175th Anniversary Mass

Parishes organize evangelization efforts

Father Todd Goodson, pastor of St. Ambrose Parish in Seymour and Our Lady of Providence Parish in Brownstown, preaches during a Sunday Advent Mass on Dec. 2, 2007, at St. Ambrose Church in Seymour. Annunciation Parish in Brazil and St. Simon the Apostle Parish in Indianapolis have launched formal evangelization efforts that have recently focused on inviting inactive Catholics and others outside their parishes to Mass. (File photo by Sean Gallagher)

By Sean Gallagher

Pete Cerar, a member of St. Simon the Apostle Parish in Indianapolis, sees himself as an average Catholic, just your regular 41-year-old father of four.

Jerry Laue, a member of Annunciation Parish in Brazil, is a small-town hospital administrator who heard a priest make a challenge from the pulpit and took him at his word.

These are men who love their Catholic faith and want to help others love it as much as they do. And they’re working to spread that love through formal groups that their parishes have established recently.

These evangelization teams are helping active parishioners grow in their knowledge and love of their faith, are seeking to invite inactive Catholics back into the heart of the Church and are reaching out to those who are not active in any faith tradition.

For Cerar, though, it all boils down to one simple goal.

“If I can help more people get to heaven, that’s all the better for everybody.”

Cerar, Wendy Braun and other members of St. Simon’s evangelization team have been making several efforts to achieve that objective.

They’re helping to build up adult faith formation opportunities, putting “everyday evangelization” suggestions in the parish bulletin,

experimenting with using name tags at Mass to foster a more welcoming atmosphere, and making phone calls to registered parishioners who haven’t been at the parish recently.

It’s this last initiative that has Braun excited.

She said that the phone calls were simply focused on finding out how the people were doing and if the parish could do anything to help them.

“We’ve had a really good response from that,” Braun said. “It was really worth it. None of us were really comfortable doing this. But it’s something that we got better at.

“People really appreciated the calls. Some people are coming back to church.”

Reaching out to the margins of the parish and beyond is an important part of evangelization, but Cerar sees just getting active parishioners simply to talk regularly about their faith as an important preparation for that.

“As I grow stronger in my Catholic faith, I recognize that if I can share [my faith] openly with others, it makes it easier for others to start sharing also,” he said. “If a guy like me, … [can do it], it’s OK to do faith sharing before a parish council meeting or an athletic practice. Maybe it will be OK for other dads, moms, guys and gals to do it as well.”

Braun also sees the evangelization team as helping people involved in the varied ministries of the parish see the ways in which they can evangelize others in their particular activities.

“We see ourselves as resources to help all these other folks in the parish, first of all, recognize that what they’re doing is Catholic evangelization as we understand it, and then just to help them think about it in light of that,” she said. “Presented that way, people have wonderful ideas. They just hadn’t thought about it before.”

Father Dominic Chukwudi, a former administrator of Annunciation Parish, inspired Laue when he challenged his parishioners in a homily to become evangelizers.

“I really took [him] seriously,” Laue said. “I thought, ‘I’m going to go out and make contact with several [inactive Catholics] and find out, kind of on my own, what were the issues and what we can do to invite them back in a way that they don’t necessarily feel that they’re being under a microscope.’ ”

Laue eventually joined other parishioners with a similar desire to form its evangelization committee.

And, in an outreach effort similar to their counterparts at St. Simon Parish, they sent out greeting cards during Lent to several registered parishioners they hadn’t seen at church for a while, inviting them to come back for Easter.

Annette Durcholz, a member of the committee, liked the results she saw.

“I noticed on Easter that there were a couple of people that I personally had sent cards to that were in church that I hadn’t seen for a long time,” she said. “That made me really excited.

“I’m really excited just by the small success so far to see what we’re going to do in the future.”

Getting people to come to Mass is an important part of evangelization for Laue.

He’s invited some Protestant co-workers at St. Vincent Clay Hospital in Brazil, where he works, to come to Mass with him.

In fact, Laue hopes to see in the future the celebration of what he has called a “friendship Mass,” where literature that explains the Mass to non-Catholic friends is given out in advance.

“It would be a celebration of friendships and to expose people, to get them into our doors to at least have them understand our faith better,” he said.

Ken Ogorek, the archdiocese’s director of catechesis, said you don’t have to look any further than the Bible to learn the priority that parishes should put on formal evangelization efforts.

“I often think that of all the things that Jesus could have said immediately before ascending to the Father, of all the

last-minute clarifying instructions he could have given, he was pretty specific: Go everywhere, baptize everyone, teach them everything,” Ogorek said. “Part of being a parish is permeating the area and really encouraging people to enter the life of the Church.”

He also said that the benefits of organized evangelization initiatives in a parish spread far and wide.

“Every time we engage in evangelizing activity, it helps to renew our own faith, our own enthusiasm for the Lord and his Church,” Ogorek said. “So even though we tend to think of evangelization as something that we do for them, whoever they are, I would say that the more that we focus on evangelizing activity, the more benefit that we ourselves receive.” †