...or Read the Following Excerpt

In the first week of my sophomore year at the University of Michigan I attended a charismatic prayer meeting of an ecumenical Christian community called “The Word of God.” These prayer meetings had begun four years earlier, but the community itself had only formed one year before I first walked into the St. Thomas Parish social hall. Yet, to me—nineteen years old, with little experience and less knowledge of Christian institutions—this group of over 500 appeared to be as solidly established as the turn-of-the-century Catholic sanctuary to which the social hall was attached.

The group had been founded by four Catholic laymen—Steve Clark, Ralph Martin, Jim Cavnar, and Gerry Rauch—who had met as students at Notre Dame, and who had moved to Ann Arbor in 1967 to launch an evangelistic outreach to students. In that same year they were among the first group of Catholics to experience a Pentecostal awakening (which they called “being baptized in the Spirit”). Energized by this transformative encounter with God, their prayer meetings grew from just ten participants to over one-hundred in four months. The Catholic Charismatic Renewal, born among them and their network of friends across the country, grew nationally and internationally at a similar pace. Ann Arbor became the Jerusalem of this movement, the symbol and institutional center for its diverse and widespread constituency.

It is difficult to imagine that either the Word of God in Ann Arbor or the Catholic Charismatic Renewal around the world would have emerged in the late 1960’s apart from the Second Vatican Council which had concluded only a couple of years earlier. In many Catholic settings the years immediately following the Council brought chaos, confusion, and bizarre forms of experimentation. While the Catholic Charismatic Renewal was not totally immune to such phenomena, to a great extent it embodied and manifested the love of scripture, creative engagement with tradition, and  Christ-centered openness to the Spirit which were hallmarks of the Council. The Word of God in Ann Arbor had all of this, along with a renewed consciousness of what it meant to be part of the Body of Christ and the People of God—a consciousness central to the ecclesiology enunciated so powerfully in Lumen Gentium. Here one could find capable lay leadership, a commitment to ecumenical engagement, and a fervent dedication to living and proclaiming the good news. In Ann Arbor, at least, and in the international movement which looked to this city as its capital, the Second Vatican Council was alive and well.

I felt much ambivalence in my first two years of participation in The Word of God. On the one hand, I could not deny the vivid sense of the presence of God when the community gathered for worship. I respected its leaders, and drew much personal support from the other student members who lived in my university residence hall. It was also exciting to live in the hub of an international movement, with a sense that the world was watching. On the other hand, as a Jew and a non-Catholic, I felt like a stranger in a strange land. Two-thirds of the community membership, and virtually all of its leaders, were Roman Catholic. Our main community meetings were held in Catholic buildings; priests in clerical garb and nuns in habits were often present, and sometimes addressed the group; weekly folk-masses were held in the lounge of our residence hall, and the midnight mass at the Catholic student center was an unofficial community event. We hosted Catholic visitors—or, perhaps more accurately, pilgrims—from all over the world, and organized and staffed Catholic Charismatic conferences which were held in Ann Arbor and elsewhere. I appreciated much of what I was learning about Catholicism, but this seemed to be too much of a good thing. I was overwhelmed, and as a Jew I felt near to cultural suffocation.

I survived the shock—and then began to flourish.