InterVarsity Flirts with Catholicism

Every three years, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship , one of the nation’s largest evangelical student groups and part of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students (IFES), hosts a missions conference called Urbana . The name came from the long-time host campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champlain, though the conference has outgrown its old home and two years ago was held at in St. Louis, MO. Twenty-two thousand students attended, myself included, and since the conference we receive an e-mail newsletter with the InterVarsity’s usual topics: missions, multiculturalism, living the faith on campus, etc.

This time around the newsletter bore the subject heading “Flirting with Catholicism.” There have been plenty of examples of evangelicals rediscovering the riches of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches and incorporating them into their practices and beliefs, but I was nonetheless surprised to see four articles on Catholicism sent out from InterVarsity.

There was a summary of Flirting with Monasticism , the story of a Presbyterian pastor’s exploration of Dominican spirituality (a book I had seen for sale at the Urbana conference).

The weekly Q&A column offered a frank and fair assessment of the relations between IFES and the Catholic Church, particularly in Latin American countries.

An InterVarsity staff-worker who was born Catholic offers his reasons for remaining attached to some aspects of the Catholic faith, but not re-entering into full communion with the Church (closed communion, papal infallibility, and “tolerance for nominalism”).

And a former evangelical tells the story of her conversion to the Catholic faith through the writings of Dorothy Day and Flannery O’Connor.

While the latter two articles are by no means apologetic masterpieces, they are genuine, and the fact that they appeared in the newsletter of an evangelical missions conference is another small, but significant sign of an increased evangelical engagement with Catholicism.