In June, I was leading a breakout session at our diocesan leadership conference for parish pastors and lay leaders. The topic was “What do our parishes need for evangelization?” Since this was my diocese, and this was my last gathering with them as their Director of Missionary Discipleship, I wanted to solicit pastoral input for my successor, and for them: Do we need more practical workshops? Do we need to provide grants for parish initiatives in evangelization? Do we need to be working together on one specific initiative? Do we need better religious and material data about populations in specific regions of the diocese? Do we need better Spanish-language resources?
Our conversation ended up being about anything other than these “practicalities,” as useful as they could be. We ended with an extended conversation on why our parishes need people to stop being afraid to evangelize. Of all the stumbling blocks, one of the biggest is this: the majority of parishioners thinking, “I’m afraid.”
It would be a fascinating conversation with such an honest person to pick away at why he or she is afraid. Afraid of what? Failure, embarrassment, loss of social capital?
There is one solution
Regardless of those details, scripture gives us the one solution. 1 John 4:18: perfect love casts out all fear.
If we are afraid, it is because we live in imperfect love. Perfect love is a gift of God the Father, incarnated in his Son, and the living reality of the Holy Spirit. We are called in live in, and according to, perfect love. And…broken sinners that we are, we are often not entirely living in perfect love…yet.
It is similar to Jesus’ parable about having faith the size of a mustard seed. If we had such faith, we could tell mountains to move, and they would. Yet I don’t see a lot of moving mountains. It’s profoundly humbling, how much more my faith has to grow. And yet it can grow–the mustard seed is the source of a large, leafy tree of rest for all the birds of the air, and shade for those under it’s branches. Our faith is meant to grow from less than tiny to great and majestic.
Love is meant to grow as well, to become “perfect,” or complete (the Greek word implies both). And perfect love does something as great as mountain moving–it casts out fear.
We can imagine a love like this, though. A mother sees her child run into the street. A car is coming and doesn’t see the child. That mother, out of love, will run and push that child out of danger, even at the cost of her own injury…or life. No time for fear. Perfect, complete love casts it out.
So we came to a reflective answer about what our parishes need for evangelization. What we need is a perfect love. Or at least, a growing love, the love of the Father for his children in harm’s way. We can, and should, pray for that daily. And we should recognize that fear was never meant to be the center of our lives, and it will not be our last word as growing disciples…if we let God cast it out.
