The Call to Evangelise.

A blogger called Torch of the Faith wrote an interesting article which brought me back to a sermon preached by a priest in the 1950's.  He was pointing out that there is a tendency for Christians  to be identified as good or practicing when they are employed in the parish doing this, that, or the other.   However a person may just go to Church on a Sunday and still live and spread the faith as devoutly as anyone else.   My priest in the fifties stated that he was worried about people with families who spent too much of their time leaving the family home to join a committee, a movement, or some other activity only performed in Church.    He believed that many people got so wrapped up in Church work that they forgot their duties to the family.

Of course we need peopler to help the priest or the parish would collapse but there is a tendency to believe these days that you have to be 'doing' something in the Church in order to be a faithful Christians.   I have heard priests boast of how they have involved people in Church activities such as reading, special ministers of Holy Communion, Welcomers, booksellers, we even have site managers.      It is all well and good to point to these things but they do absolutely nothing to help spread the Faith.  It builds the insular Church that many would condemn the Pre-Vatican Church of being.   I am a member of the Rosary Group in my parish but when I say the Rosary and leave the Church my work as a Christian is just starting.   I have to love my wife and family and hopefully this love will shed a little of God's light in the world.    I have to support my children when they have difficulties and sorrows, that is why God gave them to me.   I have to be a Christian at work and not afraid to say I go to Mass on Sunday and I have to be a helping hand to those around me, to comfort those I work with when I can.   I have to be a good neighbour to those next door and when they enter my house and see crucifixes and pictures of Our Lady they will know why I am kind.   I have to be ready to share my faith with anyone who asks me to account for it    I have to visit the sick when I can, I have to visit the elderly if I can, I have to comfort children from broken homes when I can.   There are so many ways of evangelising, but it does not happen within the Church walls.   If your only a Catholic on a Sunday giving out the chalice or reading from the book it could be all you can do in your circumstances but having people surrounding you with chalices on a Sunday as I saw at one Church is not a sign of Faith and nothing to boast of.   It is when a community is involved in a wider community to spread the Faith not hide it, that God is really with us and we are with God.          

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