It All Starts with an Invitation
Jesus didn’t have to create sub-committees to get people to follow Him. He simply called upon them and asked them to come (Mt 4:18). His presence and the experience of meeting Him face-to-face produced what Dr. Peter Kreeft calls Jesus Shock. Meeting Jesus was enough to cause people to leave behind their former ways and follow Him. That’s where we are going wrong in our current approach at evangelization. Our witness, our lived example, is not properly reflecting the face of Christ to others. If so, we wouldn’t be in the situation that we find ourselves in.
“I’m convinced that through a person-to-person, peer-to-peer approach to sharing faith with others, we can break the quiet, reserved, privatized posture and the programmatic response to evangelization that have tended to characterize American Catholicism and offer a dynamic new approach to evangelization.”
~ Bishop Gerald Wilkerson of Los Angeles
The bishop is right on. We are not reaching people because we are only calling them from the pulpit. But most of them are not listening in this arena. We have to reach them, to engage them in their environment—the workplace, the supermarket, the classroom, and most importantly at home. It’s personal. It’s real. This is the best way to evangelize—to bring Jesus to the people. Pope Francis has spoken and shown us that this is truly the case.
“Witness is the communication of faith. The faith can only be communicated through witness and that is through love. Not with our ideas, but by living the Gospel in our own lives, which the Holy Spirit breathes within us.”
~ Pope Francis
Personal Relationships and Their Role in Evangelization
A few weeks ago I received an email from our parish community requesting volunteers for the parish fiesta. I didn’t respond. I didn’t feel the message was for me. But as a parishioner, the message was for me. A few days later I received a text from a friend and brother from the parish. He personally asked me if I would help out with the fiesta. I said yes. The message was the same, but the approach was different. It was personal. This is an example of the power of the personal invitation.
“At the heart of the problem is a lack of relationships, both in terms of our people being willing to engage others in their search for meaning and of being confident that such an engagement is not so much a matter of having answers to questions they may have or providing programs for their information and edification, but evangelization is a matter of being willing to listen, to understand and to walk with them in their spiritual quest.”
~ Bishop Gerald Wilkerson of Los Angeles
Before we can make these personal invitations, we must first possess the openness achieved only through personal relationships. I must be able to call this man my brother, my friend, in order to invite him into relationship with Jesus Christ. This means the way we interact and treat people is the doorway into their hearts. Only then can we echo Jesus’ call to them to follow Him by entering into relationship with people and inviting them to share in the joy of Jesus’ friendship.
“Evangelization, then, is first and foremost an exercise in communication and developing relationships.”
~ Bishop Gerald Wilkerson of Los Angeles
Don’t Forget the Message
If evangelization is the sharing of the faith in Christ and invitation to relationship with Him, then He must remain primary to our efforts. He gave us the mission and it’s to Him we must turn for guidance.
“When people think of evangelization, they think of projects, strategies, making plans But they are only tools, small tools. The important thing is Jesus, and being guided by Him, and then come the strategies. But that is secondary.”
~ Pope Francis
We can’t let our plans get in the way of the message, of the invitation. We must turn to Christ in prayer. He will send us where we need to go. He will place the people in our paths that need Him. He will prepare us and fill us with the grace we need to share His message, to be His presence to a world so desperately in need of Him.
For more on this topic from Bishop Gerald Wilkerson, please read his six-page document on titled simply “Evangelization“.