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SERVE WEEK 2024

BIGGEST SERVE EVENT OF THE SUMMER | JULY 14-20

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Your walk with jesus starts at journey church international.

SUNDAYS AT 8:00, 9:30, AND 11:00 A.M.

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Worship, Learn, and Find Community

Journey Church International offers several ways for you to experience God’s presence every day of the week. Whether you want to visit our church in Lee’s Summit on Sundays or watch the latest messages online whenever, we invite you to join in our community that stretches all across the globe and connect with Jesus.

Plan a Visit

Get ready to join us this Sunday at 8:00, 9:30, or 11:00 A.M.

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Tune in to Sunday services from anywhere in the world.

Watch Past Messages

Catch up on previous sermons from Journey Church International.

Small Commitment. Big Impact.

In a world full of distractions and competing priorities, it can be easy to lose sight of what truly matters. That’s why our entire church has committed the next 18 months (from January 2024 to mid-2025) to surrendering 1% more of our lives to serving Jesus.

By dedicating just 1% more of your life – whether it’s time, resources, money, or energy – to spending time with Jesus, you have the potential to ignite a Kingdom movement within yourself, your family, and our community.

Learn more about the different ways you can surrender 1% more of your life to Christ and join the movement.

Take Your Next Step with Growth Track

At Journey Church International, we believe we’re all created by God to fulfill a specific purpose. Growth Track is a monthly process that aims to help you discover your unique design, develop your spiritual gifts, and make a difference in the lives of others. If you’re looking to experience both Journey and Jesus on a deeper level, this is a great place to start!

Other Next Steps at Journey

Your faith is a lifelong journey. Whether you’ve grown up in the church or you’re learning about Jesus for the first time, everyone has a next spiritual step. We want to help you move forward and equip you with opportunities to grow in your personal relationship with Jesus, while also connecting with other like-minded followers of Christ. How will you get involved at Journey Church International?

As Christians, we’re called to love God, love our neighbors, and make disciples of all nations. But in order to fulfill our calling, we also must focus on strengthening our own faith. Journey Church International offers ministries and programs for individuals at every age and stage of life, including kids, students, young adults, and adults.

Journey Kids

Journey Students

Impact Opportunities

We may be a church in Lee’s Summit, but it’s our goal to have a lasting impact both in our community and around the world. We’re constantly seeking out ways to serve and spread God’s love wherever we go. Check out our current impact opportunities and discover how you can be the hands and feet of Jesus on behalf of Journey.

God intended for us to do life together. That’s why we put an emphasis on building community and enjoying fellowship with one another. We take it beyond Sunday services and encourage Christ followers to learn from each other and grow their faith through small groups. With group options for men, women, couples, and parents, there’s a place for everyone.

Our Care Groups are designed to provide hope and support through life’s difficult seasons. Regardless of what you may be going through, we want to provide you with an environment where you can be fully known and fully loved without judgment or shame.

Unlikely Converts

Join us as we walk through Acts 9-12, looking at the founding fathers of the first-century church. God is constantly using unlikely people for His glory. We are looking at how their stories apply to us today.

It’s All About Jesus

Journey Church International is a non-denominational church in Lee’s Summit, Missouri. But we’re more than a Christian church; we’re one for you — the same way God is for you. 

Since 2011, we’ve existed to see people far from God become passionate Christians who make a difference in the world. Everything we do as a church is motivated by our six core beliefs in generosity, spiritual growth, global impact, community impact, sharing Jesus, and multiplication.

A diverse group of individuals and families from all walks of life attend Journey Church International, and together, we make up a church family enthusiastic about living more like Jesus. We know the best is yet to come.

What’s Coming Up at Journey Church International

We have all kinds of events that help you further develop your faith and find community among other believers. See what we’ve got going on, and register now for upcoming events.

Fall Week of Prayer

Join us for Fall Week of Prayer as spend time each morning...

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Journey Church International 1601 SW State Route 150 Lee’s Summit, MO 64082

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Join us for easter services

Egg hunt after every service! ‍ ‍

Lake Worth 04.08 | 5:00PM 04.09 | 9:00AM 11:00AM 1:00PM

Boynton 04.08 | 5:00PM 04.09 | 9:00AM 11:00AM

Online 04.09 | 9:00AM (On-Demand)

Transform Your Life

TO LIVE AND LOVE LIKE JESUS

Welcome to Journey Church!

We're here to help you transform your life by Experiencing God, Finding Freedom, Discovering Your Purpose, and Making a Difference.

Kingdom Campaign: West Palm Campus

We are thrilled to announce that our next campus will be in West Palm Beach! You can play a vital role in bringing this vision to life by contributing to our Kingdom Campaign. We are confident that God will transform countless lives through this 68,000 square foot facility, and your donation can turn this vision into reality

Watch our most recent message

Pastor Josh shares the heart of God's greatest commandments: loving God and loving our neighbors. Learn how true love for people flows from our love for God and how embracing our identity in Jesus empowers us to serve others.

Visit Journey

Join us every Sunday at one of our locations!

9:00am 11:00am 12:45pm

Boynton/Delray

9:00am 11:00am

9:00am (Live)

Share Your Story

A story is a building block here to encourage you and help you engage in your faith.

A church for the whole family.

No matter what season of life you're in, we have a place for you!

Babies - Elementary

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Still Have Questions?

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Encounter Night

Join us for a night of worship and prayer April 6th.

Easter at Journey Church

Learn more about Easter services at at both locations

Sunday Services

We have services every Sunday in-person and online!

Join Us Live!

Join a small group today.

We know it's important to be connected, but it's hard to build lasting friendships. What if taking one simple step changed everything?

Sunday @ 9am, 10:45am, 12:30pm.

Boynton / Delray

Sunday @ 9:15am and 11:00am.

Pastor Scott Baugh

Pastor Scott Baugh is the founding and lead pastor here at Journey Church. He is deeply passionate about creating warm environments where people can experience God.

Watch a Service

See what a Sunday at Journey Church is really like. Check out a past message from one of our pastors.

What We Believe

At Journey Church, we believe God has a specific plan and purpose for your life. We exist to help each person take their next step towards loving God more and loving more people. Our heart is to help people of all economic, social and ethnic backgrounds. Our focus is not to build a church but to make disciples that impact their communities outside the church building’s four walls.

The Trinity

God is the one and only true God, eternally existent in three persons; Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God the Father begat Jesus Christ who paid for man’s sins through His substitutionary death on the cross. He was raised to newness of life three days later through the power of the Holy Spirit. This same Holy Spirit now empowers followers of Christ.Deuteronomy 6:4; Matthew 28:19; Mark 1:9-11; John 1:1-5, 5:21-23; Romans 1:3-5, 8:9-11; James 2:19

All men have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God and thereby require a savior. The blood of Jesus Christ, shed on the cross, provides the only way of salvation through sin’s forgiveness. We are saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ, His death, burial, and resurrection. Salvation is a gift from God through the substitutionary atonement of Jesus Christ, not a result of good works or any human effort.Isaiah 1:18; Matthew 1:21, 27:22-66; Luke 2:28-32; Acts 2:21; Romans 1:16-18, 5:8-10; Galatians 2:20, 3:13; Revelation 3:20

We believe that all creation is called to worship the one true God in spirit and truth. When God’s people gather together in worship, God’s presence visits His people through the power of the Holy Spirit. His presence is the only catalyst for authentic life change, and it is only through His Son, Jesus Christ, that we have access to Him. During worship, we believe that the Holy Spirit may choose to work in people’s lives through spiritual gifts in an orderly and purposeful manner to build up the body of Christ.1 Chronicles 16:23-31; Psalm 99:1-3; John 4:24; Romans 12:1-2; Hebrews 10:23-25

In its original language, the Bible is the infallible, inspired, authoritative, and inerrant Word of God to all people. Human authors wrote it divinely inspired by the Holy Spirit. We commit to teaching Biblical truth each time we gather because it is effective for instructing, reproof, correction, and training in the ways of righteousness, that we may be equipped for every good work.Deuteronomy 4:1-2; Psalm 119:11; Isaiah 40:8, Matthew 22:29; John 17:17;  Romans 15:4; 2 Timothy 3:15-17; Hebrews 1:1-2; 2 Peter 3:15-16

We believe Jesus Christ sits at the right hand of God and acts as a mediator on behalf of those who call and believe in His name. Therefore, we believe God hears our prayers and seeks for us to call upon Him. Through prayer, we believe our relationship with God is strengthened and deepened, and we are invited to participate in what He is doing on the earth. 2 Chronicles 7:14; Jeremiah 29:12; Matthew 6:6-13; Mark 11:24; Romans 8:34; Ephesians 6:18; Hebrews 7:25; 1 John 5:14-16

We believe God has given His people the community of believers to strengthen, equip, resource, and spur one another toward love and good works. We see community as necessary for true Biblical discipleship and carry the responsibility to help encourage followers of Christ to enter into Biblical community with one another. Psalm 133:1; Acts 1:14, 2:46-47, 4:32; Romans 12:4-5; 1 Corinthians 12:13; Hebrews 10:23-25; 1 John 4:11

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WE EXIST TO MAKE MORE AND BETTER DISCIPLES BY THE GOSPEL FOR THE GLORY OF GOD.

Most recent sermon, download the journey mobile app, the journey app has a variety of resources, including sermons, an events calendar, an in-app bible, and more..

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Attend a lunch to find out all you need to know about journey., small groups, find a group of friends to connect with at journey, serve at journey, find your place on one of our serve teams, spiritual habits, personally meet with god on a daily basis., stay connected, app & social media, take us on the go.

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Welcome to The Journey

A casual, contemporary, christian church, there are two great options to attend the journey this weekend: join us in-person this sunday at 10:00am or 11:30am at the amc empire 25 in times square join us for church online on sunday at 9am, 11am, 1pm (plus additional times, including saturday at 5pm or 7pm), you’re invited to the journey church this sunday .

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Bristol Oaks Country Club

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Double Tree by Hilton Pleasant Prairie

Dyer Intermediate School

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Jack's Pizzeria & Burgers

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Promised Land

Racine Theater Guild

Simmons Field

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Traxside Skaating

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SUNDAY Kenosha Campus 9:00 & 11:00 am 10700 75th St Kenosha, WI 53142

Burlington Campus 10:00 am 740 Center St Burlington, WI 53105

Beach Park Campus 9:00 & 11:00 am 12735 W Graves Ave Beach Park, IL 60087

Mount Pleasant Campus 10:00 am 9605 Spring St Mount Pleasant, WI 53406

Journey Kids: Wednesday 6:30 pm Journey Youth: Wednesday 6:30 pm Journey Young Adults: Thursday 7:00 pm Groups at various times

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Sundays at Journey Church

Church can be an intimidating place to visit — especially if you don’t know what to expect.

A church can be an intimidating place to visit — especially if you don’t know what to expect. At Journey Church, we believe that Jesus modeled hospitality as a way of life.  With His being the example we follow, we want to make you feel welcome and loved as soon as you get here.  We invite you to experience what the gospel means both intellectually and relationally at our 10:00 a.m. Sunday worship service. You can engage with others and find places for your whole family to connect. We hope that through visiting with us, you will experience the hope, love and joy that comes from a community of people who love Jesus.

We believe that the Church is not a building, but rather the people that make up the Body of Christ.  Therefore, our Sunday morning gatherings serve as a rallying point for believers to come together to be edified and equipped in order to be sent back out to live to the glory of God in their communities. 

We are located right off of Route 611 in Warrington at

272 Titus Ave

Warrington, PA 18976

Look for our signs on Sunday mornings!

AUTHENTIC WORSHIP

We believe that Sunday morning worship is about a vertical and horizontal outpouring to the One being worshiped.  We gather to worship corporately, rallying together shoulder to shoulder to declare our praise and adoration of God.  Corporate worship is also an opportunity for us individually to recount Truth and pour out our hearts to our Father.  We long to create an environment where it is easy to breathe in God's grace in a way that causes us to breathe out His praise. 

Teaching from Scripture

We believe that practical, relevant Gospel Centered teaching is the catalyst for transformation in an individual's life. Scripture is inspired by God, completely accurate and our authority regarding Christian doctrine and the guide for Christian living.  

Upcoming Events

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• Journey Christian School
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Join us this weekend!

• Friday at 6:30 PM Sunday at 9 & 11 AM
• Livestream: Sunday at 9 AM 

Join us THIS weekend

Friday AT 6:30PM Sunday at 9 + 11 aM

Summer At Journey

Join us in July for this incredible lineup of ‘guest’ speakers.

July 5 & 7 – Mark Oestreicher July 12 & 14 – John Lynch July 19 & 21 – Brooke Lee July 26 & 28 – Chris Ward

Stay connected.

Whether you are brand new to Journey or if you’ve been around for a while, we want to stay connected. Let us know how we can help!

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We have open crisis and care group meetings.

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Our Food Bank has four monthly food distributions

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Get the latest info and Updates from our Generations team!

Thank you for partnering with us to impact our community

Journey's Mission

Helping ordinary people disconnected from God access the depth of life “with God” through Jesus Christ

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668 bethlehem pike →, 9:30, 11:00, montgomeryville, 400 franklin ave →, 8:00, 9:30, 11:00, 12:30, phoenixville.

you're invited

This sunday, phoenixville, 400 franklin ave phoenixville, pa 19460, service times on sundays 8:00, 9:30, 11:00, 12:30, get directions, 02 / pick a time, 03 / see you there, 668 bethlehem pike unit three, montgomeryville, pa 18936, service times on sundays 9:30, 11:00 am, service times on sundays 9:30am, we have a heart for the 4.8 million people in the greater philadelphia region (and that includes you) , wherever you are in life ,  no matter what your story or background is—there's a place for you here. you belong, just as you are.,  facebook, join us august 19th →, welcome to church night, new to jrny learn how to get involved and what it's like to follow jesus, free meal @ 6 | event starts @ 7.

Party With Us All Summer Long!

Jrny summer →, sundays, now - sept. 9th , lead a group →, sunday sermons →, bible study →.

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“How Have I Been Doing Ministry for 20 Years without This?!”: Michelle Helmkamp’s Seminary Journey at Age 50

Travis Hearne — July 24, 2024

“How have I been doing ministry for 20 years without this?!” Michelle Helmkamp said after taking her first course at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary,

Michelle is finishing up her Master of Arts in Biblical Counseling at Southern Seminary, but her journey into theological education came thirty years after her last formal class. So, what made her want to pursue an advanced seminary degree at age fifty and with twenty years of ministry experience? All it took was a little nudge from her son, and she was hooked.

Mitch Helmkamp, Michelle’s son, recently graduated from Southern Seminary and is currently serving as Director of Theological Development at Gospel City Church in Granger, Indiana—the same church his mom has been directing children’s ministry at for twenty years.

“My mom has been serving in kids ministry and women’s ministry for most of my life,” Mitch said. “She’s always been a diligent student of God’s Word, a veracious reader, and loves to consume theological podcasts. But she had never received any formal training.”

Mitch knew his mom would not only benefit from taking a class at Southern Seminary but knew she would also love it.

“I figured that if she was already spending so much time reading and learning, then she might as well study under the best professors,” Mitch said. “She could be guided regarding what to read, what content to study, and learn more precisely what to believe.”

Michelle was intimidated at first but admits Mitch was right. She had no idea how much she would love taking classes and how beneficial the online program would be for her own ministry.

“I enrolled in Dr. Claunch’s systematic theology class,” Michelle said. “My son was right—I loved it! I have found it particularly amazing to be in a ministry role while getting my seminary education. I have implemented several changes in how we do ministry with our kids that were a direct result of my classes. I have found that God has been in the timing of each class, enriching the work that I do as a teacher of children and women and in counseling. It has been fun to see how God has even been in the order and timing of the classes as they have correlated with what was going on in my church.”

Mitch recognizes how seminary has refined his mom’s theological understanding and effectiveness in ministry. Even though she had spent her whole adult life serving kids, education, and local church ministry, seminary helped open new opportunities and produce better fruit.

“I have to admit it is pretty funny to have conversations with my mom about the baptism of the Holy Spirit, reprobation, and different views on the atonement,” Mitch said. “But the most encouraging thing is seeing how her training is bearing immediate fruit in our church’s children’s ministry. Theology is not just for pastors and adults; the kids love it! Southern Seminary has equipped my mom to write her own children’s curriculum that is deep, biblical, and age-appropriate without watering down the truth. She also equips the parents to disciple their kids and even helps write and lead Sunday night children’s classes which survey systematic and biblical theology.”

The online degree from Southern Seminary was perfect for Michelle because she remained in her ministry context while receiving the same caliber of training as on-campus students.

“I am thankful for the opportunity to do online learning with such excellence,” Michelle said. “At this stage of my life, married and already rooted in ministry, there would have been no way to get an education like this if it required moving to Louisville, Ky. Online education has helped me stay plugged into my church and continue to serve my family with the least amount of disruption.”

Along with growing in her confidence and knowledge of God’s Word, Michelle continues to be encouraged by the benefits seminary offers other women like her and those not pursuing the pastorate.

“I have been so encouraged at the number of women attending—especially in the biblical counseling classes. It is wonderful to have women being trained to come alongside the elders and pastors in the church, supporting them with a fuller understanding of God’s Word. This can only make the church stronger. As women teach other women and children, we need them to be as biblically accurate as we would want the other areas of our church to be.”

Seminary education has even helped expand Michelle’s ministry roles, as she now uses her biblical counseling experience in her local context.

“Before seminary, I was officially the Director of Children’s Discipleship. However, we have a healthy Biblical Counseling Ministry at our church, and as women needed care through counseling, I would sit with them and pray for them as they met with our pastor. This sparked an interest in me I saw the great need to meet people in their suffering with the hope of the Gospel. Now I am better equipped to apply God’s Word to these women.”

Training ministers to apply God’s Word is at the heart of Southern Seminary’s mission, and why Provost Paul Akin points to Michelle’s story as paradigmatic for any Christian wanting to better serve their church through the benefit of theological education. “We exist to serve churches,” Akin said. “One of the most effective ways for us to serve churches is to make theological education accessible for people like Michelle. As a wife and mother, she had engaged in women’s and children’s ministry for over 20 years, but she wanted to grow and learn more. With Southern Seminary Online, she can grow in her knowledge of the Bible and discipleship while remaining engaged in ministry in her local church. Her life is a testimony that Jesus’ command to love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength applies to men and women in every walk of life regardless of age or stage in life.”

Want to experience the benefits of theological education like Michelle?

Are you ready to become a pastor, counselor, or church leader who is Trusted for Truth?

New Name. Same Mission.

The cea is now evergreen, this past year we set out to articulate our mission and vision with increased clarity and officially adopted a new name and brand identity – evergreen. this new name symbolizes not only the enduring hope and timelessness of the gospel but also serves as a clear beacon for both partners and future church planters..

The choice of “Evergreen” well represents the Pacific Northwest, where an abundance of evergreen trees stands as a testament to endurance and vitality. It encapsulates the organization’s unwavering commitment to spreading the hope of Jesus through the establishment of healthy new churches in the region.

Though our name is changing, our core mission remains steadfast: to bring the transformative power of the gospel to the Pacific Northwest by establishing healthy, multiplying churches. Since our beginnings in 1961 to the present day, our journey stands as a testament to God’s faithfulness and goodness.

3 Ways to Partner With Evergreen

Give to our general fund to help us provide services to our planters and lead in the region.

Give To Evergreen

You and your church can invest in establishing a new church directly

Select a Project

Praying for our current and future planters and our established churches is a priority for us.

Get Updates

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© Copyright 2024, Evergreen Church Planting Network, a 501(c)3 organization. Privacy Policy   |  Contact Us

– Healthy, Multiplying Churches in the PNW.

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13 Things to Know About J.D. Vance’s Catholic Journey

Republican vice-presidential nominee has grown in faith thanks to his grandmother, an admired uncle, Dominicans and his confirmation saint.

Republican vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance is one of the most overtly religious major politicians in America.

Vance has written extensively about his life in faith, both in a mega-selling memoir and in a long essay that describes how a drug-using teenager with anger problems, family problems, school problems and doubts about God became an accomplished, successful family man excited about being a Catholic.

But nowadays, he’s also the most questioned of religious politicians, as pro-lifers ask if he’s still one of them.

Where did he come from in faith? And how did he get where he is now?

Vance, who comes from a long line of culturally Protestant Scots-Irish Americans from Appalachia, was baptized Catholic in August 2019.

Below are 13 items about his meandering journey to Rome and the aftermath, drawn largely from his 3-million-copy-selling 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy ; and a 6,777-word essay he wrote about his conversion for the Easter 2020 issue of The Lamp , a Catholic magazine. 

Vance also talked about his conversion in an August 2019 interview with Rod Dreher published in The American Conservative .

1. J.D. Vance Rarely Went to Church as a Child

Vance was largely raised by his grandmother, whom he called “Mamaw,” who believed in Jesus and liked Billy Graham but didn’t like what she called “organized religion.”

Vance wasn’t baptized as a child. The family members he spent the most time around generally didn’t go to church unless they were visiting their Appalachian ancestral home in Jackson, Kentucky.

Even so, he says in his memoir, his grandmother had “a deeply personal (albeit quirky) faith.”

2. Vance Had a Crisis of Faith as a Child

When he was about 10, Vance had a moment of doubt.

“Mamaw, does God love us?” he asked his grandmother after a major disappointment, mindful of the fractured family life he and his half-sister were growing up in.

The question caused his grandmother to cry.

Vance doesn’t say how his grandmother answered the question. But he describes another instance when Mamaw accidentally went the wrong way on a three-lane interstate before making a U-turn, causing him to scream in terror.

“Don’t you know Jesus rides in the car with me?” his grandmother replied.

3. As a Teenager, Vance Was a Pentecostal

As an adolescent, Vance reconnected with his biological father, whom he hadn’t seen much of after his parents split up. For a while, he stayed with his dad every other weekend.

“With little religious training, I was desperate for some exposure to a real church,” Vance wrote in Hillbilly Elegy .

His father had given up drinking and became a serious Pentecostal, and he would take Vance to a large Pentecostal church in southeastern Ohio with his new wife and their children.

Vance drank it in. Among other things, he rejected evolution and embraced millennialism, including a belief that the world would end in 2007.

“I’m not sure if I liked the structure or if I just wanted to share in something that was important to him — both, I suppose — but I became a devoted convert,” Vance writes in his memoir.

4. Vance Didn’t Like the Catholic Church When He Was a Kid

Even before he started going to a Pentecostal church, Vance thought he knew certain things about Catholicism — which he didn’t like.

“I knew that Catholics worshipped Mary. I knew they rejected the legitimacy of Scripture. And I knew that the Antichrist — or at least, the Antichrist’s spiritual adviser — would be a Catholic,” Vance wrote in his April 2020 article in The Lamp of his once-misguided impressions.

5. Vance’s Image of Jesus When He Was Growing Up Differed From His Image of the Catholic Church’s Image of Jesus

One of Vance’s aunts married a Catholic, whom Vance liked and respected.

“I admired my uncle Dan above all other men …,” Vance wrote in Hillbilly Elegy .

His grandmother liked Dan, too.

But Catholicism seemed too formal and impersonal to her.

“The Catholic Jesus was a majestic deity, and we had little interest in majestic deities because we weren’t a majestic people,” Vance wrote in his conversion essay .

6. Hillbilly Elegy Isn’t a Conversion Story

Vance mentions the word “Catholic” or “Catholics” only five times in the 264-page book, and he never engages with Catholic teachings in it. He wrote it between 2013 and 2015, several years before he became a Catholic, and gives no hint that he had ever considered Catholicism.

He also doesn’t dwell in his book on his atheism as a young man, a period he describes at length in his conversion essay in The Lamp .

7. An Anglican Philosopher Provided the First Crack In Vance’s Atheism

While he was still a nonbeliever, Vance encountered the work of English philosopher Basil Mitchell (1917-2011) in an undergraduate philosophy course at Ohio State.

As Vance describes it, Mitchell, who was a member of the Church of England, presented difficult experiences in life as a trial of faith that requires trust in God without fully understanding what God has in mind.

Vance was surprised by Mitchell’s presentation because as a young Christian he had always thought that “[d]oubt was unacceptable” and “that the proper response to a trial of faith was to suppress it and pretend it never happened.”

“But here was Mitchell,” Vance wrote in his conversion essay , “conceding that the brokenness of the world and our individual tribulations did, in fact, count against the existence of God. But not definitively.”

8. A Homosexual Billionaire Influenced Vance’s Outlook on Life

While a student at Yale Law School, Vance went to a talk by venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who was Facebook’s first outside investor and co-founded PayPal .

According to Vance, Thiel argued that elite professionals got themselves trapped into climbing rungs on the socioeconomic ladder at the expense of happiness.

Vance realized that he was “obsessed with achievement” for itself — “not as an end to something meaningful, but to win a social competition.” He also concluded that he “had prioritized striving over character.”

Thiel introduced Vance to the thought of René Girard (1923-2015), a French historian and philosopher whose writings, among other things, attracted Vance through the way he described Christianity as transcending the scapegoat myth of various cultures because Christ “has not wronged the civilization; the civilization has wronged him.”

Thiel, now 56, who identifies as a Christian and a conservative, is civilly married to a man . Vance worked for Thiel in venture capital, and Thiel was Vance’s major contributor in Vance’s successful run for U.S. Senate in Ohio in 2022.

9. Vance’s Family Ties Kept Him From Becoming a Catholic for a Long Time

Vance connected with Catholic doctrine several years after his grandmother died in 2005. It made sense to him.

“Yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that if I converted I would no longer be my grandmother’s grandson,” Vance wrote in The Lamp .

That left him in a sort of limbo.

“So for many years I occupied the uncomfortable territory between curiosity about Catholicism and mistrust,” he wrote.

10.  Vance Credits His Hindu Wife With Helping Him Convert to Catholicism

Vance acknowledges having problems with anger stemming from his chaotic childhood and the destructive behavior of people in his family, especially his mother, who abused prescription drugs and went through a string of boyfriends and husbands.

That anger affected his relationship with Usha, his girlfriend in law school, but she helped him work through it to try to become the kind of husband and father he wanted to be. They married in 2014.

“The sad fact is that I couldn’t do it without Usha. Even at my best I’m a delayed explosion — I can be defused, but only with skill and precision,” Vance wrote in Hillbilly Elegy .

Usha is the daughter of immigrants from India and a Hindu. Vance felt hesitant about joining the Catholic Church because he wasn’t a Catholic when they got married.

“But from the beginning, she supported my decision, so I can’t blame the delay on her,” Vance wrote in his conversion essay.

Vance has said the Church’s clergy sex-abuse scandal delayed his conversion by a few months.

11. Dominican Priests Helped Draw Vance to Catholicism

What Vance calls “a few informal conversations with a couple of Dominican friars” led to a period of serious study of Catholicism.

The process was gradual, with no a-ha moments.

But it included what he calls “some weird coincidences.”

During a late-night conversation at a hotel bar with an unnamed conservative Catholic writer, Vance says, he challenged the man for criticizing Pope Francis.

“While he admitted that some Catholics went too far, he defended his more measured approach,” Vance wrote in his conversion essay, “when suddenly a wine glass seemed to leap from a stable place behind the bar and crashed on the floor in front of us.”

That ended the conversation.

Another: While on a train from New York to Washington, D.C., Vance listened to a recording of an Orthodox choir singing a Psalm during Pope Francis’ visit to the country of Georgia in 2016.

When he got to Washington, he asked a Dominican friar to coffee.

“He invited me to visit his community, where I heard the friars chanting, apparently, the same psalm,” Vance wrote.

Vance was baptized in August 2019 by a Dominican priest, Father Henry Stephan, at St. Gertrude Priory, which is attached to a Dominican parish in Cincinnati, where Vance now lives.

Despite his Dominican connections, his confirmation saint is Augustine .

“I was pretty moved by the Confessions ,” he told Dreher. “I’ve probably read it in bits and pieces twice over the past 15 or so years. There’s a chapter from The City of God that’s incredibly relevant now that I’m thinking about policy. There’s just a way that Augustine is an incredibly powerful advocate for the things that the Church believes. And one of the subtexts about my return to Christianity is that I had come from a world that wasn’t super-intellectual about the Christian faith. I spend a lot of my time these days among a lot of intellectual people who aren’t Christian. Augustine gave me a way to understand Christian faith in a strongly intellectual way. I also went through an angry atheist phase. As someone who spent a lot of his life buying into the lie that you had to be stupid to be a Christian, Augustine really demonstrated in a moving way that that’s not true.”

12. Vance Credits Practicing Catholicism With Making Him a Better Person

Vance says practicing his Catholic faith has helped him increase his patience, curb his temper, forgive more easily, and choose his family over his career.

After he became a Catholic, Vance wrote in his conversion essay, “I realized that there was a part of me — the best part — that took its cues from Catholicism.”

13. Vance Hasn’t Yet Explained How His Current Position on Abortion Squares With His Catholic Faith

Vance began public life as thoroughly pro-life.

In September 2021, several months after he began running for U.S. Senate in Ohio, Vance said he supported Texas’ law banning abortion.

“I think in Texas they’re trying to make it easier for unborn babies to be born,” Vance said during an interview with Spectrum News 1 .

Asked about abortion in the cases of rape and incest, Vance said the question is “whether a child should be allowed to live.”

“Look, I think two wrongs don’t make a right. At the end of the day, we’re talking about an unborn baby,” Vance said (at 11:11 of the interview ). “What kind of society do we want to have? A society that looks at unborn babies as inconveniences to be discarded?”

His tone shifted during a debate in October 2022, when he said he supported “reasonable exceptions,” including allowing a pregnant 10-year-old girl to have an abortion.

During a second debate that month, he said he supported a proposal in Congress at the time that would have banned abortion nationwide after 15 weeks.

More recently, Vance has aligned his public positions on abortion with those of his running mate, former president Donald Trump, who has said he wouldn’t sign a federal limitation on abortion and that he wouldn’t ban abortion pills.

On abortion pills, Vance told an interviewer on NBC on July 7 that he supports a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision that, according to him, said that “the American people should have access to that medication.” Pressed about mifepristone , one of the two abortion chemicals, he said he supports access to it.

Vance has not at this writing publicly explained how he integrates his Catholic faith with his current position on abortion.

But he seemed to contemplate this sort of situation in an interview with Dreher in August 2019, shortly after his conversion and three years before he was elected to public office.

He noted that politics “is in part a popularity contest,” and he pointed out a tension between getting votes and living a life of faith.

“When you’re trying to do things that make you liked by as many people as possible, you’re not likely to do things that are consistent with the teachings of the Catholic Church,” Vance said then. “I’m a Christian, and a conservative, and a Republican, so I have definite views about what that means. But you have to be humble and realize that politics are essentially a temporal game.”

• catholic politicians
• catholic conversions

Matthew McDonald Matthew McDonald is a staff reporter for The National Catholic Register and the editor of New Boston Post. He lives in Massachusetts.

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Jd vance shares his journey from atheist law student to practicing christian .

Republican vice presidential nominee, U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, detailed his faith journey this week while speaking with conservative Christians, sharing how he went from being an atheist law student to a devout Christian.

Giving an address before a breakfast organized by the conservative Christian advocacy group Faith & Freedom Coalition on Thursday during the Republican National Convention, Vance, 39, discussed his religious upbringing as he grew up in Ohio.

Vance, who penned the 2016 bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis , was primarily raised by his grandmother, who, while being a devout Christian who regularly prayed and read the Bible, only attended church services once or twice a month.

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He said that growing up, "there was something a little bit shallow" about his faith, and that, "like a lot of kids," his religious views disappeared while growing up.

"I went off to the military, to college, to law school," he recounted. "Somewhere along the way, that faith that had developed, and was germinating, sort of evaporated. And so, by the time that I was in law school, I started to call myself an atheist."

Vance said "there was a certain arrogance" to identifying as atheist, telling those gathered that "there was this idea that I was smart and wise and I knew things that my grandma never knew."

The senator said marrying his Hindu wife, Usha Chilukuri Vance , whom he had met at Yale Law School, brought him back to the Christian faith. The couple wed in 2014. 

"Thinking about what was required of me as a husband and as a father," Vance explained, "the more that I thought about those deeper questions, the more that I thought there was wisdom in the Christian faith that I had completely discarded and completely ignored."

Vance began attending church when his first child was born in 2017. He recalled how his wife observed that "there's something about becoming Christian that is really good for you." 

He quoted his wife as saying, "There's something about thinking about the Christian faith, there's something about practicing the Christian faith, that makes you more patient with our son, and makes you a little bit more forgiving when I'm grumpy after a long day."

The bestselling author said that he "realized" at that moment that his wife was describing "grace," adding that he did not believe that grace "happens instantaneously" but rather "something that happens over a lifetime."

"In ways big and small, if you practice your faith, if you pray, if you think about what it requires of you, then God makes you a little bit better each and every single day," Vance said.

In 2019, Vance converted to Roman Catholicism, saying in a previous interview with The American Conservative that he never had a super strong attachment to any denomination growing up. 

The vice presidential nominee said he loves being part of a faith community, taking his kids to church every Sunday and the questions his children ask about Christian faith.

In closing his remarks, Vance referenced the 1990s R-rated film " Pulp Fiction ," specifically comments that Samuel L. Jackson's character Jules makes in response to miraculously surviving an attempt on his life.

Vance recounts when Jules tells a fellow gangster that, when it comes to miracles, "it's not about whether God changed Coke to Pepsi or found my car keys, what matters is that I felt the touch of God."

"One of the really deep beliefs I have is that there all of these small little miracles," Vance said. "And if you look for them, you actually see them."

On Monday, Trump announced on his social media platform Truth Social that he had  selected Vance as his vice presidential running mate after "lengthy deliberation and thought."

"J.D. honorably served our Country in the Marine Corps, graduated from Ohio State University in two years, Summa Cum Laude, and is a Yale Law School Graduate, where he was Editor of The Yale Law Journal, and President of the Yale Law Veterans Association," stated Trump.

"J.D. has had a very successful business career in Technology and Finance, and now, during the Campaign, will be strongly focused on the people he fought so brilliantly for, the American Workers and Farmers in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Minnesota, and far beyond."

Vance accepted the nomination on Wednesday, telling the Republican National Convention that he believed "Trump represents America's last best hope to restore what, if lost, may never be found again."

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Knowing the Nearby God

[Paul said], “Athenians, as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ – Acts 17:23 (NRSV) 

The Apostle Paul trained as a lawyer, but he could have been an investigative journalist. To learn about the Athenians, he’d walked around their city, taking in the sights—especially the statues and idols. He told the city leaders, “I see how extremely religious you are,” for the Athenians even had an altar dedicated “To an unknown god.” They’d covered all their spiritual bases.  

As a Jew, Paul knew God’s commandment against graven images. He could have called down divine wrath on the city. He chose not to.  

Paul didn’t condemn the Athenians for their statues. Instead, he bore witness to his own experience of God—a living, life-giving Presence that couldn’t be confined in a piece of stone, no matter how exquisitely carved.  

Paul had multiple encounters with that Presence. Sometimes, as on the road to Damascus or in the Philippian jail, the experience came with great drama. Other times, he’d known the living God day by day as he’d walked, ridden, and sailed countless miles across the sea. Paul knew the God of the journey, the God of the next step. No graven image, no “unknown god” could possibly have given him what he needed for such a life. Only a living, ever-present God would be with him every step of the way.  

The God Paul knew didn’t “live in shrines made by human hands.” Nor, he proclaimed, was this God “far from each one of us.” Unlike the Athenians, God for Paul was known, and God was nearby.  

May it be the same for us.  

Prayer In you, Lord, we live and breathe and have our being. Thank you. Amen.

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13 things to know about J.D. Vance’s Catholic journey

By Matt McDonald

National Catholic Register, Jul 21, 2024 / 07:00 am

Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance is one of the most overtly religious major politicians in America.

Vance has written extensively about his life in faith, both in a mega-selling memoir and in a long essay that describes how a drug-using teenager with anger problems, family problems, school problems, and doubts about God became an accomplished, successful family man excited about being a Catholic.

But nowadays, he’s also the most questioned of religious politicians, as pro-lifers ask if he’s still one of them.

Where did he come from in faith? And how did he get where he is now?

Vance, who comes from a long line of culturally Protestant Scots-Irish Americans from Appalachia, was baptized Catholic in August 2019.

Below are 13 items about his meandering journey to Rome and the aftermath, drawn largely from his 3-million-copy-selling 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” and a 6,777-word essay he wrote about his conversion for the Easter 2020 issue of The Lamp, a Catholic magazine. 

Vance also talked about his conversion in an August 2019 interview with Rod Dreher published in The American Conservative.

1. J.D. Vance rarely went to church as a child.

Vance was largely raised by his grandmother, whom he called “Mamaw,” who believed in Jesus and liked Billy Graham but didn’t like what she called “organized religion.”

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Vance wasn’t baptized as a child. The family members he spent the most time around generally didn’t go to church unless they were visiting their Appalachian ancestral home in Jackson, Kentucky.

Even so, he says in his memoir, his grandmother had “a deeply personal (albeit quirky) faith.”

2. Vance had a crisis of faith as a child.

When he was about 10, Vance had a moment of doubt.

“Mamaw, does God love us?” he asked his grandmother after a major disappointment, mindful of the fractured family life he and his half-sister were growing up in.

The question caused his grandmother to cry.

Vance doesn’t say how his grandmother answered the question. But he describes another instance when Mamaw accidentally went the wrong way on a three-lane interstate before making a U-turn, causing him to scream in terror.

(Story continues below)

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“Don’t you know Jesus rides in the car with me?” his grandmother replied.

3. As a teenager, Vance was a Pentecostal.

As an adolescent, Vance reconnected with his biological father, whom he hadn’t seen much of after his parents split up. For a while, he stayed with his dad every other weekend.

“With little religious training, I was desperate for some exposure to a real church,” Vance wrote in “Hillbilly Elegy.”

His father had given up drinking and became a serious Pentecostal, and he would take Vance to a large Pentecostal church in southeastern Ohio with his new wife and their children.

Vance drank it in. Among other things, he rejected evolution and embraced millennialism, including a belief that the world would end in 2007.

“I’m not sure if I liked the structure or if I just wanted to share in something that was important to him — both, I suppose — but I became a devoted convert,” Vance writes in his memoir.

4. Vance didn’t like the Catholic Church when he was a kid.

Even before he started going to a Pentecostal church, Vance thought he knew certain things about Catholicism — which he didn’t like.

“I knew that Catholics worshipped Mary. I knew they rejected the legitimacy of Scripture. And I knew that the Antichrist — or at least, the Antichrist’s spiritual adviser — would be a Catholic,” Vance wrote in his April 2020 article in The Lamp of his once-misguided impressions.

5. Vance’s image of Jesus when he was growing up differed from his image of the Catholic Church’s image of Jesus.

One of Vance’s aunts married a Catholic, whom Vance liked and respected.

“I admired my uncle Dan above all other men …,” Vance wrote in “Hillbilly Elegy.”

His grandmother liked Dan, too.

But Catholicism seemed too formal and impersonal to her.

“The Catholic Jesus was a majestic deity, and we had little interest in majestic deities because we weren’t a majestic people,” Vance wrote in his conversion essay .

6. “Hillbilly Elegy” isn’t a conversion story.

Vance mentions the word “Catholic” or “Catholics” only five times in the 264-page book, and he never engages with Catholic teachings in it. He wrote it between 2013 and 2015, several years before he became a Catholic, and gives no hint that he had ever considered Catholicism.

He also doesn’t dwell in his book on his atheism as a young man, a period he describes at length in his conversion essay in The Lamp.

7. An Anglican philosopher provided the first crack in Vance’s atheism.

While he was still a nonbeliever, Vance encountered the work of English philosopher Basil Mitchell (1917–2011) in an undergraduate philosophy course at Ohio State.

As Vance describes it, Mitchell, who was a member of the Church of England, presented difficult experiences in life as a trial of faith that requires trust in God without fully understanding what God has in mind.

Vance was surprised by Mitchell’s presentation because as a young Christian he had always thought that “[d]oubt was unacceptable” and “that the proper response to a trial of faith was to suppress it and pretend it never happened.”

“But here was Mitchell,” Vance wrote in his conversion essay , “conceding that the brokenness of the world and our individual tribulations did, in fact, count against the existence of God. But not definitively.”

8. A homosexual billionaire influenced Vance’s outlook on life.

While a student at Yale Law School, Vance went to a talk by venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who was Facebook’s first outside investor and co-founded PayPal .

According to Vance, Thiel argued that elite professionals got themselves trapped into climbing rungs on the socioeconomic ladder at the expense of happiness.

Vance realized that he was “obsessed with achievement” for itself — “not as an end to something meaningful, but to win a social competition.” He also concluded that he “had prioritized striving over character.”

Thiel introduced Vance to the thought of René Girard (1923-2015), a French historian and philosopher whose writings, among other things, attracted Vance through the way he described Christianity as transcending the scapegoat myth of various cultures because Christ “has not wronged the civilization; the civilization has wronged him.”

Thiel, now 56, who identifies as a Christian and a conservative, is civilly married to a man . Vance worked for Thiel in venture capital, and Thiel was Vance’s major contributor in Vance’s successful run for U.S. Senate in Ohio in 2022.

9. Vance’s family ties kept him from becoming a Catholic for a long time.

Vance connected with Catholic doctrine several years after his grandmother died in 2005. It made sense to him.

“Yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that if I converted I would no longer be my grandmother’s grandson,” Vance wrote in The Lamp.

That left him in a sort of limbo.

“So for many years I occupied the uncomfortable territory between curiosity about Catholicism and mistrust,” he wrote.

10. Vance credits his Hindu wife with helping him convert to Catholicism.

Vance acknowledges having problems with anger stemming from his chaotic childhood and the destructive behavior of people in his family, especially his mother, who abused prescription drugs and went through a string of boyfriends and husbands.

That anger affected his relationship with Usha, his girlfriend in law school, but she helped him work through it to try to become the kind of husband and father he wanted to be. They married in 2014.

“The sad fact is that I couldn’t do it without Usha. Even at my best, I’m a delayed explosion — I can be defused, but only with skill and precision,” Vance wrote in “Hillbilly Elegy.”

Usha is the daughter of immigrants from India and a Hindu. Vance felt hesitant about joining the Catholic Church because he wasn’t a Catholic when they got married.

“But from the beginning, she supported my decision, so I can’t blame the delay on her,” Vance wrote in his conversion essay.

Vance has said the Church’s clergy sex-abuse scandal delayed his conversion by a few months.

11. Dominican priests helped draw Vance to Catholicism.

What Vance calls “a few informal conversations with a couple of Dominican friars” led to a period of serious study of Catholicism.

The process was gradual, with no a-ha moments.

But it included what he calls “some weird coincidences.”

During a late-night conversation at a hotel bar with an unnamed conservative Catholic writer, Vance says, he challenged the man for criticizing Pope Francis.

“While he admitted that some Catholics went too far, he defended his more measured approach,” Vance wrote in his conversion essay, “when suddenly a wine glass seemed to leap from a stable place behind the bar and crashed on the floor in front of us.”

That ended the conversation.

Another: While on a train from New York to Washington, D.C., Vance listened to a recording of an Orthodox choir singing a Psalm during Pope Francis’ visit to the country of Georgia in 2016.

When he got to Washington, he asked a Dominican friar to coffee.

“He invited me to visit his community, where I heard the friars chanting, apparently, the same psalm,” Vance wrote.

Vance was baptized in August 2019 by a Dominican priest, Father Henry Stephan, at St. Gertrude Priory, which is attached to a Dominican parish in Cincinnati, where Vance now lives.

Despite his Dominican connections, his confirmation saint is Augustine .

“I was pretty moved by the ‘Confessions ,’” he told Rod Dreher. “I’ve probably read it in bits and pieces twice over the past 15 or so years. There’s a chapter from ‘ The City of God’ that’s incredibly relevant now that I’m thinking about policy. There’s just a way that Augustine is an incredibly powerful advocate for the things that the Church believes. And one of the subtexts about my return to Christianity is that I had come from a world that wasn’t super-intellectual about the Christian faith. I spend a lot of my time these days among a lot of intellectual people who aren’t Christian. Augustine gave me a way to understand Christian faith in a strongly intellectual way. I also went through an angry atheist phase. As someone who spent a lot of his life buying into the lie that you had to be stupid to be a Christian, Augustine really demonstrated in a moving way that that’s not true.”

12. Vance credits practicing Catholicism with making him a better person.

Vance says practicing his Catholic faith has helped him increase his patience, curb his temper, forgive more easily, and choose his family over his career.

After he became a Catholic, Vance wrote in his conversion essay: “I realized that there was a part of me — the best part — that took its cues from Catholicism.”

13. Vance hasn’t yet explained how his current position on abortion squares with his Catholic faith.

Vance began public life as thoroughly pro-life.

In September 2021, several months after he began running for U.S. Senate in Ohio, Vance said he supported Texas’ law banning abortion.

“I think in Texas they’re trying to make it easier for unborn babies to be born,” Vance said during an interview with Spectrum News 1 .

Asked about abortion in the cases of rape and incest, Vance said the question is “whether a child should be allowed to live.”

“Look, I think two wrongs don’t make a right. At the end of the day, we’re talking about an unborn baby,” Vance said (at 11:11 of the interview ). “What kind of society do we want to have? A society that looks at unborn babies as inconveniences to be discarded?”

His tone shifted during a debate in October 2022 when he said he supported “reasonable exceptions,” including allowing a pregnant 10-year-old girl to have an abortion.

During a second debate that month, he said he supported a proposal in Congress at the time that would have banned abortion nationwide after 15 weeks.

More recently, Vance has aligned his public positions on abortion with those of his running mate, former president Donald Trump, who has said he wouldn’t sign a federal limitation on abortion and that he wouldn’t ban abortion pills.

On abortion pills, Vance told an interviewer on NBC on July 7 that he supports a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision that, according to him, said that “the American people should have access to that medication.” Pressed about mifepristone , one of the two abortion chemicals, he said he supports access to it.

Vance has not at this writing publicly explained how he integrates his Catholic faith with his current position on abortion.

But he seemed to contemplate this sort of situation in an interview with Dreher in August 2019, shortly after his conversion and three years before he was elected to public office.

He noted that politics “is in part a popularity contest,” and he pointed out a tension between getting votes and living a life of faith.

“When you’re trying to do things that make you liked by as many people as possible, you’re not likely to do things that are consistent with the teachings of the Catholic Church,” Vance said then. “I’m a Christian, and a conservative, and a Republican, so I have definite views about what that means. But you have to be humble and realize that politics are essentially a temporal game.”

This story was first published by the National Catholic Register, CNA’s sister news partner, and has been adapted by CNA.

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What JD Vance has said about his faith

The ohio senator and recently named running mate of donald trump spoke with the deseret news in 2016 about his religious journey.

By Kelsey Dallas

JD Vance will bring a unique religious perspective to former President Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, since he’s done more spiritual exploration than many politicians.

Vance, who was unveiled as Trump’s running mate on Monday, grew up believing in God but not affiliating with a faith group, attended an evangelical Christian church off and on as a teen and then entered a period of near-atheism in his twenties. He ultimately chose to join the Catholic Church as an adult.

Here’s what Vance has said about his faith over the years.

JD Vance’s religion

Vance, who will turn 40 on Aug. 2, felt close to God growing up, but he wasn’t invested in organized religion, as he told the Deseret News in 2016.

His family drew comfort from Christian beliefs amid chaotic times, but rarely chose to turn to religious leaders or local churchgoers for help.

Still, Vance credits local churches, and his dad’s evangelical Christian church, in particular, with showing him that there was something better out there than the poverty, drug addiction and conflict his family was dealing with.

“Going to church showed me a lot of really positive traits that I hadn’t seen before. I saw people of different races and classes worshipping together. I saw that there were certain moral expectations from my peers of what I should do,” he told the Deseret News.

But by the time Vance enrolled in Yale Law School in 2010, he was disengaged from church and from God.

“I would have called myself an atheist,” he told the Deseret News in 2016.

At law school, though, Vance began to have new appreciation for the power of faith. He connected with Catholics and members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and recognized that their religious beliefs were propelling them forward, not holding them back.

When he graduated from law school in 2013, Vance wasn’t committed to a specific religious community but he was curious about them again. He told the Deseret News in 2016 that he could see himself joining a faith group in the future.

“I’ve been going to church for the past year or so. Not as much as I should, but more than I have been. I’ve been thinking very seriously about converting to Catholicism,” he said.

JD Vance conversion to Catholicism

About three years after his conversation with the Deseret News, Vance did indeed get baptized and received into the Catholic Church.

Rod Dreher broke the news in August 2019 by publishing a Q&A with Vance about his faith in The American Conservative .

Vance told Dreher that Catholicism appealed to him on both an intellectual and emotional level. He enjoyed studying Catholic teachings, and also connecting with Catholic loved ones.

“When I looked at the people who meant the most to me, they were Catholic,” Vance said.

He told Dreher that past scandals in the Catholic Church, including the clergy sex abuse crisis, delayed his conversion decision. Ultimately, he decided that he needed to take a “longer view” on religious institutions.

“The hope of the Christian faith is not rooted in any short-term conquest of the material world, but in the fact that it is true, and over the long term, with various fits and starts, things will work out,” Vance said.

Vance’s bio on X reads, “Christian, husband, dad. U.S. Senator for Ohio.”

Everyone join me in praying for our President Trump and everyone at that rally. I hope everyone is ok. — J.D. Vance (@JDVance1) July 13, 2024

Does faith inform JD Vance’s politics?

If Trump and Vance win in November, Vance would become only the second Catholic vice president in U.S. history, according to the National Catholic Register . The first was President Joe Biden, who served as vice president under former President Barack Obama.

Vance has said in the past that, even before he joined the Catholic Church, he shared many policy goals with Catholics. He told Dreher in 2019 that he wanted to be known for promoting the common good.

“I hope my faith makes me more compassionate and to identify with people who are struggling,” he said.

But since being sworn in as a U.S. senator in January 2023, Vance has angered some more conservative Catholics, especially when it comes to abortion.

Like Trump, he does not support a federal abortion ban , and instead says abortion policy should be left up to individual states.

Earlier this month, he again echoed Trump by expressing support for allowing abortion pills to remain widely accessible.

C.J. Doyle, executive director of the Catholic Action League of Massachusetts, criticized Vance’s recent comments in an interview with the National Catholic Register.

“Vance has no principles, at least none that aren’t for sale, and the asking price is cheap,” he said.

But Vance is far from the first Catholic politician to be out of step with the Catholic Church’s teachings on abortion, which state that life begins at conception and that any “procured abortion” is a moral evil, according to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Biden, who attends Catholic worship services regularly and who carries rosary beads with him, is personally troubled by abortion, but has spoken repeatedly during his time as president about the importance of protecting abortion rights, according to NBC News .

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Scenes from a street car: created to be disciples.

Saturday, July 20 – Created to Be Disciples

Today was our closing worship for the 2024 ELCA Youth Gathering, and what a week it has been! This Gathering, filled with deep and meaningful conversations, laughter, and the Spirit’s palpable presence, has truly transformed us all.

Throughout the week, we’ve heard from incredible speakers who each brought something unique and necessary to our hearts. Walking through the streets, engaging in Community Life, and participating in Interactive Learning, I witnessed groups buzzing with excitement and deep reflection. This Gathering, and the vibrant city of New Orleans, have challenged, supported, and inspired us in ways only this experience could.

Presiding Bishop Elizabeth Eaton captured the essence of our journey during the final morning’s worship. She declared, “We made it! What a week! We’ve learned a lot, we met new people. We’ve learned about how it rains in New Orleans all the time. So now here we are—we’ve been brave, authentic, free, disruptive…and now we’re going to be disciples.”

Bishop Eaton shared the story of the Good Samaritan, reminding us that our neighbors are not just those we choose, but anyone God places in our lives.

She emphasized, “We don’t get to pick and choose who those people are. Those people are whomever God sends to us in our lives—people we might never ever meet.”

Friends, I have to share a story with you about a man, who I now know is named Robert. This is one of those stories that intersects in ways that only the Holy Spirit can orchestrate:

On Friday morning, I was running late to the convention center. As I hurried out of the hotel, I smiled at a man sitting in a wheelchair on the corner of the street. He said something to me, but I didn’t quite hear him. Despite my rush, I felt compelled to stop. This kind man looked at me with caring eyes and asked me to help him put his shirt on. As I helped him, I noticed it was a blue shirt given to him by another group from the Gathering. We exchanged smiles, and I wished him well before continuing on my way.

Later that day, in the Interactive Learning space, I met a group from Christ Lutheran Church in Brenham, TX. When telling me about their Gathering highlights, they shared their own encounter with a man they had met just that morning. Their youth group had stopped to give a man wearing a blue shirt bracelets and pray with him. My eyes widened as Avery continued the story. Their youth leader, Sharon, asked this man his name, and the group prayed for him, leaving with hearts full of God’s love. As they walked away reflecting on their encounter, Stephen shared how he and his group were reminded of Austin Channing Brown’s powerful message from the previous night. Her words about addressing the root of issues rather than trying to change individuals deeply resonated with them. I learned the name of this man in the blue shirt, now adorned with Gathering bracelets, name is Robert.

If this was all there was to the story, it would be remarkable! The connections continued as Sharon sought me out later to tell me more. You see, later in the afternoon, this group from Brenham, TX, learned even more to the story. They encountered Silas, who had handed the man wearing a blue shirt and Gathering bracelets, a cup of water while they were praying for him. Silas Kulkarni, Director of Strategy and Advocacy of the ELCA Advocacy in Washington, DC and one of the organizers of the ELCA Advocacy booth, recounted that in his busy morning, he was also late to the convention center. But having been asked for a cup of water, Silas knew helping this man was more important than being on time. And now Silas knows Robert’s name, too. And so do you. 

Pastor Emily Harkins from the Dwelling spoke about the importance of being known by name. “When we truly see one another, then and only then, will we truly see Jesus. See me. See you. See them. See us. See Jesus.” In Robert’s kind eyes and brilliant smile, we all saw Jesus that morning.

This living Good Samaritan story beautifully exemplifies the message Bishop Eaton preached about in closing worship. It’s a testament to how we are called to be disciples, recognizing and loving our neighbors, regardless of our differences. This encounter with Robert brought the teachings of this week to life, demonstrating how we can be the hands and feet of Jesus in our everyday actions. Through the spirit of courage, compassion, and community, we are called to disrupt what is wrong and work for what is right, seeing Jesus in everyone we meet.

This week, we’ve heard powerful stories and testimonies of the Holy Spirit at work. We’ve danced like no one was watching, sang at the top of our lungs, witnessed moving lyrical dances, tasted the rich flavors of New Orleans, and immersed ourselves in its vibrant culture. This past week at MYLE, the tAble, and the Gathering has been life-changing. As Joe Liles told us at the beginning of the week, we are leaving as new people. We are changed, and friends, we ARE!

Now, in the words of Joe: We must Walk. This. Out. in our own unique ways. Walk this out with the Spirit of Courage to serve in new places. Walk this out with the Spirit of Conversation to engage with those we’ve never met. Walk this out with the Spirit of Challenge to embrace uncomfortable faith. Walk this out with the Spirit of Curiosity to ask God who you are becoming.

As you leave New Orleans and return home, carry with you the Spirit of bravery, authenticity, freedom, and disruption. Be the disciple God has called you to be.

Until we meet again in 2027 in Minneapolis for our big Lutheran family reunion, remember who you are Created to Be—wHoly and beautifully, loved and beloved.

Weekly Recap Video

See you in Minneapolis, Friends!

Written by: vicar bobbi cyr (she/her); stephen of christ lutheran church, brenham, tx contributed to this post.

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Uae sets out journey to paris 2024 olympic games, competing in swimming and judo games.

PARIS, 24th July, 2024 (WAM) -- The Opening Ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games is scheduled for Friday, 26 July 2024 in Paris. The international sports event will see 10,500 athletes from 200 National Olympic Committees compete in 32 sports across 329 events at 35 venues in the presence of 20,000 media representatives, and 45,000 volunteers. The UAE National Olympic Committee (NOC) said 14 Emirati athletes will compete in five sports: equestrian, judo, cycling, swimming, and athletics during the Games will conclude on 11th August. The UAE delegation sets out its journey to the Paris 2024 Olympic Games through two competitions: swimming and judo, two days after the official opening ceremony.

The Paris 2024 Olympics is considered an important stage in the UAE's future sports journey at the Olympic level, which began in Los Angeles 1984. It is a departure for a new station towards a brighter sporting future, in light of the National Sports Strategy 2031, which represents an umbrella for all initiatives, programs and projects of the sports sector in the UAE, and whose main goal is to increase the number of qualified Emirati athletes to over 30 by the 2023 Olympic Games. Speaking about the national sporting ambitions and the future of UAE sports in the Olympic Games, Ghanim Mubarak Al Hajeri, Director-General of the General Authority of Sports, said: "Since the flag of this dear nation was raised for the first time at the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, we have been dreaming of a bright sporting future that carries with it achievements and excellence. There is no doubt that our participation in the Olympics is not just a sporting competition, but rather an embodiment of the visions and directions of our wise leadership and the dreams and aspirations of our people and our rising generations."

He added: "The 1984 Los Angeles Olympics was the beginning, and since then we have been striving to build a generation of athletes who represent the UAE in the best way. The challenges we faced and the difficulties we surmounted were nothing but additional motivations to achieve more achievements." He said: "As we prepare today for the Paris 2024 Olympics in a few days, we have in mind a goal that goes beyond Paris, which is to achieve the largest possible participation and create a new dream for the UAE's leadership and people, in line with objectives of the National Sports Strategy 2031, which include developing the capabilities of sports talents and achieving success in elite professional sports to consolidate the presence of the UAE on the global sports landscape.''

WAM 25th July 2024, 03:27 GMT+10

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