20th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A
Previous Years: 2017
Preached at the Church of the Assumption in Bellingham, WA
Recording
https://moorejesus.podbean.com/e/yes-es-and-no-s/
Transcript
About 15 years ago, our archdiocese went all-in on a book called Growing an Engaged Church. It was put out by the Gallup Organization, which uses polling data for a purpose, in this case to understand corporate environments and what makes companies work well as a work environment. And then they took that data and they started using it for churches and polling churches and asking churches what makes a church work. “What is an engaged church?” And they put data to all of this. “This is what it looks like to be spiritually healthy. This is what it looks like to be engaged in your community. This is how you use that data for a purpose.” Well, our archdiocesan implementation of this book was poor because among the many things that it talks about, the only thing that people really focused on was peoples’ need to be able to serve according to their strengths. And the author recommends a book called Strengths Finders. Everybody in the Archdiocese took Strengths Finders. We all know our strengths, if you’ve worked for a church in the last 15 years. I have “learner”, “analytical”, “context”, “strategic”, and “activator”. 15 years ago, we all took this, but almost nobody did anything with this. We loved having a little personality test for ourselves. But we didn’t do anything. It’s almost like we didn’t read the book. The main thrust of the book is how do you help people feel engaged in their church, so that through that engagement, they can grow in spiritual health.
And there are metrics for what engagement means. Somebody who is engaged in their church understands what’s expected of them. They are on board with the vision of the church. They know the vision. They feel like they’re getting things out of the church and that they’re able to contribute back to the church. One of the questions that Gallup uses to check engagement is, do I have a best friend in the church? Of my good friends, do any of them come from my church? It’s a good metric for engagement. Another one is, have I been able to contribute to my church using my strengths? If I have a strength, is there a place I’ve been able to put it for the good of my community? Generally, what the data says is that the best congregations are still hovering around 25% of engagement. The great majority of parishioners are something Gallup calls not engaged, which should not be a surprise to anybody who knows how words work. You’re engaged or you’re not engaged. Okay. The great majority are not engaged.
But then there’s another category. And those are the actively disengaged. So these are folks who maybe have been on the register for 30 years, but they haven’t come to church for 20 of those years. That’s one category. Another category of actively disengaged, which is interesting to read about, is people who are there every Sunday, but they don’t want to be. They’re just mad about it. They’re mad about something and they’ve kind of got this chip on their shoulder, but for whatever reason – maybe their family drags them, maybe they feel obliged – but they’re there. They’re just angry about it. Well, what’s really interesting – and I think about this all the time in my own decision making – is that Gallup says, for an organization to grow, you focus only on the not engaged. You take the not engaged people, the people who are there, who are not engaged but are also not mad and you give them points of engagement. So for the people who are here, you help them to have opportunities to make friends in the parish, have opportunities to serve the parish, have opportunities for them to grow closer to the vision of the parish, to live that vision out or to see how it’s growing in their lives.
What Gallup says not to do is to spend time on the actively disengaged. One of the things they talk about, and you hear it in a lot of church books, is if you let them, 20% of the people will take up 80% of your time. And that’s not good for mission. You have to be able to focus on everybody, not just the people who really want your ear all the time. And so that’s one of the reasons we’re saying don’t focus on the actively disengaged. But the other reason, if you want to summarize it, is we all have a yes or a no in our heart. The engaged have said yes. They’ve said yes to the mission. They’ve said yes to the community. They’ve said yes to what we’re doing. The actively disengaged have said no in some way. No, I do not want to be there. No, I am not on board with the mission. And Gallup is essentially saying it’s really, really hard to overcome a no. But you have this huge group of people in the middle who don’t have a yes or a no. They’re there. They’re not fully committed, but they’re there. They’re happy to be there. They’re getting something out of it. And so your efforts are best used in taking the people who don’t yet have a full yes or a full no, and trying to shift them into that full yes, That’s the best use of parish resources and parish time.
Well, that is a five minute and forty second tangent to get you to the readings today. In our second reading, Saint Paul says something really fascinating. He says, and he’s writing to the Romans here “I am speaking to you Gentiles, inasmuch as I am the apostle to the Gentiles, I glory in my ministry in order to make my race jealous and thus save some of them.”
It is deeply surprising that Christianity should be anything other than a Jewish enterprise. The Lord used the Jewish people for a millennium and a half to form a people for his own. He taught them his laws and his ways and his decrees. He was walking with them with the prophets and with the kings. He was helping them understand what it was like to follow God. It is from the Jews that the Messiah came. It is from the Jews that the Messiah chose his 12 apostles. As Jesus says directly in the gospel, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” Everything about Christianity should simply be an expression of Judaism. We call ourselves the fulfillment of what God did with the Jews.
And yet, as best as I can tell, around 50 AD, Saint Paul started preaching to the Gentiles. Before that, he always went into the synagogues. He wanted to preach to the Jews, because it should be from the Jews that salvation is found. So he went to the Jews who were prepared for the Messiah. He would preach in the synagogue. And then the synagogue leaders started getting tired of it, started kicking him out of synagogues. At one point he was almost stoned to death by a leader of a synagogue. And so at some point, he just wiped his hands of it and said, you know what? If you are not going to listen to the gospel, I will preach to the Gentiles right next door. And he started doing so, and it went gangbusters.
It was Gentile after Gentile after Gentile converting to the faith, to the point that by the death of the last apostle in the 90s AD, Christianity was almost entirely a Gentile exercise. There were still Jewish Christians, but they were an extreme minority in this large pool of Gentile converts. Saint Paul recognized that, at some point, the Jews he had preached to – the Jews all over the Mediterranean – had basically made up their minds. They were already a yes, or they were already a no, and he was just going to be spinning his wheels, hitting his head against a wall if he kept trying to preach to people who already had a no in their hearts. And so he said, fine, I’m going to go talk to these Gentiles. And it was amazing. He was the apostle to the Gentiles. He made so many converts. And almost none of you come from a Jewish background. It is thanks to this move of Saint Paul that the Gentiles, which is to say all of our ancestors, were converted to the gospel.
I think there’s a powerful message here and a really important takeaway for our lives. I’m going to talk individually, then I’m going to talk corporately. Individually. We should not be afraid to mix things up from time to time. Of course, there are bare minimums: daily prayer and weekly mass attendance. If those are hard, we just need to keep doing them because it’s really important that we not fall away from those. But beyond these minimums, we should not be afraid to mix things up. If you run up against a barrier, just change course. I had to do this about two years ago. I was trying to read the autobiography of Saint Teresa of Avila, one of the greatest saints in the tradition, a doctor of prayer. Super important. I got like a third of the way into this book and I gave up. I just I couldn’t follow it. It was too hard, it was too dense, it was too stream of consciousness. I couldn’t do it, which is saying something because I was the head of my high school class. I did seven years of post-graduate education in philosophy and theology. I should be able to deal with a book like this, and I just gave up, and I was really ashamed of that for a while. And then I realized, you know what? There are thousands of important Catholic books to read. If this one is slowing me down, I just need to go around it. There are so many more books that I could be reading and that’s okay.
It’s true for your lives as well. If you’re reading something on the faith and it’s not doing it for you, fine, put it down. Pick up something else. If you’re reading the stories of the saints and you’re bored, pick up a biblical commentary. I’ll tell you there is some stuff coming out in the realm of biblical commentary in the last ten years that is once-in-a-century stuff. It is so important, and it’s fresh and it’s new and we’re blessed to have it. Guys like Brandt Petri, guys like John Bergsma, guys like Scott Hahn, who kind of started this movement. It’s incredible what they’re writing. Pick some of that up. It’s fascinating. Or if none of that does it for you, read some dogmatics, read some Christology, read the Church Fathers, read a history of the church. There is so much to read. If you run into a barrier, go around it. Pick up something else.
The same is true in your prayer life. If you’ve been praying the rosary for decades and it’s just not bringing you closer to God anymore, switch to praying with Christian music. If music has dried up, switch to the Rosary. If neither of those work, pick up your Bible and read it. There are so many ways to pray. We just we have this wealth of the faith. Don’t get bogged down. Just do something new.
The same, I would argue, is true for our personal mission fields. All of us should be taking our faith and sharing it with others, inviting others into the experience of Jesus. A lot of us have a specific person that we’re working on. But a lot of us also have a specific person who has said “no” directly, clearly. And the more we bring up faith to that person, the more they run away because they become bitter and resentful and angry. At some point, we just have to admit they’ve given us the “no”. The same “no” that Saint Paul faced before he went to preach to the Gentiles. Okay, we don’t give up on that person, but we do give them to God, and we spend our energies elsewhere, where these energies will be appreciated and fruitful.
Saint Paul says something very interesting. He says, “I glory in my ministry in order to make my race jealous and thus save some of them.” If somebody has a “no” in their heart, the only way they will be attracted back to the faith is through attraction. They have to see something that is appealing to them, and a lot of times that looks like other converts. If somebody else converts to the faith, if all the people around them are becoming Catholic, they start to have a question in their heart that begins to overcome the “no”. So a lot of times the people that have said “no”, we have to put it in the hands of God. Well, our work isn’t going to affect them anymore, but what will is working around them on our other friends, our other family members, building a dynamic faith community, dynamic programs, dynamic ministries, Masses that are full of families and kids that are loud with the sound of singing. This is attractive. People will be attracted back to that. But Saint Paul said, look, I’m preaching to the Gentiles so that the Jews will be jealous of your conversion. They will see something there that they want, and they might be called back to the faith. So for us, if we reach a barrier in evangelization, it’s okay to go around that barrier, work on somebody else who’s a little bit more open to it.
Finally, on a corporate level, the last four weeks I’ve been writing about Partners in the Gospel in the bulletin. If you haven’t been reading it, a quick summary: United States society is rapidly disaffiliating from religion. Rapidly. The number of people who have left religion in this society over the last 10 to 20 years is astounding, and the day that Christians in this country will be a religious minority is within reach if these trends keep up. I think it’s 20 or 30 years. A religious minority in this country. Well, the Church, sometimes because of its negligence, sometimes because of its flaws, sometimes in spite of its best efforts, is experiencing that shrinking as well. We have fewer resources today than we had ten years ago in every metric. In order to keep preaching the Gospel with full strength, we need to make some hard decisions and combine our resources, human resources, financial resources, program resources, and physical resources. We need to say we have strength in the church, but we’re split too many ways. We need to recombine, refocus, and preach the Gospel with the strength we still have.
Well, this thing that Saint Paul did, it’s going to be really important for us to keep in mind as we approach the Partners in the Gospel process. As we are paired with 1, 2 or 3 of our neighbors in new parish life, we have to ask ourselves, are there parts of parish life that we need to leave behind because they just don’t have the strength? Because they are not bearing fruit? Because we are no longer seeing life here? A lot of us have an image of what parish life ought to look like, the types of ministries that ought to be on offer, and we spin our wheels trying to maintain something that hasn’t had life for a while. If a ministry, as important as it is, has been running for 40 years but hasn’t had a new volunteer for a decade, maybe it’s time to look at a new ministry. Maybe it’s time to leave that ministry behind. Not saying it’s not important, but just admitting to ourselves where life and the Holy Spirit are being found at the moment. Saint Paul never gave up on the Jews. He always wanted to go back to them and make sure they received the Gospel. But he knew preaching to them at that moment was not going to bear fruit. And so he started preaching elsewhere. What does that look like in our parish life? What are the sacred cows we need to leave behind so that we can focus our efforts and our time on something that is effective, something that is bringing life?
I think a lot about people I meet around Bellingham. You wear a collar, people ask questions. There aren’t that many Catholic churches, so they say, where are you a priest at? And I say Assumption. And they’ll be like, “Oh my family went to Assumption. I went through the school.” Well, I’ve been a priest here for four years. I have no idea who this person is. I don’t even know their family name. They’re trading on something that they were doing 50 years ago, and they haven’t darkened the door of the church since, except maybe for a funeral. If I planned our parish life based on those folks, I’m planning based on people who’ve already said “no”. Instead, I ought to plan parish life based on the people who are here, the passions that are currently in the pews, the things that our people right now are attracted to. That’s where we are going to find life. That’s the mission field. That’s where we find a dynamic community and dynamic programs. But we have to be willing to leave behind those things that are not bearing fruit at the moment.
Now I am not going to name what those things are because I don’t really even know what they are. We need a community conversation about it. And the thing that makes me very sad about Partners, I don’t even know if I’m going to be the priest leading you through it. With all of these changes, they may need to move a majority of the priests in the diocese, and I might be one of them. But the conversation starts here, and it starts now. Where do we see life? Where are we finding success? There is so much work to be done. So where are we spending our efforts without fruit? Because if there’s that much work in the world, if there’s that much ministry to be done, we can pick any of 200 things. Well, what are the ten that bring the most life? What are the ten that are the most dynamic? What are the ten that hit the passions of the people who are here now in our pews? The people who have converted to the pews in the last ten years. Where are those people? What brought them in? Where do we find success?
My brothers and sisters in Christ, the Holy Spirit continues to work in the Church. He has always worked in the Church. But from 2000 years ago until today, the Holy Spirit points us – because he knows – he points us to the people who are going to say “yes”. He points us to the mission fields that will bear fruit. Are we open to the movement of the Holy Spirit? Are we willing to go to a new mission field to leave things behind that we love, so that we can preach the Gospel with more power?
Fr. Moore 