……If Salt Loses Its Taste….

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            I drive out to the Diocese of Joliet to help with masses on the weekend.  That trip takes me down Route 80, where I frequently pass Family Harvest Church, an evangelical church.  I know the pastor of Family Harvest Church.  His name is Robb Thompson.  He and his wife started their church in a restaurant on LaGrange Road in Orland Park.  The congregation became so large that they erected a building for worship and ministries on Wolf Road.  When the congregations grew too large for that building, they constructed a huge campus, the one they are now at off Route 80 in Tinley Park.  The campus is quite impressive.  The parking lot looks like the parking lot of a mall and the building for worship and education is huge.  They obviously have given a family focus to what they do at this church.  What is further interesting is that Robb and his wife are both former Catholics, products of parochial schools, elementary and high school.  During my years at St. Michael’s in Orland Park, Robb was always very kind and hospitable to me, open to ecumenical dialog and activities.

During the time I was living at St. Michael’s in Orland Park, I was the Director of the Office for Chicago Catholic Evangelization.  I was in that position from 1979 – 1992, when I left to assume a role on the faculty at Loyola Institute of Pastoral Studies in the areas of Evangelization and Religious Education.  During my years at the office, I also started two national organizations for evangelization.  As I began the office, I asked a college freshman with whom I had worked at St. Hubert’s in Hoffman Estates in Youth Ministry, if she wanted to work with me, part time.  That young woman was Dawn Mayer who went on to become the co-director of the office.  During those years of working in evangelization, there were not many parishes in the Archdiocese of Chicago that I was not in, resourcing in evangelization in some way.  I also traveled to different parts of the country and the world as a consultant in evangelization.

We built our vision and strategies for evangelization from the document Evangelii Nuntiandi, the encyclical on evangelization written by Paul VI in 1975.  Pope Paul VI said that the essence of evangelization can be found in Luke 4:43, “Let us go to the other towns, so that I may proclaim the Reign of God there also; for that is why I came.”  Jesus explains the reason for his coming to the earth as the mission of proclaiming, revealing the Reign of God to people.   In a parallel passage in Mark 1:15, Jesus says, “I’ve got good news for you: the Reign of God is here. Change your lives.”  Those two passages have what evangelization is about in a nutshell.  Evangelization is inviting people to a change of life and heart, that is conversion, and a new way of seeing life and living life – the Reign of God.

Dawn and I developed strategies for evangelization around Paul VI’s target areas for this work: the re-evangelization of active Catholics, reach out to alienated or inactive Catholics, RCIA-like work with the unchurched, more holistic youth evangelization and ministry, the use of media and technology to evangelize, and the need to connect evangelization with the works of mercy and justice.  We also emphasized the convergence model of evangelization, namely that no matter what a faith community’s governance structure might look like, all the ministries of a faith community converge on this one central mission of inviting people to the Reign of God and conversion.  In our vision and strategies, we tried to avoid the compartmentalization of efforts that sometimes take place in a faith community. 

We had an annual evangelization convention called “Jesus Day”.  In its heyday, it attracted close to 3000 people on a Saturday.  With the Office for Black Catholics, we developed a yearly African American Catholic revival that filled Holy Name Cathedral, as well as an African American Catholic Evangelization training program.  We also developed a Hispanic revival with the Office of Hispanic Catholics and a training program for evangelization entitled Para Servile.  We had institutes on improving preaching and improving pastoral counseling and spiritual direction.  We began parish based missions which had been on sabbatical for years.  We trained parishioners around the Archdiocese on how to do home visits, how to do small Christian communities, and how to create neighborhood ministries, all in an attempt to do what Dr. Paul Cho of Seoul, South Korea and the late Dr. John Hurston and his daughter Karen, called “Creating a Relational Net” for the parish, which results in not necessarily 100% attendance, but 100% reach out. 

Several times, we brought Dr. John Savage to Chicago to speak on his work, The Alienated and Bored Church Member.  In this doctoral dissertation, Dr. Savage said that through his research, he found many people fall away from churches, no matter the denomination, because of a cluster of pain in their lives that connects with a negative event with their local parish or church.  Savage found that when these two things come together, personal pain and a negative event with the church, people stop coming to church. Many typical parishes or congregations screen such people out which makes them become further alienated.  Those who are screened out tend to reinvest their church going energy in something else.  They become bored with religion, bored with the faith communities that they once were a part of. 

One of the things that I have tried to do with Catholic parishes is to break out of a maintenance mindset and praxis, to energize them and train them for mission, a mission that focuses on life in the Reign of God and conversion. 

Dawn Mayer and I have done an evangelistic radio program for close to thirty years. 

I emphasize evangelization this week because the theme running through the first reading and the gospel seems to be that of universalism or God wanting to invite all peoples into His Kingdom.  In the first reading from Trito-Isaiah, the third section of Isaiah, God says he is going to send Jewish people from Jerusalem as missionaries to foreign lands to invite them to become part of His Reign.  He even says that he will transform some of these foreign people into priests and Levites. 

In the gospel, Jesus warns that life in the Kingdom of God is a difficult experience that involves passing through a narrow gate.  Jesus goes on to say that people from the east and the west and from the north and south will recline at table in the Kingdom of God.  Having stated this theme of universalism, Jesus goes on to warn that some are last who will be first, and some are first who will be last.  Jesus’s emphasis on reversals at the end of the gospel seems to warn against complacency when it comes to the mission of the Reign of God. 

The letter to the Hebrews certainly is a warning against complacency.  It is addressed to Christians who have already suffered for their faith.  The author encourages his readers and encourages us to have discipline, discipline for the mission of the Reign of God, and to not allow ourselves to become lukewarm in our faith. 

I left the Office of Evangelization in 1992 to go to Loyola.  I then went on to become pastor of Holy Family in Inverness where I tried to put into practice, with Dawn Mayer and others, the vision and strategies of convergence evangelization, which I taught for so many years. 

After I left the Evangelization Office, I was not replaced for years.  Eventually a new Archdiocesan director was brought on to help with the articulation of a vision of evangelization for the Archdiocese of Chicago. 

I fear that some of the lukewarmness and complacency that the letter to the Hebrews warns about have taken hold in many Catholic communities.  The excitement about evangelization of the 1980’s and the 1990’s has waned. Pastors are appointed to parishes without the proper discernment of their gifts.  Gifted people who have given their lives to the church are mindlessly cut from staffs and volunteer ministries, and are thrown under the bus.  Each year, church attendance drops.  Experiences of genuine community in many parishes are minimal.  Empowerment of parishioners and ownership by laity of their faith communities are minimal.  Rather than re-imagining the church or re-imagining the parish, or “refounding” as Fr. Gerald Arbuckle wrote on some years ago, we in a restorationist, nostalgic mode of undoing some of the vision and strategies of Vatican II.  Twenty-five years ago pollster George Gallup, working for the Catholic Church in evangelization, called the church a “sleeping giant”.  I think even back then he was being kind; and if he were to be honest now, he might speak of the Church and evangelization in terms of coma, rather than sleep.

 

In Jesus,

 

Pat Brennan

 

 

Listen to HORIZONS, a radio program hosted by Fr. Pat Brennan and Dawn Mayer, every Sunday morning at 6:30 a.m. on 560 AM and at 11:00 a.m. on 1160 AM.