Fr. Ron Rolheiser's latest post on the "New evangelisation " at his website is worth a read and I also found this one Evangelism: Bringing Joy Not Imposing a Yoke from Fr Ted (the real one !) uplifting.
Extract from Fr. Rolheiser's article is below to which I've added a few images:
" It no longer makes sense to speak of trying to evangelize such
persons in the same way as we intend that term when we are speaking of
taking the Gospel to someone for the first time.
 |
| Image from the Book of Kells, a 1200 year old book. Category:Illuminated manuscript images (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
It's more accurate
precisely to speak of a new evangelization, of an attempt to take the
Gospel to individuals and to a culture that have already largely been
shaped by it, are in a sense over-familiar with it, but haven't really
in fact examined it.
The new evangelization tries to take the Gospel to persons who are already Christian but are no longer practicing as Christians.
How to do that? How do we make the Gospel fresh for those for whom it has become stale?
How do we, as G. K. Chesterton put it, help people to look at the familiar until it looks unfamiliar again? How do we try to Christianize someone who is already Christian?
Source
There are no simple answers. It's not as if we haven't already been trying to do that for more than a generation. Anxious parents have been trying to do this with their children. Anxious pastors have been trying to do that with their parishioners. Anxious bishops have been trying to do that with their dioceses. Anxious spiritual writers, including this one, have been trying to do that with their readership. And an anxious church as a whole has been trying to do that with the world. What more might we be doing?
My own view is that we are in for a long, uphill struggle, one that
demands faith in the power and truth of what we believe in and a long,
difficult patience.
Christ, the faith, and the church will survive. They
always do.
The stone always eventually rolls away from the tomb and Christ always eventually re-emerges, but we too must do our parts.
What
are those parts?
The vision we need as we try to reach out to evangelize the already
evangelized will, I believe, need to include these principles:
1. We need to clearly name this task, recognize its urgency, and
center ourselves in Jesus' final mandate: Go out to the whole world and
make disciples.
2. We need work at trying to re-inflame the romantic imagination
of our faith. We have been better recently at fanning the flames of our
theological imagination, but we've struggled mightily to get people to
fall in love with the faith.
3. We need to emphasize both catechesis and theology.
We need to focus both on those who are trying to learn the essentials of their faith and those who are trying to make intellectual sense of their faith.
4. We need a multiplicity of approaches. No one approach reaches everyone. People go where they are fed.
5. We need to appeal to the idealism of people, particularly that
of the young.
We need to win people over by linking the Gospel to all that's best inside them, to let the beauty of the Gospel speak to the beauty inside of people.
6. We need to evangelize beyond any ideology of the right or the
left. We need to move beyond the categories of liberal and conservative
to the categories of love, beauty, and truth.
7. We need to remain widely "Catholic" in our approach. We are
not trying to get people to join some small, lean, purist, sectarian
group, but to enter a house with many rooms.
8. We need to preach both the freedom of the Gospel and its call
for an adult maturity.
We need to resist preaching a Gospel that
threatens or belittles, even as we preach a Gospel that asks for free
and mature obedience.
9. We need today, in an age of instability and too-frequent betrayal, to give a special witness to fidelity.
10. We need, today more than ever, to bear down on the essentials of respect, charity, and graciousness.
Cause never justifies disrespect.
We need to work at winning over hearts, not hardening them."
All I can add to Fr .Roheiser's reflections at this time is this:
Don't ignore the elephant in the room and there is more than one being ignored by the church at the present time.
No comments:
Post a Comment