A Church-in-Mission and Reverse Evangelization

Last Sunday I heard a woman say, "I'm visiting from California and I enjoy being here. My parish back home is just so dead. This helped my faith." Sometimes parishes seem to lack vitality because they are turned in on themselves. They have enough money. Their worship is good. Their mood is upbeat and friendly. What is lacking? What makes a parish seem dead? In short, parishes need a missionary vision. They need to move beyond maintenance.

Parishes have a dual focus. They are devoted to their own members and attend to their needs. Beyond that, they are a church-in-mission. They learn how to be a presence in the neighborhood.

Being a presence means that parishes turn outward in a missionary posture. What should this presence be? The answer comes through prayer, communal reflection, and decisions that relate a parish to the larger civic community. Sometimes the church-in-mission is militant and task oriented. Parishes work to clean up local morals. It's going to get everybody saved. Or a parish is primarily therapeutic. It's out to heal every wound. It's going to carpet the world. While personal salvation and genuine healing are admirable goals, neither will be suffice for a church-in-mission in a pluralistic world.

Father Anthony J. Gittens says, "There is a great need for Christians committed to mission rather than maintenance - but this in turn requires both missionary leadership and the practice of true subsidiarity. "Missionary leaders take some risks and trust the Spirit and their people. Not every leader needs to be young, ostentatious, or even dynamic. But every true leader needs to inspire and encourage and promote those with greater imagination and energy. Subsidiarity refers to a form of delegation or shared leadership, in which the person with the greatest authority...practices mutuality, shared responsibility, and genuine graciousness."

A parish thrives when it works at building community. "If the church...is not to become a memory, individuals must discover that they can become community. Insular lives must experience the vitality that comes from wider encounters. Leaders must neither arrogate to themselves all the power and the glory nor refuse to encourage and build up the community of which they are an integral part. Moreover, a church marked more by nostalgia and by caution rather than enthusiasm must repent, be converted and discover the missionary call it heard in its youth."

When God takes the church to the world, the church finds itself giving and receiving. "The process whereby the one sent is in turn enriched and converted by the spirit and the local people is known as mission in reverse. As Pope Paul VI said, 'the church has constant need of being evangelized.' Thus the Holy Spirit evangelizes the virtuous and the strong, the orthodox and the baptized, the skeptical, the cynical, and the hurt. The local church-in-mission needs to listen and to learn. "There are millions of disillusioned and dispirited people - including many former active Catholics - in this country today, and they cannot simply be dismissed as people of bad will. A listening church still has something to learn, a deaf church is forever closed to conversion."

A parish-in-mission continually listens to the Spirit's guidance to learn how to be in the neighborhood.