Yes, you too! Go forth and tell the Good News!

What Catholic could not have mixed feelings about our history as “evangelizers,” particularly when we’re able to now see so many mistakes and damage having been done over the centuries through our missionary efforts.  One has to ask, “What were they thinking?” after finally grasping how unlike Jesus’ style of announcing, healing, and dialogue has been our record as evangelizers.   (Maybe we – especially in the West  -- have always been “results driven.”)  Only recently has the Catholic Church officially respected the complexity of cultures (starting with Evangelii Nuntiandi) when teaching about how we are to go to bring the Good News to all the nations.

For me 1983 was both the most miserable and delightfully satisfying year I’ve experienced as an evangelizer.  It was in the Peten, northern Guatemala and I was really a beginner, and knew it.  Bishop Jorge Mario Ávila had recently entrusted me with the care of more than 30 faith communities, but with the proviso that I be pastor of a parish that no one wanted, San Andrés.  Decades of unresolved conflicts, scandal after scandal, broken and ruined marriages, most everyone co-opted in some way in crimes and misdemeanors… it was a desperate, hate-filled and hopeless community.  Previous pastors (and very competent Burgos missioners, by the way) had “given up” on that parish, even refusing communion to them at Sunday mass!

Of course, after two years practicing my primitive Spanish and just beginning to set up catequist recruiting and training (this was our primary work), I knew one thing:  I was in no way qualified to understand these issues, to address them, nor especially to help the people resolve them.  So I did the very, very little that I could:  preach about the Prodigal Son (and a dozen other Gospel healing/reconciliation stories) and … well, a lot of serious praying..

After six months of visits to San Andrés, without much change in mass attendance or participation, the couple elders asked for a meeting with me.  It was then that a group of six men and women presented themselves ready -- they wanted to receive certification (training) as catechists; their only condition was that they be missioners to other communities.  I had my doubts but finally agreed.

As soon training ended all of them were busy visiting some of the remote villages and coming back with great stories.  More suprisingly, their experience – at first only in places distant from their community – attracted a dozen more who “wanted to evangelize too!”   Within two years, San Andres had become our area’s banner community not only for missionary catequists but for musicians, youth ministers, and a variety of other services, even for their own(!).  All this, even while they continued to stuggle as the same sinners with the same problems as before, something they themselves insisted on declaring during our retreats!  Now, however, they were experiencing God’s presence, His healing and forgiveness…and talking about it to anyone who would listen.

Surely as baptized Christians we have been told that we are evangelizers, that this is not a specialist thing, just for bishops, priests, deacons and so on... All the more strange that many of us priests or missioners are reluctant to evangelize!  Most likely we simply don’t believe it, or we feel incompetent, so we avoid it!  There’s always good reasons, too.  It’s hard to do “kingdom talk” when it’s God’s own mysterious plan and not our own kingdom we’re talking about.  We’d rather correct behaviors, or talk about making the medium (internet, mass media, etc) more effective, or make sure we get our legal and philosophical (and cultural) baggage accurate and updated (read ‘politically correct’) before any preaching and teaching.  Better yet, we might substitute social work or church/school construction for evangelization.  After all, these are good things, aren’t they? and people seem grateful for them, and there’s always people who want to help us do these practical, helpful things.   So we tend to concentrate on becoming professionals (a good thing) in every area of our work …except in that one area.

But stalling just begs the nature of our call to evangelize.  “ The Kingdom of God is NOW!”  and it ignores the call to be evangelizers, especially as members of the Congregation of the Mission.  Is any of this what Jesus had in mind, when he commanded, “come, follow me!” ?

Evangelization is not about us making the world a better place, as worthwhile as that obviously is.  Rather, it’s about learning how to recognize God healing and transforming the world, and helping God do it.  Besides living by the faith we claim we have, evangelizing pushes us out there, among the people, announcing the Good News (articulating it as well as living it), nurturing the Kingdom of God where we see it sprout up, getting caught up on Somebody Else’s agenda. 

Those sinners at San Andrés were a remarkable surprise to us Petén missioners.  They heard that call and understood what evangelizing meant: to share our deepest hopes and faith and to invite others to transformation.  I suppose that in struggling to recognize and share God's transforming grace, we are being transformed ourselves.

This business of being faithful disciples of Jesus, well it’s probably not what most of us would think it was or should be.  As much as we Christians would like to think of ourselves as obedient to Jesus’ words, and as hard we sometimes try to be, we really don’t listen most of the time.  When we listen we don’t understand.  When, after much thinking and planning, we think we’re doing the right thing we find out, usually someone finds out for us, that it was somehow wrong... or right despite our diligent efforts rather than because of them. 

Perhaps that two-steps-forward-one-step-back routine shouldn’t worry us though.  We’re in good company.  Apparently that die was cast for all of us with the very first choices Jesus made for his disciples (the twelve), who were for the most part an uncomprehending, divided (even competitive) group of misfits.
To their credit, however, they placed their wounded hearts in the right hands.  So should we.

DPB (Mallet, Louisiana mission appeal reflections, July 2010)