The Call to Become a Missionary Disciple
On the Fourth of July weekend, 2017, 3300 Catholic bishops, priests, and lay leaders gathered in Orlando. I had the privilege of participating as a lay leader. We came together to reflect on and respond to Evangelii Gaudium (EG), Pope Francis’s revolutionary Apostolic Exhortation on the duty and joy of evangelization. We also came to understand the causes of the Church’s great twenty-first-century crisis and find a way to address them.
The convocation recognized that the Catholic Church is suffering from a critical membership hemorrhage. Speakers in plenary sessions and many of the breakouts acknowledged reports that for every person joining the church, six leave. That’s the poorest loss/gain ratio among all Christian groups. The attrition is most apparent among Millennials. Fifty percent of Catholics born between 1982 and 2004 have left the church. Many claim no religious identification and have come to be known as the “Nones.”
At the final plenary session, Robert Barron, the auxiliary bishop of Santa Barbara and the founder/director of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries, said that causes of the drain include: Scientism which falsely claims to explain all reality and so denies the transcendental; The growing sub-culture which regards all religion as a fairy tale and “Who cares, anyway;” and Secularization, which substitutes living for power, pleasure, honor, and wealth instead of for truth, goodness, and beauty, that is, for God.
Over four days, many speakers suggested potential solutions to resolve the crisis. One striking note came from a youth leader. He shared that once a young “None” approached him and said, “Stop calling me a problem—I’m a person.” And another panelist urged just as parishes have adopted a preferential option for the poor, they must now adopt a preferential option for the Nones (and the “Dones,” the older dropouts). At the heart of all recommendations was Pope Francis’s call for all Catholics, especially the laity, to do evangelization as “missionary disciples.”
All the baptized, wherever they function in the Church or their maturity in the Faith, are instruments of evangelization. This plan would be an insufficient call if evangelization were to be carried out by a select few. Rather, the call to missionary discipleship is a call to all the Faithful! Pope Francis makes this clear… Every Christian is a missionary to the extent that he or she has encountered the love of God in Christ Jesus: we no longer say that we are “disciples” and “missionaries,” but rather that we are always “missionary disciples” EG, 120.
As missionary disciples, the Pope commissions us to find and accompany people on the peripheries. There we will meet the unbaptized, the hurting, non-practicing Catholics, the Nones, the agnostics, and the atheists. We will show and tell them how the Lord Jesus can fill the emptiness. So, we are sent to bring women and men to encounter Jesus Christ and then go and make disciples. Missionary disciples implement Pope Francis’s charge: “I invite all Christians, everywhere, at this very moment to a renewed personal encounter with Jesus Christ, or at least an openness to letting him encounter them; I ask all of you to do this unfailingly each day” EG, 3.