I recently overheard a conversation between two Catholics about evangelization. They seemed unequivocally against it, at least in its more typical form of intentionally sharing the Gospel with non-Christians. To them, in this age of human rights, active evangelization necessarily means the compromise of another person’s religious freedom. To promote one’s own religion, to them, is to degrade someone else’s notions of the numinous.
The discomfort modern Catholics stereotypically feel with the practice of evangelization can make this an awkward time of the liturgical year, this time of Ascension and Pentecost, when Jesus gives the Great Commission, that “repentance, for the forgiveness of sins, would be preached in his name to all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem.” (Luke 24:47) It’s true that, on the surface, we Catholics don’t seem to have much in common with the missionary branches of Christianity, like Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses, whose dogged evangelization efforts relate closely to their belief that the end times are now, lending an effective urgency to Christ’s command to go out in his name to all the world.
Continue reading “The Great Commission in an age of disaffiliation”
A family member called the other night, shaken by a recent exchange with a stranger in an airport. This relative was raised Catholic, loves his Catholicism, but chooses to attend a Presbyterian church out of love for his wife and respect for her religious traditions. When he mentioned that he was returning home for his daughter’s confirmation to the airport stranger, the stranger asked with interest if he was Catholic. “Actually,” my relative replied, “we go to a Presbyterian church.” The stranger scoffed. “Oh, I get it,” he said, “you go to fake church.” He went on to belittle my relative’s choice to worship with his wife and daughters and to openly deride and insult their Presbyterian tradition.
One of the challenges of reading scripture in a college course in North America is the perceived saturation of any Christian text in a society in which Christianity dominates the religious landscape. When my students see the Gospel of Mark listed on the syllabus, they assume encountering the text will be a matter of review. “I mean, obviously, I’m a Christian, so I’ve read it before.” I hear this frequently, yet in teaching the text, I find many students have never read the Gospel the way they have read other assigned literary texts such as The Odyssey or Jane Eyre. They’ve heard the Gospel, but then only in snippets (or thematic extracts called pericopes). We can thank the various churches (mine included) for this; in proclaiming and studying scripture bit-by-bit (even, in some churches, phrase-by-phrase), we’ve created a “snippet” Christian scriptural culture, whose members struggle to put the whole story together and think critically about what it means, especially as members of the dominant culture. 
I’ve been a blur of preparations this week for the city of Roanoke, VA’s 
With me, when a new Star Wars movie comes out on DVD/streaming, the question is not whether I will purchase it, but when. Though it became available Saturday night, I had to wait until last night to purchase access to Solo: A Star Wars Story due to conflicts (which included my eager interest in the current offering from PBS Masterpiece on Sunday night: part 2 of 
“Brothers and sisters: In this instruction I do not praise the fact that your meetings are doing more harm than good.” (1 Cor. 11:17)