Catholic Evangelism for Anglican Catholic Future Festival
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
‘Just do it’ A Keynote Address on Catholic Evangelism for Anglican‐Catholic Future In the best Anglican tradition I have just caught up with what the culture was doing twenty years ago and I am currently much inspired by the Nike strapline, ‘Just do it.’ That is my message to you today. Never mind more words. Let’s do some evangelism. Let’s leave our bags here, let’s go out onto the streets, let’s go into Paddington station where there are thousands of people waiting for trains. Let’s each find someone we don’t know and ask them what they think of Jesus. We’ll see where the conversation goes from there and then return here to pool ideas. Okay we’re not really going to do that, at least not yet. That was a cheap way to make a point. You see I am bored of talking about Catholic evangelism. We need to stop talking, stop holding conferences, stop writing papers and articles and actually get on and do some evangelism. The mere fact there is a subject called ‘Catholic Evangelism’ which merits study on its own for me rather illustrates the problem. Do we have talks and papers on ‘Evangelical evangelism?’ No, because they’re too busy doing it. In our defence we are living through a time of immense evangelical influence in Church of England and as a result the techniques and ideas that surround evangelism are largely drawn from one tradition. Inevitably that means that we can feel at odds with much of the language of evangelism that is around today. Part of the problem is not that Catholics aren’t doing evangelism, but that our approach and language differ such that people don’t always notice what we’re doing. It may be helpful therefore at the start of this talk to remind ourselves of the key elements of Catholic Evangelism. I would say there are four distinctive features. First Catholic evangelism is Incarnational. Malcolm Brown, the Director of the Mission and Public Affairs Division, recently gave a fascinating paper at an Estates Evangelism conference in which he drew a doctrinal distinction between two approaches to mission, both of which have had periods of predominance in Anglican history. One focuses on atonement and so places the emphasis on Calvary and the saving work of God on the cross. In this approach the world is viewed as a godless, dark, sinful place. The task of an evangelist therefore is to draw people to individual repentance and conversion, to encourage them to place their faith in the saving work of Christ on the cross so that they can be plucked from an evil world and saved in Christ forever. Conversion is therefore a profoundly individual choice. The church is little more than a local gathering of the voluntary community of the redeemed and is the safe harbour in a vast sea of sin and danger. This is the classical protestant approach which is highly individualistic and has a low theology of the Church. The second approach focuses on the Incarnation and so the emphasis is on Bethlehem. God has been born into his world in an act that impacts on the whole of creation and remains powerfully present within it. Athanasius famously tells us, ‘That which is assumed is redeemed.’ The mere fact of Christ taking on human flesh impacts on our 1 lives and our world for sanctification. The Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins typifies this theology as he writes: ‘The World charged with grandeur of God.’ By his Incarnation, the presence of God suffuses all creation. The task of the evangelist therefore is demonstrate the existing presence of God such that people acknowledge him and worship him in his Incarnate Son. I remember whilst working in Camden that around every six months an American funded Church planter would coming knocking at my door and say, ‘Hi Phil, I’ve come to bring Jesus to in Camden.’ I would reply, ‘Actually do you know, he’s already here. Come with me and we’ll go and find him – in the faces of the poor and the destitute, in the lives of the prostitutes and the drug addicts, in the creativity of the artists and musicians, in the whole wonder of this diverse and extraordinary community.’ That was a classic clash between Atonement‐based and Incarnation‐based approaches to mission. Catholic evangelism therefore is incarnational. To draw someone to conversion is to awaken them to their divine potential, to help them discover the presence of God in their lives so that they can acknowledge their true purpose, their true identity, their true vocation and thereby be saved. It is an approach that leads to a much higher theology of the Church. By virtue of the Incarnation the Church is a divine institution because it continues the Incarnate presence of the Son. It is his body in the world, his presence, and so it has an authority that is divine. In a Catholic evangelism the cross is central, but that is because it guarantees the eternal and enduring presence of God in his world. Catholic evangelism is about more than the plucking out of individuals for personal redemption. At its heart is the setting free of all creation. This is why Catholics embed themselves in our communities for long periods of time. Catholic evangelism is boring. It mistrusts the spectacular and the short‐term. Evangelism is about the long, slow, dull process of sharing lives and pointing out where Jesus fits into them. Thus also Catholics have a passion for the dignity of human life because it is charged with the very life of God. In the Incarnation we see a thrilling vision of the dignity of human life, so we must despise anything that undermines that dignity. We locate ourselves with the poor. We have a passion for justice. And a really good catholic evangelism will naturally draw together service and proclamation. S. Vincent de Paul is the perfect example of this, a man who renewed the whole French Church by proclaiming good news to the poor whether that poverty be spiritual, material or both. If we proclaim but do not serve, we are hypocrites preaching an empty Gospel. If we serve but fail to proclaim we are subjecting people to the greatest deprivation of all which, as Pope Francis reminds us, is to be deprived of ever hearing the saving news of God in Jesus Christ. Secondly a Catholic evangelism is Sacramental. In a protestant soteriology, worship can at times seem a bolt on. What matters is individual conversion of the heart and 2 people do not always see where weekly Church attendance fits into that. An interesting illustration is the Alpha course. Around 2.5 million people in the UK have done Alpha and so you would expect that this would impact significantly on Churchgoing figures. If 20% of those who had been on the course made a commitment to Christ, you would presume that Sunday attendance would be up by around 500,000. But in that period of time church attendance has actually decreased and in the Church of England is now around 900,000. Many people it would seem have become Christians but are choosing not to worship. For a Catholic, to believe and not to worship is quite simply impossible. At interview I sometimes ask a question that is often put to me by my sceptical sister. ‘So what if a man called Jesus died 2000 years ago? How does the effect me now?’ The answer for a Catholic is the Sacraments. In Baptism we are born anew into the risen life of the Christ who died for us. In the Eucharist we feed on that risen life for our salvation. It is through the Sacraments that power of the cross flows down upon us for salvation. It is the Sacraments that make the cross contemporary. So for us as Catholics, to evangelise means to bring people to Jesus in the Eucharist. That in the end is our job. Why? Because in the Eucharist we come into the real, physical, actual presence of the incarnate Christ. We are in Bethlehem where we gaze upon the one who has assumed our humanity that we might assume his divinity. We are at Calvary where blood and water flows down upon us for our eternal salvation. We are in the garden gazing at the empty tomb as the Resurrection transforms the whole meaning and purpose of our humanity. In the Eucharist we draw life from the Christ who, through his cross, redeems and sets free from sin. In the Eucharist we gaze upon the result of Christ’s saving work as we are caught up in the very worship and life of heaven. The Eucharist is therefore both the means and the goal of our salvation. We need to teach our people therefore to love the Eucharist because to love the Eucharist is to love Jesus. To love the Eucharist is to love the Gospel. And we need to be shameless in inviting people to the Eucharist, because within it people will find the purpose of their lives. The Eucharist in and of itself evangelises. Come to the Walsingham Youth Pilgrimage if you don’t believe me. Thirdly Catholic evangelism is Communal. A mission strategy whose sole purpose is the personal conversion of the individual will by nature be individualist. The Church therefore becomes no more than a voluntary gathering of the like‐minded, a purely human institution. A good example for me came at the Keswick convention after a rather tortured seminar by an extremely intelligent man who was trying to make sense of one of the Old Testament genocides.