Tuesday, June 17, 2014

Evangelization: A Skewed Perspective?

The word evangelize, to me, provokes a particular image - there's me (envangelizer) who knows Jesus and wants to help other people know Jesus, and then there's this other person who doesn't believe in God or has never been introduced to the idea of God - or for whatever reason, in whatever way, a person does not know God. SO in order to evangelize I have to help this person encounter the living God, right? 

Well, kind of. 

I think there is more to evangelization than just helping someone encounter Christ. What about beyond that encounter, when one begins working on that relationship with God - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. What about when it gets hard? When we don't want to work on our relationship with God, when we don't want to pray, when we don't want to fight temptation.. 

I had a really good conversation with my roommates about this topic - about how when we share our prayer lives with those around, when we ask how things are going, we are evangelizing. In our conversations, one of the girls had been wanting to go to adoration more frequently but was having a hard time going on a regular basis, so I told her that what I did when I went to adoration/mass for lent, I wasn't allowed to go home until I had gone because I knew that once I got home I wouldn't want to leave. And she had another issue, so we came up with a simple, practical solution - working together to call each other on in holiness. And then my other roommate has been dating someone for a little over a year now, so I like to check in and ask her how things are going? It ended up being a really experience asking her different questions and seeing what her thoughts were on different matters, and seeing a dating relationship at work. And so after we got done catching up about our lives, our discussion moved to one around evangelization. 

In our community, we see a closed-minded idea as to what evangelization is, but in our discussions we came to a conclusion, that loving the people around us is a work of evangelization. You don't have to serve on a youth group leadership team, you don't have to be a student missionary, you don't have to be a mission leader, you don't have serve at the soup kitchen every Saturday in order to serve the Lord, in order to evangelize. 

In the vocation of student we can evangelize simply by being a joyful and peaceful presence in the classroom (or clinical setting for me). In the vocation of marriage husband and wife evangelize to each other. In parenthood, parents evangelize to their children by teaching them about God, by teaching them his love. 

I know I've carried a skewed perspective of evangelization. I came from more or less know faith, to being a fully practicing and very actively involved Catholic because someone who knew God brought me to know Him. And then I had a hard time seeing my purpose, and seeing a way for me to help others come to know God. SO I felt I had to be a student missionary or serve on a core for a youth group, but really I don't. 

This summer semester God has taught me a lot about evangelization. In the first week of class I found out some of my classmates were Catholic, and one girl said something about wanting to start going to mass again, but she had a hard time going to her home parish because of the population. And in that conversation I realized God has placed me there for a reason. He placed a mission in front of me. 

Perhaps you are called to serve in a very particular way, such as student missionary, mission leader, mission director, youth minister, youth ministry volunteer, etc. But just because you aren't called to serve in one of those ways does not mean that you are not called to serve, to evangelize, to be the light of Christ to the nations. Bloom where you are planted. Be where your feet are. Love with all you've got. Never give up. 

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