When I was a Methodist pastor, a frustrated elderly parishioner, Mrs. Smith, said to me one Sunday, “I’ve visited Sue Jones in the nursing home three times this month and she said that no one from the church has been to see her.” I paused before replying, hoping the irony of her words would be apparent once she heard it out loud. No such luck.
Now I’d been a pastor long enough to read the code and understand what she meant; she was frustrated that I, the pastor, hadn’t been to see Mrs. Jones. This, by the way, is why folks in pastoral ministry often live with the perpetual feeling that they are letting somebody down.
It’s interesting that in a United Methodist setting, with no sacrament of Holy Orders, the pastor’s representative role is still irreplaceable. How much more so, then, in Catholicism, in which the priest is an alter Christus by virtue of his ordination?
And yet, we the laity also serve a crucial role in caring for each other within the Body of Christ. If we forget this, we become consumers who view the Church as a detached institution that exists to provide us goods and services, rather than to see the Church as a living mission to the world in which we are all working members, organically united and necessarily involved.
Thus—if you missed the irony—my Methodist parishioner’s complaint was self-refuting. If she had been to see Mrs. Jones three times in the nursing home, the church had visited her!
Now translate this concept into another area of ministry—evangelization. The root “eu-angelos” is Greek for “good news,” and so the word “evangelization” refers to announcing and embodying the good news of Christ’s victorious, transforming, and inviting love to the world.
And this task is primarily ours as laity. As Vatican II’s Lumen Gentium puts it:“[T]he laity go forth as powerful proclaimers of a faith in things to be hoped for, when they courageously join to their profession of faith a life springing from faith. This evangelization…takes on a specific quality and a special force in that it is carried out in the ordinary surroundings of the world.”
Yet we wait for our pastor to initiate a parish evangelization program, as if it is his task alone. In a role reversal, we imagine we’re spectators cheering on our priests in the battlefield for souls, when actually we’re meant for the battlefield, and our pastors are, in a manner of speaking, our sergeants, medics, and chaplains. Don’t take my word for it, check the Catechism: “The ministerial priesthood is at the service of the common priesthood (note: that’s you and me, via our baptism). It is directed at the unfolding of the baptismal grace of all Christians” (¶1547).
And where is this battlefield? It’s where we live, work, and play, or as the Council says, “the ordinary surroundings of the world.” And our weapons are love, service and prayer. Thus, our success is not judged by our comportment at Mass, where we show our best faces, but in how we embody love and integrity daily in our work, friendships, families, and all those we meet.
I’m not sure we get this, since we more often lament the damage to Catholicism by wayward priests than we do our own hypocrisies that obscure the good news of Christ and his Church.
In the gospel reading for January 4th, taken from John 1, John the Baptist directs two of his disciples toward Jesus as the “Lamb of God,” who then ask Jesus where he is staying. Jesus’ response of “Come and see” invites them to spend a day with him—to see in Jesus’ordinary moments the confirmation of the Baptist’s claim. “Come and see” is also St. John’s literary invitation to read the rest of his gospel, to see for ourselves this Word made flesh.
But the “Come and see” phrase goes further; it asks every person baptized into Christ whether others see Jesus alive in us. For example, when photojournalist Linda Schaefer once accompanied Blessed Mother Teresa in her work, she titled her pictorial essay, Come and See, an indication that seeing the saint in her daily work confirmed the authenticity of her witness.
What about us? If we understand our role as evangelizers, we will humbly seek God’s grace—and no one needs it more than me--as we ask ourselves, “If I said ‘Come and see?’ to a non-believer, inviting him to see my daily life, unfiltered from waking to bed, would he be more likely or less so to believe our Lord is real?”After all, wherever we go, there the Church will be.
Now I’d been a pastor long enough to read the code and understand what she meant; she was frustrated that I, the pastor, hadn’t been to see Mrs. Jones. This, by the way, is why folks in pastoral ministry often live with the perpetual feeling that they are letting somebody down.
It’s interesting that in a United Methodist setting, with no sacrament of Holy Orders, the pastor’s representative role is still irreplaceable. How much more so, then, in Catholicism, in which the priest is an alter Christus by virtue of his ordination?
And yet, we the laity also serve a crucial role in caring for each other within the Body of Christ. If we forget this, we become consumers who view the Church as a detached institution that exists to provide us goods and services, rather than to see the Church as a living mission to the world in which we are all working members, organically united and necessarily involved.
Thus—if you missed the irony—my Methodist parishioner’s complaint was self-refuting. If she had been to see Mrs. Jones three times in the nursing home, the church had visited her!
Now translate this concept into another area of ministry—evangelization. The root “eu-angelos” is Greek for “good news,” and so the word “evangelization” refers to announcing and embodying the good news of Christ’s victorious, transforming, and inviting love to the world.
And this task is primarily ours as laity. As Vatican II’s Lumen Gentium puts it:“[T]he laity go forth as powerful proclaimers of a faith in things to be hoped for, when they courageously join to their profession of faith a life springing from faith. This evangelization…takes on a specific quality and a special force in that it is carried out in the ordinary surroundings of the world.”
Yet we wait for our pastor to initiate a parish evangelization program, as if it is his task alone. In a role reversal, we imagine we’re spectators cheering on our priests in the battlefield for souls, when actually we’re meant for the battlefield, and our pastors are, in a manner of speaking, our sergeants, medics, and chaplains. Don’t take my word for it, check the Catechism: “The ministerial priesthood is at the service of the common priesthood (note: that’s you and me, via our baptism). It is directed at the unfolding of the baptismal grace of all Christians” (¶1547).
And where is this battlefield? It’s where we live, work, and play, or as the Council says, “the ordinary surroundings of the world.” And our weapons are love, service and prayer. Thus, our success is not judged by our comportment at Mass, where we show our best faces, but in how we embody love and integrity daily in our work, friendships, families, and all those we meet.
I’m not sure we get this, since we more often lament the damage to Catholicism by wayward priests than we do our own hypocrisies that obscure the good news of Christ and his Church.
In the gospel reading for January 4th, taken from John 1, John the Baptist directs two of his disciples toward Jesus as the “Lamb of God,” who then ask Jesus where he is staying. Jesus’ response of “Come and see” invites them to spend a day with him—to see in Jesus’ordinary moments the confirmation of the Baptist’s claim. “Come and see” is also St. John’s literary invitation to read the rest of his gospel, to see for ourselves this Word made flesh.
But the “Come and see” phrase goes further; it asks every person baptized into Christ whether others see Jesus alive in us. For example, when photojournalist Linda Schaefer once accompanied Blessed Mother Teresa in her work, she titled her pictorial essay, Come and See, an indication that seeing the saint in her daily work confirmed the authenticity of her witness.
What about us? If we understand our role as evangelizers, we will humbly seek God’s grace—and no one needs it more than me--as we ask ourselves, “If I said ‘Come and see?’ to a non-believer, inviting him to see my daily life, unfiltered from waking to bed, would he be more likely or less so to believe our Lord is real?”After all, wherever we go, there the Church will be.
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