I’m excited!

Welcome to a new occasional feature at The Mark 5:19 Project, 15 Minutes on Sharing the Gospel: short interviews on sharing the gospel with people who have something to say on the subject. Some of these people may be well-known and leaders in the emerging field, and others practicing “the long faithfulness” in a a much quieter, less known manner. Shoot, some people may be interviews on the street. We’re going to have fun with this, so we can all learn together.

I’m grateful that our first interview is with Dcn. Keith Strohm of the Archdiocese of Chicago, and Executive Director of M3 Ministries, which focuses on parish renewal. I’m grateful because he has been a great encouragement to me in this new apostolate, and he has so many important insights to share! He is the author of multiple books, including one of my favorites, Ablaze: 5 Essential Paradigms Shifts for Parish Renewal. Let’s get to it! These interviews are recorded and then transcribed, and lightly edited for length.

Susan Windley-Daoust: Hi everyone, I’m here with Deacon Keith Strohm. He’s the Executive Director of M3 Ministries. And we’re going to have 15 fast minutes with one of our favorite evangelists here in the United States! I’m so pleased to be able to talk to him here.

All right, Deacon Keith, we’re going to go straight into the deep end here. We’ve only got 15 minutes!

If you only had one thing that you could share with somebody about evangelization, what would that one thing be?

Dcn. Keith Strohm: That is a really, really interesting question and probably very difficult. I think off the cuff, like coming from my heart, it would be that it is fundamentally about a relationship with Jesus Christ. It’s about introducing people to the person of Jesus and allowing them to open their own hearts to that love that he has for us.

I think that would be the most essential thing.

SWD: Now, what would you say to people who say, well, I think I’ve got that already? You know, I think a lot of us do say, of course, this is the most essential piece. We need to have a living relationship with Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.

But what do you say to people who aren’t sure what that means? It’s like… “well, I have that, though. I think. Don’t I?”

Dcn. Keith: Well, sometimes I do. People ask me like, OK, well, am I really a disciple? I was in a parish in Illinois, a parish I was employed at, and I had an 85 year old man really come up for prayer. And he said, I don’t know if I’m a disciple. I don’t know if I’m a disciple. And he seemed upset about it, almost.

And I just said to him, well, do you want to be? And he said, yes, more than anything. I said, well, how about this: why don’t we just open our hearts to the Lord right now and just invite Jesus in? And then at least he walked away with a sense of, OK…now I know. But people ask: do we know whether we are disciples in one big moment? Or do we know in an extended kind of story approach to the Lord?

One, do you have that sense that you’ve surrendered to him? You know, have you really have you really said, OK, Lord, I really want you to be in my life.

Discipleship is like any relationship then. We have it, but we can go deeper. I’m not satisfied in one sense with simply being in a relationship with my wife at the same level that I was when we first got married.

I would hope that I’m in a deeper place in that relationship. And so whether it is someone beginning a relationship with Jesus or deepening it, evangelization is fundamentally living in the heart of that relationship. It’s helping other people walk into it, and it’s helping people go deeper. And really, there’s a life cycle in evangelism, which is why I started M3 Ministries, because the M stands for making, maturing and missioning. So there’s this time that marks the beginning of every relationship. And there’s the maturation of every relationship. And then there comes a time when we want to talk to other people about that relationship with Jesus, the missioning.

SWD: I know when I talk to people about what the heart of evangelization is, it’s really about going deep and then going out. You’re going deep into relationship with Jesus Christ and you’re going out because you’re so filled, you can’t help but want to tell other people about who Jesus is and introduce him to them.

Dcn. Keith: I agree. You hit on something for me. One of the ways I kind of when I’m walking with people is getting a sense of, you know, if they say, well, I am a disciple, then I always my next question is, I wonder, then how much are you burning to share the love of Jesus with others?

You know, because there comes a point in that relationship like I, of course, you can encounter Jesus and walk away the same. We see that time to the rich young man in the Gospels. But when people say to me, oh, yeah, I am a disciple, I look then for the signs of that encounter. You know, where is that? Where is the passion to to pour out oneself for the sake of others?

Where is the excitement to talk to other people about Jesus? Now, lots of cultural things can get in the way and lots of lots of personal history can blunt some of that. But at the end of the day, I love what you said.

It’s about being in that relationship with God and then sharing it and being with people. I recall this Protestant pastor summarized the Great Commission. He said the Great Commission is this: You’ve been with God. Now go be with people. And I think that that summarizes evangelization really, really well.

SWD: No, I love that. I work with somebody who’s really influenced by FOCUS Ministries. And he quotes Curtis Martin, who says to them, everybody needs to have a conversion to God. And then they also need to have a conversion to God’s people. Right? It’s like it’s a twofold conversion.

But too many Catholics are surprised enough by the first conversion and then flabbergasted by the second!

Dcn. Keith: (laughing) Well, I used to say maybe this is the pre-conversion to God’s people, that Christianity would be so much easier if it wasn’t for other Christians, you know? But I think that’s right. As you grow in a loving relationship with someone else, you begin to love the things and the people that they love.

You know, and so I mean, when I when my wife and I were dating… she loves the Muppets. And so she would always say, hey, do you want to watch the Muppets? I have the original show on DVD. And I roll my eyes because I hate the Muppets. But I wanted to spend time with her. So I was like, sure…this sounds great!

And then what I discovered is as I fell deeper and deeper in love with her, I began to love the things that she loved. And so now I love the Muppets as well. First, because it reminded me of her; but then I began to see the things that she saw in them as I got to know her better. And I think that’s the same with Jesus. As we fall deeper and deeper in love with Jesus, we begin to love the things that he loves, which would obviously be his people, first and foremost.

SWD: So going back to this 85 year old man who wasn’t even sure that he was a disciple, but he wanted to be. That’s a graced moment for lots of reasons, but also because I think so many people are that 85 year old man.

Dcn. Keith: Right.

SWD: I mean, I talk to lots of Catholics. And we use the word discipleship a lot. But when they’re honest with me, they don’t know what being a disciple actually even means, really. It’s like…it’s a word in the Bible. It’s…the people around Jesus. Something like that.

They tell me, OK, this is clearly important, but I don’t know what discipleship means. How does that apply to me? What should I do?

Dcn. Keith: Right.

SWD: So if somebody else did come up to you and asked, how do I lean into this discipleship? What would you tell them?

Dcn. Keith: Oh, it’s interesting, because when I talk about discipleship, that’s when people’s eyes just glaze over sometimes. Particularly, and I’ll be honest with you, particularly when I talk with priests—because they sense when we talk about discipleship, many say, “well, the way God moves in the human heart is a mystery.” And so therefore, we can’t really talk too deeply about the concrete things related to discipleship.

But, you know, I like to tell people that Jesus spent his life trying to replicate himself in 12 men. And those 12 men spent their lives replicating Jesus in the men and women that they encountered. And so while the way God works in the human heart is a mystery, what it looks like, while it is also unique to the person, shares some common characteristics.

You know, we begin to resemble our teacher, we begin to resemble our family members. And so I like to talk about six disciplines of discipleship: daily scripture reading, daily prayer, sacramental life, fellowship, service to the world, and then sharing Jesus with others–evangelization.

If we can begin to live out those disciplines of discipleship, then we begin to grow in conformity with the one who we are following, the one who has given us his life.

And it can’t simply be, I’m doing all these things. We always have to see them as a means to becoming more like Jesus, to growing in that relationship with Jesus, to being conformed. I think discipleship is very concrete, but we just don’t talk about it enough in our churches.

SWD: Right. It’s concrete, but we need to avoid the checklist.

Dcn. Keith: That’s the balancing act. Yeah, that’s the balancing act, I think. And that’s what happens when you have, in one sense, catechetical instruction before conversion, before evangelism, is that things get reduced to a checklist.

And we see this often in confirmation preparation, where the diocese might have a particular set of things that need to be covered. Right?

Or even in First Communion preparation. And I always say, we do a good job of preparing people, young kids to receive Jesus. But we never ask them if they want to follow him as Lord.

And so we end up with people who then have, as they grow older, a more reflexive “I go to church to get communion,” rather than “I’m going to the liturgy to enter into the self-offering of Jesus.” And communion is a byproduct of that, obviously, but….

I don’t go to Mass to get something. In a very real sense, I go to Mass to be someone, to be drawn into the people of God, to be drawn into how I was created as someone who is called to worship. And all of these things happen, but they happen, it’s seen in, I think, its right order when there is this conversion of heart, first and foremost.

SWD: You know, this is interesting, and I’m just feeling like I need to ask this, even though it’s such an odd question. Well, it’s not odd in my mind, but maybe to some people it would be.

Before I really moved in this focus on  evangelization and parish renewal, I did a lot of work in spiritual direction. Both receiving spiritual direction, and eventually I was trained to be a spiritual director, and I still am practicing it. And it’s intriguing to me because these two things, spiritual direction and evangelization, are held as very, very separate by many people.

But I see connections all over the place. Honestly, I see the lack of discipleship on one hand, and yet I see people craving spiritual direction. There’s a sad lack of spiritual directors in the United States for the number of people who want it.

And I think–maybe we’re not reading the people of God right here. I mean, maybe there is a lot more thirst and desire out there than we are willing to admit or recognize. But we’re putting the thirst in different categories.

Maybe people are asking for spiritual direction, and that’s a good thing. But what they really want and need, first and foremost, is this basic but life-changing understanding of discipleship.

Dcn. Keith: It’s actually interesting that you bring that up because I’ve been thinking that for a long time, actually. The reality that when people come, and I have done spiritual direction as well, and I’ve had directees come, I couldn’t give them spiritual direction because they weren’t in a place where they could receive it. They’re yet to enter into that relationship with Jesus.

So what I did was accompany them. And so we went on a journey together. And it felt like spiritual direction to them because what they wanted was someone to walk with them.

SWD: Right, exactly.

Dcn. Keith: And so I think you’re dead on with that 100%.

SWD: Yeah. Hmm. What do we do with that now?

Dcn. Keith: I don’t know. Were you expecting controversy? I’m not sure.

SWD: Well, just trying to put it all together because, I mean, on one hand, it’s really easy to talk about a kind of crisis in evangelization in the Catholic Church, as in there needs to be a great deal more of it across the board by all the baptized. And I keep saying, “but you know, underneath that crisis of evangelization is a crisis in discipleship.”

If we don’t address the discipleship piece first, you know, we’re not talking about disciples doing evangelization. We’re talking about people doing something entirely different, like…community promotion. Band-boostering.

Dcn. Keith: In one sense, I think it’s have un-evangelized folks or people who have not yet become disciples, and they end up inviting people to church rather than helping them enter a relationship with Jesus. So I think you’re absolutely right. That is a fundamental crisis.

I talk about it as the Nemo principle because everyone remembers Finding Nemo, but it’s the—I think it’s the Latin phrase, nemo dat quod non habet, right? No one can give what they do not have. And so when we have a church filled with non-disciples, they are unable to disciple others.

And so that has to be attended to. And then we wonder why our programs and processes aren’t bearing fruit. It’s because we have people who have not yet surrendered their own lives trying to help other people connect with Jesus, a person that they themselves don’t yet know.

You can only accompany someone on a spiritual journey to Jesus as far along as you yourself have come. And so we have to spend time helping people make that connection with the Lord, surrendering their lives, growing and maturing as disciples so that they can be fruitful. And our parishes are filled with really wonderful people who are not yet disciples.

And if you think about it, as disciples, we are deliberately and intentionally cooperating with the supernatural power of life in Christ, right? The power of the Holy Spirit, which we receive in the sacraments and through other ways of praying. But when we ask non-disciples to do the work of a disciple and they’re not deliberately and intentionally cooperating with grace, it’s like we are almost guaranteeing their burnout.

And so this is what I tell people. If you are constantly looking for new help in your parish every two or three years because everybody’s burning out around you, you could just have a very toxic environment or, and or, we might be asking people who are not yet disciples to do the work of a disciple, and they’re not equipped for that.

SWD: That’s right. That’s absolutely right. Well, I’ll tell you what, that was a fast 15 minutes.

Dcn. Keith: Is that 15 minutes already?

SWD: That was totally 15 minutes.

Dcn. Keith: That’s amazing.

SWD: Thanks for answering a few questions. It’s been a lot of fun.

If you are interested in learning more about Dcn. Keith’s apostolate, M3 Ministries, you can see more starting in mid-July 2024 after a major website revamp! www.M3Ministries.com.