Selling the Faith

So often as a Church we find ourselves struggling to figure out how to engage the people and either keep them or bring them back to Church. Everyone has an idea of how to modernize, tweak, or dress up our faith to make it more attractive. I heard on a radio show yesterday that an older man was even suggesting we abolish the Sacrament of Reconciliation as it was pushing the teenagers away. For those who have watched their congregation sizes gradually diminishing, it doesn't seem so far fetched that whatever we did to scare people away can be reversed, before we've disappeared entirely. And if we can't even get them in our pews, how are we going to sell them on the idea of vocations to priesthood and religious life?

I think the problem starts with the fact that the actual premise of why our numbers are dwindling is flawed. The idea that suddenly what had been doing before was not working because after nearly two thousand years we weren't hip or modern enough doesn't quite cut it. The reality of the matter is that the numbers in the pews of all ages started to drop when our society quietly shifted from an overtly Christian culture to something unmistakably more secular. Sure, there are some relics leftover to remind us of the sway Christianity once held on our nation, but they are there more for historical significance than spiritual feeling. Our pews, and in fact entire Churches, emptied out not with the young, but with their parents. Their parents had already lost the faith (or never had it) long before they forgot to bother to give Church a try. If these kids have been in Church, it was to get a few Sacraments and even then often out of habit because that's what one does. The Church itself hasn't changed, it's the culture that changed around us. The real problem is that for too long the Church has been happy to rely on the culture to fill our pews and to give Sacraments out realizing that many of these past two generations may never return for weekly Mass after they've got what they wanted from us.

So what should we do? Should we revolutionize our Church? Play pop music during Mass, let priests marry, ordain women priests, tell our nuns and monks to ditch their habits, change our tune on issues of sexual morality from artificial birth control, to premarital sex, to abortion, and follow the current movement of culture to become more relevant? That seems to be the siren call of some from within the Church and also from those who stand on the outside. After all, if practically all the other mainstream denominations have given up the ghost (and dare I say the Holy Spirit) on these issues, why shouldn't we? We clearly can't be complacent anymore, but the question remains as to what's the best action. In our think outside the box culture, changes of this nature seem the obvious choice from the outside, but if we look at our sister denominations, I think it's easy to see that all these changes, while temporarily very popular, aren't bringing sustainable growth. Those other denominations are struggling to stay relevant to the culture, but are still facing the same problems of dwindling numbers.

Change to match a culture so clearly at odds with our faith simply isn't worth it. In my view, too much would be lost for too little gain. It's still clear to me that there is some change needed, and it starts with Christ. Christianity is not a product to be packaged and sold to the masses. When we treat it like the next best thing that can be modified to make it more attractive, we see quickly that people will come through our doors, but won't stay for long. Christianity is not meant to be consumed, it is meant to consume us. Our faith is meant to be a life-changing gift. If we try to bend and stretch Christianity to suit us, like a branch, it will bend for so long and then snap, leaving us broken and bruised with no real truth and comfort to rely on. We need to stop being so busy trying to change Christ and His Gospel, and start letting Him change us. Once we're changed, our faith will shine out of us in a way that will make us a magnet to those living in darkness.

So perhaps the radical thing needed is not to change in all things but name, but to embrace the true core of Christianity: to be a follower of Christ. I'm not talking about superficial adherence to custom and blind acceptance of doctrine. I'm talking about passionate love for our Saviour, and a thirst to know everything we can about the faith and richness of tradition He has given to us through the Church. Souls aren't saved by the habit of attendance, they're saved by truly embracing Christ and falling so in love with Him that coming to the community of Church is the pinnacle of the week (or day). We can't sit idly by with our cool respect for our few passionate members. It's time for us to become a community of true Saints, striving in our weakness to give everything to God. If our faith and lives become authentic, then our faith will attract people. If we love our Church community, then when we invite people we can do so knowing that we aren't trying to yoke them with a heavy burden, but inviting them to accept a gift beyond compare. That's the kind of relevance we should be seeking, a relevance that speaks to hearts and minds, not to an increasingly alien culture.

Community in the Body of Christ

As we move forward in the Evangelization and Re-Evangelization of all people, part of the focus has been to change the focus of our Church's activities from filling an hour (or less) to fulfilling the hunger of the soul. For too long we have depended on a Christian culture to fill our pews, but once people were there all too often we simply filled their hour without filling their hearts. Our religious education programs came to the young with great intentions and trutful doctrine, but rarely achieved the level of evangelization possible as the hearts they reached out to were not fertile soil. Now we are left with several generations of people who barely know the basic fundamentals of their faith, have never experienced Christ in their lives, and who have no qualms ignoring the ethical and moral code of the Church.

With so many Catholic either only attending on Easter and Christmas (plus weddings, funerals and baptisms), we don't have time to preach even the most basic message of the Gospel, let alone the richness of its implications. Without the miracle of the Eucharist in the context of our beautiful and rich Sunday liturgy,  how can we expect our flock's hearts to be a fertile soil in which to plant the seeds of truth? The competing message from society, not to mention the 24/7 news media is present every moment of the day. As a Church we're lucky if we see people for an hour once a week. If know we are seeing people once a week or even once a month, the Mass is our only chance to reach out to people. At my parish, the level of care and devotion putting into making the Mass rich and engaging without sacrificing the dignity of the liturgy is impressive and worthy of praise. Our pastor gives incredible homilies, full of passion and truth, but does so in a way that engages both the churched and the un-churched. Every weekend I get the pleasure of being challenged by his clear and truthful message. He doesn't pander to anyone. He tells it like it is but in such a way that it gives his message more traction in the hearts of even the most obstinate. Besides the pastor, we are blessed with passionate ministry leaders who represent the best of our love of tradition while using a fresh voice to express it. A fine example is our 9am music ministry. We have a praise and worship band who sing authentic praise the God, but without the shallowness we sometimes experience from that style. They are as comfortable leading us in English as they are in Latin and Greek, singing a new song along with the songs gifted us by our millenia old tradition. By the time we reach the true pinnacle of the Mass, the Eucharist, our hearts are expanded, ready to be stretched and challenged even more by the real presence of Christ in His Body and Blood. As a faithful lover of the weekday Mass at our parish, whose austerity can be excused as it feeds the hunger of those who crave to always be near to the Eucharist and to be ever consumed by Christ as they consume Him, I can say in all honesty that even our beautiful weekday Mass can't compare to our Sunday celebration. For me, weekday Mass is there to sustain me, whereas Sunday Mass is there to fill me to overflowing, to build me up, to form me, and to bring me close to the full community of the Church universal. On Sunday, unlike any other day of the week, the worldwide Church joins together in harmony with the eternal celebration of Heaven. From our earthly perspective, it is the one day of the week that the Body of Christ is the most complete as the most of us are together through the Eucharist at once. It is the day that I feel the closest to my earthly and my Heavenly family. I feel the enormity of the faithful as I become my small part in the Body of Christ. I am drawn beyond my own weak personal faith into an experience of Heaven, which will be an eternal communion of the faithful.

I think the first answer to our problem of drawing people closer to Christ would be to first draw them closer to His Church. It is impossible to ignore the presence of Christ in His Body when we give our hearts over to Him at the Sunday Mass. A people who have their hunger fed at Sunday Mass become a people open to being formed by the Spirit to accept the full truth of the Gospel. While God speaks to us always in the silence of our hearts, He becomes present in the community of the faithful, through our presence and through His Most Holy Eucharist. We approach Him as individuals, but He draws us into Him and gives us Himself through our community. The authentic message of Christ is not to self-determine our beliefs in a vacuum, but to be attentive to the truths He has already revealed with clarity through the Gospel. He undeniably calls us to community, as we are reminded that "Wherever two or three of you are gathered in My name, I am there". Once our hearts become seeped in the unique joy and love we find through our community, then we will crave to know more and better the God who we meet at Mass. All the education and knowledge in the world will fail to fill us if we aren't first set ablaze with a passion for God and His Church, but once we have that passion, we will forever crave to know Him more and to love Him more.