Why Urgent, Imperfect Evangelization is the Best Kind

It was beautiful. I was sitting in a newer east coast church, among hundreds at the Divine Renovation Conference. We listened to story after story of St. Benedict, the parish whose story is told in the book Divine Renovation. 

This parish, the biggest in Canada east of Montreal, has done so much good in recent years. Its members have led thousands of people through Alpha, bringing so many people to faith and into the mission of the Church. The parish started a movement that now leads renewal in parish staff around the world. 

I was in awe and yet, I was paralyzed. “How can I make a difference compared to what others are doing?” 

Have you ever been there? 

It can bring on a lot of emotions. There's joy at seeing excellence in motion, and gratitude for how God responds. There's the desire to be a part of something amazing like it. And sometimes, envy because you haven't borne the same fruit in your life.

I was wrestling with all of these as I sat in the pew. What could I do? 

That’s when God started to turn my attention away from what I could do to what others needed. Sitting there in that church, an image came to me. 

Picture an impoverished city. It is full of people who are literally starving and emaciated. It has been so barren of food for so long that people don’t even look for food anymore.

There are some fortresses in the city and the people inside them do have food, but they are kept tightly secure. Nobody gets in and nobody goes out. Over time, the starving people don’t even notice these places anymore.

Then one day an organization comes in and starts building a massive soup kitchen to serve the starving people and save them from ruin. You see this and are hopeful!

But after the construction ends and the cupboards stocked with food, it remains locked up. For 6 months, then a year afterward, nothing is happening and people continue to waste away.

You bang on the door one day and ask, “What is going on?? People are dying around here everywhere! Why aren’t you feeding them?? Isn’t that what you came here for?!?"

“Oh, we’re going to feed them,” you’re told.

“Look, we’re just in the process of figuring out what the best menu would be. When we do that, then we’ll open. If we started feeding people now, they might not really like the food that much."

Can you imagine how absurd that would be?

People who are starving need nutrition! They don’t need gourmet meals that leave a great first impression. They need whatever ingredients you have on hand right now.

Even if it is a big, fat, sloppy mess.

Soup kitchens don’t wait for the best ingredients, they just feed people. Field hospitals don’t wait for the best medical supplies, they just treat people.

In other words, it’s no more complicated than choosing an evangelization program and running with it.

My friend and colleague, Ron Huntley, spoke passionately about the need to foster a “culture of failure” in our churches. What he meant was that people who try things will fail more than people who don’t try things. Churches who try things will fail more than churches who don’t try things.

But God doesn’t need perfect, he just needs us to show up. 

The Proclaim Movement is born out of a sense of missionary urgency. Members are willing to take risks and start “imperfectly” evangelizing people because people need it. And isn't that an exercise in faith? Humbly offering what we have back to God, even if we don’t feel 100% qualified to carry out the task on our own? 

Let us live and move and go out as ones who truly know they have been sent. Because a bruised Church is way better than a paralyzed one. 

Let’s take urgency from the words of Pope Francis:

“If something should rightly disturb us and trouble our consciences, it is the fact that so many of our brothers and sisters are living without the strength, light and consolation born of friendship with Jesus Christ, without a community of faith to support them, without meaning and a goal in life. More than by fear of going astray, my hope is that we will be moved by the fear of remaining shut up within structures which give us a false sense of security, within rules which make us harsh judges, within habits which make us feel safe, while at our door people are starving and Jesus does not tire of saying to us: ‘Give them something to eat.’” (Mk 6:37) (Evangelii Gaudium, 49)

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This is an edited version of an article that originally appeared at CanadianCatholic.net