Praise be to God, that the call for evangelizing and making authentic disciples has finally become the focus of bishops and local pastors. The next obvious question is how. How do we effectively evangelize and how do we make disciples? 

The challenge of authentic evangelization is twofold. First, how do we get the core of the Church to sacrifice the time to do the work of relationship building so as to position them with the Gospel?  Second, how do you change the hearts of people to embrace the truth of the Gospel? 

I dare say that the second question is probably one of the greatest stumbling blocks to the effort. Because we can’t (and shouldn’t be able to) control the hearts of individuals, it is hard to do this process because we can’t control the outcome. So why bother?  

Before we woke up to the truth of our need to evangelize, we were blissfully content with simply bringing people through the sacraments, assuming that the ritual themselves would change lives. While they certainly can, if the recipients are properly disposed, many were just put through the programs. Very rarely, have I seen a parish staff evaluate whether their efforts were effective. It is much easier to create an education program and just give it to the recipients. 

When preaching parish missions, I refer to a lack of a mature understanding of the Catholic Faith among adults. My explanation for this deficiency points directly to the far too common experience of not seriously pursuing God while in those classes. I would refer to my own lack of desire and actions and watch the crowd nod their heads in agreement. We are confirming teens today that are still questioning whether they believe in God. Why?

The Church is making great strides in attempting to reach those “sacramentalized” teens of the past, who are now adults, with all kinds of evangelization programs. However, we are still sacramentalizing our current teens who will become the future adults in need of evangelization.  To me, this is a crisis. 

I understand that the bishops are looking for “best practices” that can be institutionalized by the Universal Church. But until we change the metric for measuring success, we will not find the real solutions.  

Every year the bishop assesses each parish within their diocese. I am not speaking financially, I am speaking sacramentally. Each parish must share the numbers of their sacramental work. How many baptisms, marriages, first communions, and confirmations did they have this year? 

If we need a “New Evangelization”, then we should be asking how many people were lead to encounter Jesus this year. The metric for success should not stop with the number of sacraments, but should go farther to examine whether they actually received God (fruits). If we were really serious about changing the status quo, we would be asking of our parishes to give us the real results!!!!

The sheer thought of doing this would rock the boat of the entire Church. Why? Because we would then recognize that we don’t know how to do this. This would cause us to make some radical changes. Changes like:

• We would have to pray and ask God for real help. 
• We would have to include the Holy Spirit in this process. 
• We would need to follow God instead of making our own plans and asking him to bless them. 

We would have to return control of the local parish back to God. This would affect both the pastor who leads and the parishioner who doesn’t like to change. I believe this is where we must go. Next blog we will pick up this thought and go deeper.