Training The Average Parishioner to Evangelize
The call of Jesus to go and make disciples of all nations was not just given to the institutional Church but the the individual disciple. For years, faithful Catholics have sat in the pews and viewed their roll in the church as to attend Mass faithfully, contribute money and be good people.
Some would hear and respond to the call for help and become a volunteer in the various church ministries. Unfortunately, next to none of our faithful would ever see themselves as people who would (or could) evangelize directly. “That was done by the Priests, Nuns and Lay Professionals.” And yet, that is precisely what the Church needs today. In these days when programming has been all but shut down because of a lack of attendance to programs, the church sitting in the pews must pick up its mantle and go out and evangelize.
There is a very good reason why people in the pew were satisfied to remain the “silent faithful”. Talking about their faith is a very frightening activity and they didn’t have to do it. In addition to this fear was the simple fact that the average parishioner didn’t want to suffer the cost of time it would take to prepare and actually engage in the work of leading others into a viable relationship with Jesus Christ.
With the landscape dramatically changing and the Church loosing more and more relevance in the current culture, both the institutional Church and the Church in the pew are almost ready to engage in the work of preparing the saints to lead hearts to Christ. The Church is now struggling to regain its evangelistic mission. Some preachers are finally focusing attention on this need and slowly instructing the faithful on their true role as evangelists – to become missionary disciples.
At the very beginning of our inception (New Evangelization Ministries), was the call to go and train people to evangelize. But we found a church that was not ready to be trained because many needed to be evangelized themselves. Fourteen years into our mission we have begun to see the signs that the Church almost ready for this type of vision and training.
While in this holding pattern of waiting for the Church, we have been recognizing key roadblocks to this training. Obstacles like fear – people will only go as far as their fears allow them. They can be trained all weekend long on how to evangelize but if they are not trained to overcome the fear, they will not act.
Using various forms and venues, we started developing not only a very user friendly content for one on one (1 person leading 1 person) evangelization process but also a methodology to deal with the fear. Parts of the method have been tested on audiences ranging from a dozen to twenty three hundred. The results have been extremely encouraging.
The other key component in this training methodology is learning how to co-operate with the Holy Spirit. We can’t change hearts, that is the job of the Spirit. However, when we learn how to listen and discern what the Spirit is guiding us to say, we learn how to operate in the “current of grace” that the Spirit moves in. Understanding what is our role and what is the role of Spirit gives us great confidence and faith that God will move mountains.
Gather your key movers and shakers (staff and core) together for a weekend training. We will not only teach them how to do it, we will model for them how to teach others to lead hearts to encounter Christ. We will leave you with the training materials so you can pass it on.