young bearded man explain something to his interlocutor friend sitting indoors cafe with cup of coffee
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 month we are going to continue to respond to this excellent question, 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. Yet, when we actually try to share the Gospel, we run into various difficulties, as indicated in our question.
Last month, we focused on difficulties that have their origin in “us” (the person doing the evangelizing). This month, we’ll focus on difficulties that originate from the person we are trying to evangelize. And we’ll start with the most common difficulties: indifferentism (not caring about or uninterested in a relationship with God) and disbelief (not believing that Catholicism is true).
We’ll begin with one of the greatest frustrations many people experience when they are excited about their own relationship with God and want others to experience the transforming power of that relationship themselves: indifferentism. Simply put, many (if not most) Americans are just not interested in taking their own relationship with God seriously. And this includes many people who do identify as Catholic. We share with them what a difference that relationship has made and continues to make in our own lives, and they just don’t care.
To be clear, it’s not so much that they don’t believe in Jesus’ teachings as we receive them through the Church (that’s the second difficulty we’ll address). In fact, there are many people who believe that God exists and would even profess belief in Jesus’ divinity but fall into this category. Why? There are a number of reasons, but one of the most common is that they do not see the relevance of a relationship with God (and everything that goes with it) to their lives. Their response to an articulation of the truths of Catholicism is essentially, “So what?” or “What does it matter?”
In response to this difficulty, I recommend the activity we learned somewhere around kindergarten: show and tell. Remembering what we noted last month (in the work of evangelization, it is God who changes hearts; our task is to “till the soil”), one response to indifferentism is to show others the reality of the Gospel’s power to transform our lives before we tell them about that Gospel.In other words, our lives need to demonstrate the truth of our words. The more others can see in us the relevance of faith to our own lives, the easier it’ll be for them to see that the same thing could be true for them.
