Note: I wrote a draft of this post a few years ago but never posted it. Though I haven’t been able to serve as a catechist for a while, the overall message of this post is still very important to me.
“Ok, let’s review this together again,” I said to my first grade faith formation class. “What does yellow mean?”
“Friendship with God!” a chorus of six- and seven-year-old voices responded.
“Good! God made us to be in perfect friendship with Him. What hurts our friendship with God?” I held up the black piece of paper.
“Sin!”
We went through each color – yellow, black, red, white, and green – until the class could use the colorful cues as reminders for the Good News: We were made for perfect friendship with God. Our sin -saying “no” to God – hurts our friendship with Him. Jesus Christ died on the cross (shed His blood) for us so our sins can be forgiven when we ask. This makes our souls clean again so we can heal our relationship with God. We will make mistakes, but we can keep growing closer to God.
Between Ben and I, we made sure each student could tell us the Good News using the colorful beads of the bracelets I had made as visual reminders. By the end of the class, every student had gotten it, and they all proudly wore their bracelets that reminded them of the Gospel.
Anyone who works with young children knows their attention span is minuscule, but I was determined to make sure every student was introduced to this topic, even if it meant a lot of breaks.
This message – that we were made to be perfectly, eternally happy with God and that He died for our sins to protect that friendship – is the core message of our Christian faith.
Our Responsibility
As a millennial Catholic, I have experienced the side effects of poor catechesis in my own life. I learned a lot of things that should seem obvious on my own, grappled with doubt, and faced many twists and turns before I truly accepted the faith of the Church that Christ established. But it is also these personal experiences that have made me realize that we are also poor evangelizers.
Unless people have a relationship with God, what we teach no matter how lovingly or intelligently, is going to fall on deaf ears. Unless we introduce people to Christ and His sacrifice for them, they will struggle to accept His admittedly challenging teachings.
I think one of our problems is we tend to do it in reverse. We are so desperate to teach about the faith that we can forget that many people need to first encounter the one to whom our faith is directed: God. Jesus said “If you love me, keep my commandments.” If we want people to be obedient to God, I believe that we need to first introduce them to the love of God.
Unless we introduce people to Christ and His sacrifice for them, they will struggle to accept His admittedly challenging teachings. Click To TweetThere are a few things I think we as Christians (myself included) could be doing better to lead more people to Christ.
We should be proclaiming the Good News.
I attended a seminar where we talked about how we as Catholics tend to be uncomfortable with the idea of evangelization. Evangelization is awkward to begin with, but we also tend to associate it as a Protestant thing. And friends, this is something our Protestant brothers and sisters do really, really well.
But evangelization isn’t just a “Protestant thing;” it is a Christian thing. Christ called us to make disciples.
And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age.”
Matthew 28:18-20
I’m not saying that we need to do a step-by-step Gospel Presentation with every person we encounter, but we should be able to articulate this core message of our Christian faith.
Think of the dismissals from Mass, for example: “Go and announce the Gospel of the Lord.” Our lives should radiate the love of Christ. How we live should share the Gospel as well as how we speak.
We should introduce more time for a relationship with Christ.
The idea of having an intimate relationship with Jesus can seem foreign to Catholics. The idea of having a “personal relationship with our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” seems like a very “Protestant thing.” Again, this isn’t just a Protestant thing; it is a Christian thing.
And when you reflect on your life as a Catholic, it is impossible to deny the intimacy we have with Christ. We literally receive Jesus every Sunday. We are consuming Christ’s body which he gave up for us and allowed us to continue to receive every time we are in Mass. Mass is Heaven on Earth. These small moments are the closest to Christ we can get while we are still on Earth.
But we need this intimacy to extend beyond Sunday Mass.
We should live as Christ calls us to.
Let’s face it: we have all fallen short of what Christ calls us to. But that doesn’t mean we should give up entirely. People should be able to know we are Christians by the way we live.
They should know we are Christians by the ways we care for our neighbors, by our diligence to our work, by our morality, by our joy, and by our confidence in proclaiming the Gospel.
Our examples should draw people closer to Christ and His Church, not repel them.
And our proclaiming the Gospel should come from a genuine concern about the other person. Our evangelization needs to be focused on our relationship with the person and bringing them closer to Christ; it shouldn’t be about being right. In the Gospels, we see Christ living this very clearly. Yes, he taught people in public spheres, but He also spoke with and healed individuals.
We should be conscientious about how we correct people.
I am all for sharing the truth, and as I mentioned before, it is our responsibility as Christians. However, we can do a much better job of charitably correcting people. This is especially true online where people are quick to throw out accusations of someone being a heretic or claiming someone isn’t a Catholic.
We need to get more comfortable with uncomfortable questions.
We need to be patient as they grapple with issues of faith.
We need to consider the venue in which we are conversing and evaluate if there are better places (and times) to have these important questions.
We need to accept criticisms and listen, even if they’re wrong so we can show we care before offering a different perspective.
Our mission as Christians should be to follow Christ, and a key component to this is encouraging others to become Christ’s disciples. Though teaching the truth is important, I think our first step as Christians should be getting them to love Jesus. From that, the truth should flow naturally, or at least much more easily.
But we now live in a more secular society where Jesus has been insulted , denied and undermined. Talking about Jesus to my pagan family gets me nowhere. Saint Maximillian Kolbe handed out tracts. I don’t know what the tracts said but it sounds like someone now would think he was catechizing before evangelizing. But maybe he had the effect of changing the atmosphere which would allow for more Kerygma like conversations.
It might seem to be getting nowhere, but our faithful witness to Jesus plants seeds. Often, we don’t see how the Holy Spirit is working in the lives of our loved ones.
I love your last line about changing the atmosphere to allow for conversations related to the Kerygma.
I think that catechesis may be part of the early evangelization process as we talk about who God is, what Jesus did for us, etc. My point in the post was more we need to share those foundations before we get into some other topics.