Why We Cannot Refuse to Evangelise
We, Catholics, often hear about the need to evangelise. Often, the reasons that are given sound something like: “It’s just like sharing about anything else great that has happened to you!” or “We need to share the Good News to those around us!”
This article is not going down that route. As much as that message is good and ultimately necessary, one of the possible results of such an argument is that we end up compartmentalising mission as “one of the many things that Catholics do.” It becomes optional. And anything that is optional is unnecessary. We end up sitting on the fence instead of running out into the streets.
However, this goes against everything the Church stands for. As Saint John Paul II said in Redemptoris Missio: “No believer in Christ, no institution of the Church can avoid this supreme duty: to proclaim Christ to all peoples.” Evangelisation is not a “good to have”. As this article will attempt to show, if we don’t do it, we will die. Evangelisation is so interwoven with every aspect of the Christian life to the point where it is indispensable. If you do not evangelise, your spiritual relationship with God suffers and your community suffers.
“Every Christian is challenged, here and now, to be actively engaged in evangelization; indeed, anyone who has truly experienced God’s saving love does not need much time or lengthy training to go out and proclaim that love… we no longer say that we are “disciples” and “missionaries”, but rather that we are always “missionary disciples”.”
- Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium
If you lack mission, you will lead a boring spiritual life
To start off, I want to start with a discussion about who God is…
We often think of God as a noun. That is to say, something static. We can point to him! “Oh here’s God, there’s God.” But in reality, God is more like a verb. If God is love and love is an action, a verb, God is more like a verb, a pure action. Indeed, the Holy Spirit is constantly in motion. Moving out from one place to another. The giver of life gives life to all it touches. Thus, as Thomas Merton puts in The Seven Story Mountain, “one of the notions that is absolutely contradictory to the perfection of God is selfishness. It is metaphysically impossible for God to be selfish.”
With this understanding of God, we turn to our first point:
When you don’t evangelise your spiritual life suffers
Pope Francis says in Evangelii Gaudium that, “Whenever our interior life becomes caught up in its own interests and concerns, there is no longer room for others… God’s voice is no longer heard, the quiet joy of his love is no longer felt, and the desire to do good fades. This is a very real danger for believers too. Many fall prey to it, and end up resentful, angry and listless. That is no way to live a dignified and fulfilled life.”
Later, he states that for the self-absorbed Christian “the spiritual life comes to be identified with a few religious exercises which can offer a certain comfort but which do not encourage encounter with others, engagement with the world or a passion for evangelization. As a result, one can observe in many agents of evangelization, even though they pray, a heightened individualism, a crisis of identity and a cooling of fervour. These are three evils which fuel one another.”
What he means is that when we begin to look inwards, instead of outwards to the mission, we end up contradicting the very nature of God and in the end lose him. As Jason Evert says, “castles become cages, and cages become coffins.”
And so, when we do not evangelise, actually our prayer life suffers a lot. We end up sitting in adoration like a tortured lover, does he love me, does he not? Feelings of consolation come and feelings of desolation comes, but without responding to that love that comes to us, they remain mere sensations and we eventually grow bored and leave. Your spiritual life was never meant to be only for yourself.
Consider the parable of the talents. The talents refers to divine grace. For those with 5 and 10 talents, those who give away the divine grace receive more. The more you empty the more you receive. The servant with 1 talent however shows that when we hold on to God, we lose him.
The question comes: Are you holding Jesus hostage?
Love is always two-way. “Do you love me?” is always followed by “feed my sheep.” Love always overflows out of the relationship. Love always moves. It always includes more people. Sometimes Jesus wants to lead us out of the adoration room into an encounter with another person or else that love will grow stale.
Closer to the ground, in my experience, exercising our faith through preaching and testifying expands us and challenges our faith. Needing to ask the Holy Spirit for conversions and encouragement in times of little fruit leads you to pray more! After all, the patron saints of missionaries are St. Francis Xavier and St. Therese of Liseux. Prayer and mission are unseperable. When you become genuinely evangelistic, much of your time in prayer will become intercessory. You pray for those who do not pray. You become purely “for” the other — a true imitation of Christ.
“True enough, we need to open the door of our hearts to Jesus, who stands and knocks (cf. Rev 3:20). Sometimes I wonder, though, if perhaps Jesus is already inside us and knocking on the door for us to let him escape from our stale self-centredness. In the Gospel, we see how Jesus “went through the cities and villages, preaching and bringing the good news of the kingdom of God” (Lk 8:1). After the resurrection, when the disciples went forth in all directions, the Lord accompanied them (cf. Mk 16:20). This is what happens as the result of true encounter.”
- Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium
When you don’t evangelise, your community life suffers
“God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God.”
- 2 Corinthians: 18-20
At the time of Paul’s letter, the Corinthians are having lots of trouble within their community — disputes and bickering. But, notice what language St. Paul uses. He doesn’t say “be nice”. He says we are therefore Christ’s ambassadors. He appeal to the fact that they have to go forth to the gentiles and bring them salvation, and so the Corinthians better get their act togther.
One of my favourite quotes comes from Sheryl Sandberg’s conversation with Eric Schmidt. In it Schmidt gives her advice to “get on a rocket ship. When companies are growing quickly and they are having a lot of impact, careers take care of themselves. And when companies aren’t growing quickly or their missions don’t matter as much, that’s when stagnation and politics come in. If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask what seat. Just get on.”
“If your community is not growing, it is already dead.”
Another quote? Henry Kissinger says that “The reason that university politics is so vicious is because stakes are so small.”
Why is this so? Whenever we reduce our mission fields, whenever we grow slack in our ambitions for Christ’s Church, idleness sets in. With all this extra time on our hands, the Devil slips into his playground, “the idle mind”, and starts messing with us. And so negative aspects of community become overblown. Politics and disagreements inevitably set in.
If, however, we have a common vision in mind, we’ll have a sufficient amount of fruitful work that we do not give the devil his opportunity.
“Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.”
- 1 Corinthians 15:58
My Challenge
Right now, I extend a challenge to you: Right now, pray to God for a person to reach out to. Pray for that person. It can be something as simple as a Hail Mary. Continue to intentionally pray for that person every day. When we take small steps to evangelise, the Lord makes miracles happen. Trust me.
“The Gospel offers us the chance to live life on a higher plane, but with no less intensity: “Life grows by being given away, and it weakens in isolation and comfort. Indeed, those who enjoy life most are those who leave security on the shore and become excited by the mission of communicating life to others”. When the Church summons Christians to take up the task of evangelization, she is simply pointing to the source of authentic personal fulfilment. For “here we discover a profound law of reality: that life is attained and matures in the measure that it is offered up in order to give life to others. This is certainly what mission means”
- Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium
