Encounter Ministries

Heritage

Founded in 2016 at Brighton, Michigan by Fr. Mathias Thelen and Patrick Reis. Thelen was ordained for the Diocese of Lansing in 2010, took a licence in sacred theology at the Angelicum in Rome, and is pastor of St. Patrick parish in Brighton, where the ministry's main campus meets. Its deeper heritage is the Catholic charismatic renewal, which began at a student retreat outside Pittsburgh in February 1967 and reached Michigan within months — Ralph Martin and Steve Clark carried it from the Cursillo office in Lansing to Ann Arbor, and the community they gathered there taught the worldwide renewal for two decades. Encounter stands forty minutes down the road from that, a generation later.

Theological family

Catholic, entirely — the creeds, the sacraments, the Mass, the Church's teaching authority — with the conviction, held across the charismatic renewal, that the gifts of the Holy Spirit described in the New Testament are given to the Church still. Fr. Thelen's Biblical Foundations for the Role of Healing in Evangelization (2018) sets out the theology it teaches.

Who decides what

It governs no one. Encounter is a ministry within the Catholic Church, not a body beside it: everyone involved belongs to an ordinary Catholic parish under an ordinary bishop, and Encounter operates under that authority, with standing Episcopal and Theological advisory boards of bishops and theologians reviewing what it teaches.

What a first-time visitor would find

An Encounter night looks like a Catholic parish hall that has been asked to expect something: teaching, worship music, and then prayer for healing — people prayed over one at a time, at length, by trained lay Catholics as often as by priests. The Mass and the sacraments remain where they always were; this happens alongside them, not instead of them.

What it has always cared about

Healing prayer as ordinary Christian practice rather than a specialist's gift; formation over enthusiasm — a two-year school, not a weekend; and the insistence that charismatic experience and Catholic orthodoxy are not in competition.

Its gift to the wider church

It is one of the clearest living proofs on this map that a gift can cross a very old divide and be received without either side pretending the divide was nothing. What began in a Los Angeles livery stable in 1906 — a revival most Catholics of the day would have called someone else's religion — is now taught in Catholic parishes, by Catholic priests, with their bishops' approval. Traditions that still disagree about a great deal are, at the level of practice, praying the same way.

Commonly confused with

With a denomination — it is not one, and no one leaves their parish to join it. With Protestant charismatic networks such as Bethel Leaders Network or Global Awakening, which have a family resemblance in practice and a completely different ecclesial home. And with the wider Catholic charismatic renewal itself, of which Encounter is one recent American ministry rather than the whole.

Range of views inside it

Catholic opinion about charismatic practice ranges from warm to wary, and this is true parish by parish and diocese by diocese; nothing here should suggest that Catholics broadly practise or endorse it. Encounter's own materials are careful about this, and so is this record.

Moments this body was part of

• 1960–1977 — The charismatic renewal crosses every border

  When Episcopal rector Dennis Bennett told his Van Nuys congregation in 1960 that he had received the baptism of the Holy Spirit, Pentecostal experience jumped the denominational fence — into Lutheran, Presbyterian, Methodist and, from the 1967 Duquesne weekend, Catholic life. The 1977 Kansas City conference drew some fifty thousand charismatics, roughly half of them Catholic, worshiping in one stadium.

  A renewal that began at a segregated-out revival in 1906 ended up praying in every tradition's sanctuary — the most border-crossing spiritual movement in American history.

• 2016 — Encounter Ministries and the renewal's next generation

  Fr. Mathias Thelen — ordained for the Diocese of Lansing in 2010, pastor of St. Patrick parish in Brighton, Michigan, and holder of a licence in sacred theology from the Angelicum in Rome — founded Encounter Ministries in 2016 with Patrick Reis, to teach ordinary Catholics to pray for healing and to expect the Holy Spirit to act. Its Encounter School of Ministry runs a two-year curriculum reviewed by standing boards of bishops and theologians, and Thelen's Biblical Foundations for the Role of Healing in Evangelization (2018) sets out the theology behind it. It is a ministry inside the Catholic Church, not a body beside it, and it stands forty minutes down the road from where the American renewal was organised in the 1970s.

  What Azusa Street handed to Catholics through a student retreat in 1967 is now taught in Catholic parishes by Catholic priests with their bishops' approval — the same fire, received into a very different house, and at home there.