“Use words if necessary” is a cop-out

Last updated on: February 24, 2015 at 11:29 pm by Jane the Actuary

“Use words if necessary” is a cop-out 2015-02-24T23:29:07-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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If you’re Catholic, and maybe even if you aren’t, you’ve probably been told that St. Francis said, “Preach the gospel at all times. Use words if necessary.” Now, turns out, this St. Francis said nothing of the sort, but people love, love, love this quote: it tells them that they need not feel obliged to talk about their faith to strangers, or to acquaintences or professional colleagues or neighbors or even friends, so long as, by their actions they act in a way that inspires others, imagining them thinking, “she’s always so willing to help others/always seems at peace/coped so well with this tragic event that happened/etc.; gosh, I wonder how I could be like her.”

I was thinking about this because of a couple things I’ve been reading.

Yesterday I came across a blog post entitled: “Get Young Adults to Join Your Parish in Two Easy Steps, Guaranteed.” The premise of the post: “the answer is exceedingly simple: 1. Be serious about following Jesus. 2. Get out of the way.”

#1 means: music, liturgy, homily should be about worshipping God, and equipping people to serve God. “If your liturgy is All About Us and How Wonderful a Community We Are, there’s no compelling reason for a young adult to show up.” And in the homily, “people who are showing up for Jesus don’t want to hear about how special they are. They want to understand the Bible, learn how to pray, and learn how to live. They want instruction. They want reminders.” And being serious about following Jesus means putting this into practice for more than just one hour a week, seeking out people in your neighborhood, not just waiting for them to show up at church on their own initiative.

#2 means simply giving young adults the opportunity to do, rather than being told “you’re too young,” or “we need bureacratic approval.”

Separately, I’m reading a book called “Got Religion?” (it uses the “got milk?” typeface), by Naomi Schaefer Riley, about young adults and religion. The bulk of it is profiling churches/organizations which take a new and seemingly successful approach to getting/keeping young adults in the church, or continuing religious observance more generally speaking. Haven’t finished it yet but here are my three key take-aways:

1) A statistic: in discussing efforts by Catholic universities to offer post-college service opportunities (primarily Catholic school teaching — with, by the way, more pre-classroom instruction and training that the Teach for America program) and post-service-opportunity “retention efforts”, the book cites a pretty unsettling figure:

One in 10 Americans today has been raised Catholic and is now no longer Catholic.

This is not 1 in 10 of those raised Catholic, or one in 10 of the religiously unaffiliated. This is 1 in 10 Americans. This is a big issue, and one that the Catholic leadership should be addressing (and certainly should be spending more time on than amnesty or other political causes). And one imagines that this number will decline over time, not because we’ll get better at holding on to people, but that the number of those “raised Catholic” in the first place will decline.

2) It’s all about the peer group.

Some of the chapters discuss religions and religious approaches that aren’t particularly applicable to Catholicism — e.g., sections on Islam and Judaism where “religious practice” is about saying the daily prayers or observing the Sabbath, respectively, and efforts center around encouraging these sorts of individual observances rather than attendance in a religious community weekly. For Catholicism, and Christianity more generally, it is about, as a starting point, weekly church attendance, and building from there to individual prayer and group activities outside of Sunday mornings.

But a key theme in multiple chapters is a certain, “I’d go, if I knew my friends were going” or even “if I knew other people my age would be there.” Which means that campus ministry programs are successful because young people know that their peer group will, indeed, be there, but after leaving college, kids flounder. And it’s not that church is inherently undesirable to them, but that peer group is important.

3) It’s all about the invitation.

The first church Riley profiles is a New Orleans church which, while it has a strong young adult membership, does not specifically cater to young adults; rather, it focuses on what it calls “theology of place,” reaching out to those in their specific neighborhood, with the intent that you’ll see your fellow parishoners in the neighborhood, at the grocery store, and so on, and that this will build the church and community institutions much better than a church that focuses on a narrow demographic but draws from a wide geographic area. If you’re driving 45 minutes to church, chances are, you’re not going to be willing to come back midweek for a committee meeting or a church group of some kind.

That also means that the people you see in everyday life are good “candidates” for an invitation to church, and this chapter profiles a woman who was, in fact, invited.

(Sure, the book also discusses such issues as: do you create young adult-focused or -only churches or communities, or try to draw them in to the wider church? How much do you cater to them, e.g., via free Sabbath dinners, vs. challenge them? and so on. And in my suburb, it poses the question of whether our parish should make special efforts to reach out to the apartment-dwellers to the north and south of us. But these are my take-aways.)

And when you think about it, young people, for whom peer group is so important, are the perfect candidates for reconnecting with church by invitation from others. True, probably not the 8:15 AM, but a late Sunday mass, or a Saturday night pre-bar-hop service, or even last-chance-mass on Sunday night.

And that’s where the “use words if necessary” platitude is such a cop out. If those young people who do stick with church have been told, basically, that it’s bad to talk about their faith to others, because it would be inappropriately lacking in tolerance and nonjudgementalism, then we’re all pretty much dead in the water.

And, of course, I say that from my computer, knowing that my young adulthood was spent in grad school with a close group of churchgoing friends, and now pretty much everyone I know is through church and the parochial school, so, sure, “easy for me to say.” But when I was in college, I was the one who was too insecure to go to church by myself but happily joined in when a group of kids did so.

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