St. Ann’s Catholic Church will be host to the first-ever contemporary outdoor revival sponsored by the Diocese of Raleigh, beginning Sunday, Sept. 21, on the church grounds at 4057 U.S. 70 West.
Terry Jackson, diocesan director of evangelization, said the revival – titled “Come and see” from John 1:39 – is an effort to reach out to the “un-churched” and inactive Catholics in eastern North Carolina.
The revival will be held in both English and Spanish.
Jackson said, “A priority in the area of evangelization, and also the most difficult, is to reach out to those who are un-churched. One of the effective ways to do that in the South is through the medium of a ‘tent revival’ or in some cases, an ‘outdoor revival.’”
The tent revival was widely used by the Catholic Church in the diocese in the 1940s and ’50s when the Catholic population was less than 1 percent of the total population, Jackson said.
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I’m not a Catholic. I’d like to be. Have called churches/priests over the past six years and invariably they ask me if I’m a “returning” Catholic. The concept of conversion seems unheard of? Or rarely so in any event. What about efforts to reach out to non-Catholics? I’ve been told that my desire to convert makes me “pew hopper” and that there are a lot of people who “shouldn’t become Catholic”. Wouldn’t “unchurched” mean not belonging to any church? Wouldn’t that be different than being inactive? I know that most parishes offer RCIA~but the local lady pastoral assistant told me she’d have to come out to interview my family to decide if we’d be a good fit before she’d let me attend. Seems like a really good way to turn away potential membership~and virtually guarantees that there will be very few actual conversions (at least in this parish…) I hope the efforts of the Diocese of Raleigh are fruitful.