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Q. So often when I try to share the faith with others, I feel like I’m banging my head against the wall. Either the person doesn’t care, or just refuses to listen. I try to avoid being obnoxious or overbearing, but it doesn’t seem to matter.
This is an excellent question, and one that is obviously of great relevance to our diocesan vision to build a culture of Lifelong Catholic Missionary Discipleship Through God’s Love. For, to be a missionary disciple means to both follow Jesus ourselves and to do whatever we are able to help others follow him, too, i.e., to enter into the work of evangelization.
As many of us have experienced, though, to actually evangelize often seems difficult. We’re not talking here about what we imagine evangelization to be; as we’ve discussed in this column in the past, evangelization is far simpler than we often realize (see, for example, this column in the August, September and November issues from 2023).
Again, though, here we are talking about difficulties we experience when we actually do attempt to share the Good News of Jesus Christ with others.
As indicated within the question itself, it’s important to distinguish between difficulties because of my approach as the one trying to evangelize and difficulties because of the person whom I am trying to evangelize (i.e., difficulties because of the “evangelizer”—the one “doing” the evangelizing—versus difficulties because of the “evangelizee”—the one being evangelized). In the remainder of this month’s column, we’ll focus on our part as the evangelizer, and next month, we’ll look at difficulties that find their source in the person we are trying to evangelize.
For our part, as the one doing the evangelizing, it is important to be attentive to our tone. As the question indicates, we don’t want to be obnoxious or overbearing in our approach. The point of evangelization isn’t to win an argument … it’s to win a person to a deeper relationship with Jesus. And as St. Francis de Sales noted, honey is far more attractive than vinegar, so we want to make sure our approach is more attractive than it is repulsive.
But we also need to recognize that we could make the most attractive, winsome argument, with all the logic and rhetorical panache in the world, and still fail to win the person over. After all, Jesus himself didn’t always win over those he was engaging with. Why should we think we would have any more success?
This raises a related and even more important point: we aren’t the savior of the person we are trying to evangelize … Jesus is. Our role is to do all we can to help them draw closer to Jesus, but that’s it. Yes, we are called to do everything we can to help others come to know and love Jesus and to deepen their relationship with him, but we cannot make that happen by our own strength. We can clarify misunderstandings; we can show and tell them the truth, goodness and beauty of a relationship with Jesus; we can explain its importance and power to change lives; but we cannot actually change them. That’s the Holy Spirit’s job.
Think of it as cultivating a flower. The gardener can plant the seed, cultivate and water the soil, pick the weeds, but she cannot actually make the plant grow and its flower bloom. To be sure, the gardener’s role is important and often necessary, but it isn’t sufficient.
So, too, in the work of evangelization: our efforts are important and often necessary, but they aren’t sufficient. Two books I highly recommend on these points are Mark Brumley’s “How Not to Share Your Faith” and Karen Edmisten’s “You Can Share the Faith.” Both make excellent points on how to evangelize effectively while recognizing the insufficiency of our work.
The final point on what we can do to make the work of evangelization more fruitful is to adapt and customize our approach based on the other person and where they are in their journey. Too often, efforts to evangelize are hampered because the evangelizer is making points that are simply irrelevant to the person they are evangelizing.
This is why good listening is such an important part of effective evangelization: by truly hearing what the other person is saying, I am able to craft my message in a way better suited to reaching them where they are.
There’s much more that could be said about difficulties we face in the work of missionary discipleship that are due to our own approach, but we’ll leave it here for now. Next month, we’ll turn our attention to difficulties we face that find their source in the other person and their perspective.
