noted two recurring themes as they discussed their experience at COR.
Hospitality
The students were struck by the hospitality that Rev. Jeff and Michelle Kirby provided. The hosts gave their time and attention to make this encounter possible, and they enthusiastically received the students’ feedback over a shared meal (food is always a big plus with college kids)!
COR’s hospitable environment extended beyond the Kirbys to the entire congregation. Pastor Hamilton, the founding pastor, provided a very generous introduction of the Benedictine students that elicited an authentic and spontaneous greeting from the congregation. Pastor Hamilton’s effort to personally welcome the students and sit among them prior to the service left a deep impression on the students. It was clear that hospitality was an important part of the culture at COR and had contributed greatly to the congregation’s expansive growth over the past three decades.
Of course, the students are not strangers to hospitality. Benedictine students are formed to be hospitable, and they appreciated their hosts’ attention to this age-old Benedictine value. As the Rule of St. Benedict says, “All guests who present themselves are to be welcomed as Christ” (RB 53:1). St. Benedict knew that hospitality is key to any encounter with another person, and that is something that he learned from the actions of Jesus, who shared meals with the shunned, attended to the outcast, and welcomed the forsaken.
Beauty’s Relationship to Truth
Several students were enchanted by the tripartite Chancel stained-glass window at COR, which depicts many ancient and modern figures in salvation history with the risen Christ at the center. Students noted that COR shared Catholicism’s long-standing use of sacred artwork to draw in and share the Gospel with believers and non-believers alike. In fact, students were surprised at the extent to which COR’s window drew on Catholic tradition. Pope Saint John XXIII and Saint Thomas Aquinas both appear among Biblical figures, Protestant reformers like Luther and Wesley, and contemporary Protestant theologians and pastors. Students appreciated the Methodists’ willingness to cross denominational boundaries to draw upon the richness of the teachings of Aquinas and to commemorate Pope John XXIII’s efforts to spiritually renew the Church through Vatican II.
While the Church has long used beauty to draw people to the truth, Pope Benedict XVI gave this strategy special emphasis. Pope Benedict, while still Cardinal Ratzinger, said that “True knowledge is being struck by the arrow of Beauty that wounds man.” However, he went even further to say that “Being struck and overcome by the beauty of Christ is a more real, more profound knowledge than mere rational deduction.” Thus, this compilation of shards of colored glass, insofar as it reveals the beauty of Christ’s incarnation, death, and resurrection, can provide deep insight into the nature of the universe and humanity’s relationship to the Creator.
In his remarks at Benedictine College’s Commencement in 2022, Bishop Robert Barron highlighted that Beauty has long been used in the Benedictine tradition to draw the world closer to Christ. From the simple rise and fall of a line of Gregorian chant to the gorgeous architecture and settings of Benedictine abbeys, the Order of St. Benedict has long taken advantage of Beauty’s special draw on people to bring them closer to the Truth. Echoing Ratzinger’s notion that beauty can get past one’s defenses, Bishop Barron noted, “Of the transcendentals — the good, the true, and the beautiful — the beautiful is the least threatening.” What better way to approach an ecumenical dialogue?
Of course, visual art is not the only way to convey spiritual realities through material means. The students visiting the Church of the Resurrection noted Pastor Hamilton’s use of baptismal fonts, liturgical expressions, and various gestures reminiscent of those in the Catholic Mass. These elements reminded the students of the emphasis that Catholic sacramental theology places on matter and form, stemming from the very definition of sacrament and reflective of human’s physical and spiritual, i.e. hylomorphic, nature.
Steps Toward a Common Understanding
The students enjoyed their experience of worshipping together with the Church of the Resurrection. They genuinely liked Pastor Hamilton, the Kirbys, and the members of the congregation. However, they still ultimately felt the lack of the real presence of Jesus in the sacrament of the altar. Despite a desire to be united together in a common faith, there remain significant obstacles.
In their conversation with the Kirbys, students asked whether the likenesses they noticed were mere residuals of an incomplete reformation that started with Luther over 500 years ago or beginning steps of a rapprochement with Catholicism. When Catholics and Protestants step back to look at the window of salvation history together, are we taking the necessary steps that we all might be unified in Christ, the Way, the Truth, and the Life? Are we taking seriously Christ’s prayer at the Last Supper “that they may all be one” (John 17:21)?
Students were interested in further exploring Pastor Hamilton’s view of Pope Francis’s exhortation Amoris Laetitia, which the students understand as something of a “field guide” for rebuilding families. It seems that the Pope’s exhortation is consistent with John Wesley’s – the founder of Methodism – counter-cultural “class meetings” for families broken by 18th century industrialism and urban migration. In what ways is COR counter-cultural in the wake of massive family dislocation? Perhaps continued dialogue between the students and the COR community along these lines would be a fruitful pathway toward unity.
Ultimately, the students realized the crucial importance of what they had done that day in accepting COR’s hospitality. It awakened a desire for unity with those whom Vatican II’s decree on ecumenism poignantly refers as “separated brethren.” More than that, though, this encounter provided key insights into how to bring about that unity: hospitality and shared experience of beauty. By following Christ’s lead in offering radical hospitality to others and opening oneself to new understanding through experiences of beauty, we can all grow closer to Truth Himself.
The trip to Church of the Resurrection was truly a genuine ecumenical encounter – honest, kind, but also provocative – one which will hopefully lead to a common understanding of Truth so that, in obedience to our Lord’s prayer, we all may be one.