“We are called to be a missional church…”

Last updated on: September 30, 2016 at 3:43 pm by Deacon Greg Kandra

“We are called to be a missional church…” 2016-09-30T15:43:07-04:00 Deacon Greg Kandra

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Elizabeth Scalia this morning offers some words of wisdom that strike me as very diaconal in nature—but with a message for all of us seeking to serve the Church and save souls—especially our own.

To wit:

Incarnational Evangelization happens when Christian men and women leave the comfortable place of their own origin, just as the Word proceeded from the Father, to set a tent among the “others”, and live closely with them. It meets the “others” where they are at, and learns their names and their stories. It talks with them, eats with them, laughs and cries with them, helps to birth them and, if necessary, to bury them.

It is first and foremost about service to the “other” and to Love. Which is God.

All of this used to be natural to Catholicism, back when Incarnational Evangelization went by another, simpler, name: Mission.

The Catholic church is and always has been a missional church; her growth was forged and underpinned by the strength of her missionaries, who went into places where people had never heard of Jesus Christ, and then served them, loved them, laughed and cried with them, knew them and could call them by name. Catholic missionaries set their tent among the people who had never met Christ, and brought Jesus to them one day at a time; one meal at a time; one genial, respectful discussion at a time.

Eventually, within that missional service, the people who had walked in darkness found the great Lumen Christi, and having found him, they sought out the means of holiness by which they would be bound to him, connected through time and space, because that is what happens.

Incarnation is a process. Between the first sin at Eden and the Nativity of the Lord, thousands of years had to pass as God courted his stiff-necked creatures, and made straight the paths of readiness. Then, the Great Missionary, Christ himself, left the place of his origin and came and ate with us and talked and loved us, and laughed and cried with us and served us and died for us.

We are, in every age, called to be a missional church. Catholic missionaries used to head for the jungles, seeking to serve people who had never heard of Christ. Now, we must head into the jungle of confused popular culture and idols, and relative morality and social and sexual deconstruction. And there we must set our tents, and meet and serve the people who do not know Jesus Christ.

Perhaps they have heard his name 1,000 times a day, but never interiorly. Perhaps they have seen Jesus off in the distance, once or twice, but never up-close. Perhaps they have met others who confessed his name, but poorly, and the encounter convinced them that Christ was an empty idea, irrelevant to the satisfaction of their desires which — if they only knew it — are not strange but the desires of every human heart: to be fully seen, fully known, and fully beloved.

To be called by name, and to hear “it is good that you exist.”

The Catholic church is charged to bring the peace of Christ and the authentic love of Christ to the world through the Word, and through the sacramental agency bestowed upon her by Christ.

How do we bring those sacraments to people who have no knowledge of Christ, beyond the name — who have no interest in Christ because he has been so poorly taught? How do we feed his sheep, as we are bound to do, with his Flesh and Blood when they neither want nor understand what is contained within it?

The mission is to a people who have never felt the force of a holiness so authentic that it inspires them to draw nearer to Jesus, the Great Pearl, and abandon their former choices in order to wholly know and possess him for eternity.

We have to put on the mindset of mission, once again, and be willing to meet people where they are: in an ersatz marriage; in a broken and half-mended family; in a bitter mood of entitlement; in the distracting noise of willful mindlessness; in a parade. We have to begin the process of Incarnation, living among them, learning their stories, eating and laughing and mourning with them. Calling them by name. In this way — same as it ever was — they will see Christ Jesus, and want his Light. They will seek the bond, and the sacramental means of sustaining it, and then what had been a keening emptiness, crammed with what does not satisfy, will become filled and completed.

This is the Way. The Incarnational Way is the Catholic Way. It is the Way of the One. The Way of the Holy. The Way of the Apostolic.

There’s much more. This strikes me as an important and necessary piece—and one that challenges us all.

Read it all.

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