Write Away

A sermon that I’d really like to listen to someday that I don’t think gets thought about too much would be titled:  ”How to leave a ministry.”  I definitely hear lots of encouragement to get involved in ministry, but it doesn’t seem to occur to too many people that even in ministry, all good things must come to an end.

The reason I’m thinking about this now is that I’m in the process of leaving a ministry role I’ve had for the past two years.  When I was first contemplating the fact that it was time for me to move on, I found there were some things about how I was going to leave that were quite important to me.

To start at the beginning, the Sharehouse ministry was launched by two local Evangelical churches, including the one my husband and I attend.  The days and times have varied but pretty much from the beginning, the Sharehouse was open to the public in our rural community to come and “shop” for free food and second hand items for a couple hours once a week.

This required making sure there were volunteers staffing the place each week.  A lady from the other church and I started off kind of taking care of this.  We did it in a very clunky way.  We’d each recruit a couple people from our respective churches each week, the two founding pastors held a couple brief training sessions and things got going.  I volunteered pretty much every time it was open and ended up for a while fielding questions about how things worked from the volunteers on a regular basis.

At some point I mentioned to the pastor of “my” Evangelical church that there was clearly a need for a volunteer coordinator and I’d be happy to take on that role on an interim basis until an actual member of either church could be found to fill that position.  Being the resident Catholic congregant I’m quite sensitive to the fact that the pastors generally prefer a full fledged Evangelical member to hold the more visible leadership positions.  The pastor told me to go ahead with it and so I did.  Fairly soon afterwards the lady from the other church had to back out due to increased family obligations or something along those lines.  So then I started compiling a list of volunteers from both churches and calling a few each week.

As the ministry progressed, the two founding pastors caught up with developing and implementing some more formal procedures, including how scheduling would work, which streamlined the process considerably and also more precisely defined responsibilities.  I started scheduling volunteers for three months at a time and I was made to understand that my responsibilities were pretty much limited to scheduling, so I started referring other types of volunteer questions to the two pastors.

Over time I developed a system using a free email marketing software which automated certain aspects of the process and made it very easy to communicate by email with all the volunteers.  Each quarter that I scheduled got easier and easier as I figured out more ways I could streamline the process even further.

The two pastors also handed off their roles as Sharehouse coordinators to other members of their respective churches.  My husband became one of the new coordinators.

At the end of this past summer, I accepted the position of Director of Religious Education (DRE) at my own Catholic parish.  In the months following accepting the position it became clear that my responsibilities at my own church were going to grow as I grew the religious education program.  About the time that things started to get really busy, it was time to schedule another quarter at the Sharehouse.

I was able to juggle both ministries for a while but I could see that this wouldn’t last.  I wrote an email to “my” pastor, who was still acting as Sharehouse coordinator at the time.  I told him about my new job and how excited I was about it, and that it meant that eventually I would need to step down from serving as the Sharehouse scheduler.  I didn’t have a set end date in mind, but I wanted to bring it up right then because I wanted him and the other coordinator to have plenty of time to find a replacement scheduler.  I also said I wanted to be able to train the new scheduler.

I scheduled the next quarter after sending this letter, and it was interesting because I was asked if it would be OK for me to schedule that round as a new scheduler hadn’t yet been located.  I answered that of course it would be OK; just as I’d said, I wasn’t in a hurry to stop or anything.  I think the usual way people resign from ministry is something along the lines of giving two weeks’ notice and then the job gets dumped on someone else even if a true replacement hasn’t been found yet.  One thing I knew I didn’t want to do was have either of the church pastors have to take on the scheduling even just once.

When the next round after that came along, the new scheduler had been located and accepted the position.  It was just in time for getting  the whole process started.  I arranged a meeting with both the new scheduler and one of the coordinators so that we could go over the entire process.  It turned out to be a two hour long meeting and I think I talked nonstop.  I took them through the email marketing program I was using, started to set up some of the emails which would have to go out while they were watching and methodically went over all the other little details that went along with the job.  We decided the initial emails requesting information about volunteers’ availability would go out that week and we would meet a week later to actually go through the scheduling process.  That meeting was to take place yesterday morning, actually.

As if to hammer home to me that yes I did indeed make the right decision to back out of this ministry, I found myself this week slammed with having to make a number of last minute preparations for a Confirmation retreat to take place this coming weekend.  In fact, I scheduled a meeting for that later on that day and was hoping I’d have a bit of time before that meeting to at least begin preparing the two talks I would be giving at the retreat.

It was actually a little strange not receiving the usual replies to the emails that went out requesting people’s availability–we had programmed the replies to automatically go to the new scheduler.  I wondered how that was going.

Monday morning, my questions were answered by an email I received from the new scheduler saying that she’d gone ahead and made up an initial schedule and that it would only require some tweaking based on my feedback.

I thought “Oh boy, oh boy!  Short meeting!  Yay!”

The meeting was short and could have been a lot shorter had the four of us not spent some time simply hanging out and lazily talking about various miscellaneous tips about scheduling that I’d think about (most of which were probably redundant from the previous meeting anyway).  There were a few necessary changes that I spotted right away, and then that was pretty much it.  The new scheduler and coordinator told me I’d set it up well and they felt confident moving forward after the previous training I’d given them.  Because at the moment we are all sharing a dropbox folder, I can see that the necessary changes are being made to the schedule and it will probably go out to all the volunteers shortly.  Once this month is through, my term as scheduler will be officially over–all I have left to do is make sure all the volunteers scheduled this month confirm that they are going to be serving and call them if they don’t.  But starting next month, that job also falls to the new scheduler.

Once the meeting was over I hurried over to where my next meeting would be held and had a very productive two hours before my friend and fellow retreat coordinator arrived and we could go over the retreat plans.

After my friend left I thought a bit about letting the Sharehouse scheduling go, as I’d thought about it some throughout the process of letting it go.  On one hand I’m relieved to have that off my plate.  On the other hand, I’m a bit sad to not have it on my plate anymore.  My time serving in this capacity has been a tremendous learning experience for me, and I’ve also been told on many occasions just how valuable my contribution was.  A part of me is going to miss those affirmations as well as the whole involvement with the Sharehouse ministry itself.  Since my husband is one of the coordinators, I’m also to a large extent letting go of volunteering there–one of us has to stay home with the children!

So it’s not this total happy thing.  I get sad about it at times.  But then I get going on something to do with being DRE and I then get so happy that there is one less encumbrance to me doing a good job with this new ministry, one that I really truly have free rein to not just perform a duty (however valuable) but to be actively involved in discipleship and evangelism (things that because I’m Catholic were not open to me within an Evangelical ministry).

But mostly I feel very satisfied with the way I left the Sharehouse ministry.  I told people well in advance that I would be leaving.  I gave them plenty of time to find a replacement.  Then I took the time to effectively train the new scheduler as well as cross train the coordinators.  As far as the volunteers can see, all that’s changed is the name at the end of the Sharehouse emails they receive.  The current round of scheduling took place on time and with no problems, and everyone will know when they are going to be expected to serve within a week.  No one was left with an extra job dumped on them; no one was left in the lurch.  There was a good transition from me to the new scheduler and we both feel confident that she has everything she needs (her own skills and experience plus what I was able to give her) to do the job well for as long as she wants to do it.  I know that what I have developed to streamline Sharehouse scheduling will not be abandoned or reinvented (only improved on as time goes on) since I was able to thoroughly pass on that knowledge.

As I’ve mentioned I learned and grew so much through serving as the Sharehouse scheduler, and I know much of what I learned prepared me for my current and more challenging ministry.

But it’s also made me think a lot more about passing on the torch of my current ministry.  No, I’m not looking to quit anytime soon.  But I’m seeing the great value in building this ministry in a way that will allow it to function just fine without me.  I’ve already had the experience of having substitutes cover for me on Religious Education nights that I couldn’t be there, and a huge part of what I’m emphasizing is making sure that the teachers in the program are well formed spiritually and mentored both in their walk with God and in growing as teachers.  I’ve already thought about things I do and how I can delegate some of those tasks to other people in my church.  And I’ve gotten quite conscious of the fact that I don’t have to provide everything–I can make use of all kinds of resources available to me in my parish and through the Archdiocese of Denver.  And yes, I’ve started to give some thought to how I might approach training and mentoring a replacement or backup DRE.  I mean, wouldn’t it be nice to occasionally take some time off and know that the ministry will still be OK without me?  Or, to know that the ultimate “what if something happened to me?” question will be answered by “the ministry will go on just fine.”

So strangely enough, leaving a ministry well actually has helped me to consider how to run a ministry well.  So going back to a teaching or sermon topic, yes, I think the subject of how to leave a ministry is well worth exploring.  Any takers?

I originally started sharing this story to make a point, and then I forgot what my point was, so I’ll just let the story speak for itself.  It’s my experience of being involved in a parish while it was going through a rather big scandal.

When I was in graduate school I was a parishioner at the Cathedral parish in Las Cruces, NM.  It was an exciting time to be involved in church ministry.  Several people from the parish down the road were instrumental in bringing the LifeTeen ministry to the diocese, and the Cathedral was determined to be the best venue for this youth ministry which immediately involved over 200 teens.  Father Louie, the priest chosen as the spiritual director and the main celebrant at the LifeTeen Masses, was an incredibly dynamic speaker who called things as they were (even if was hard), knew how to preach, and who related amazingly well to the youth.  I quickly started attending the LifeTeen Masses and got involved in the ministry, which involved taking significant leadership in youth retreats, leading youth activities, and being one of ten or so Confirmation teachers to a class of over 100.  It was one of those times where I learned a lot about both the good and not so good side of Christian ministry, made some good friends, and experienced a lot of growth in my faith.

Around that time the Cathedral implemented perpetual Eucharistic adoration.  This means that the Eucharist is exposed constantly in a side chapel and two people commit to praying there for an hour–enough people commit so that there are always two people in the chapel round the clock.  Prayer takes place seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day.  My schedule was unpredictable enough that I did not commit to a particular time during the week but I often came after work, or sometimes after late night socializing with friends, several times a week.  I am convinced that all this prayer on the part of many parishioners played a huge role in the outcome of what follows.

After LifeTeen had been humming along for about a year (I don’t remember the details about the timeline any more), Father Louie made the unfortunate discovery that the Cathedral parish was missing a significant amount of collection money.  When it was all said and done it turned out that the main priest at the Cathedral (not the Bishop) had a gambling addiction and had gambled away $300,000 of offering money.  He was able to keep his habit secret due to some weird accounting practices allowing for secret accounts (among other things) which probably started for innocent enough reasons but which over the years (decades?) had gotten out of hand.  Father Louie was the whistle blower.

The Bishop with some reluctance got on with addressing the issue and assigned a Monsignor (whose name I’ve forgotten) in the diocese to oversee the church side of the investigation (the local police had also been notified and were conducting their own criminal investigation).  I knew this Monsignor mostly from having attended daily Mass at his parish on occasion and having had those brief conversations as you’re shaking the priest’s hand walking out the door afterwards.

As more and more news came out both through the newspaper and from church insiders (and I knew a few), people in the diocese understandably got upset and there was much talk about it all over the town.  By this time Father Louie was already complaining about not being treated well as the whistle blower and he had a lot to say on the matter.

After several months, the Monsignor called a meeting in the parish hall of the Cathedral where he succinctly but thoroughly presented the story of the scandal as he knew it as well as the steps that had been taken and were going to be taken to both address it and make sure this kind of thing wouldn’t happen again.

The priest who had gambled away the collection money was told to sell his home and many of his possessions to at least partly repay what he’d stolen (I believe his house appraised at around $100,000), which he did.  He was removed from his duties as parish priest and sent off to some sort of treatment center in Chicago for people who suffer from extreme gambling addictions.  I never saw him again but I hope that he has been successfully rehabilitated and is doing well in life, hopefully even fully restored to the ministry.

The entire diocese, and I believe possibly even several other dioceses in New Mexico, were going to be subjected to a major external audit of all the financial business in every single parish and all accounting procedures were going to be brought up to more current and transparent methods.  Specifically, all secret accounts everywhere would be abolished, and general good accounting practices would be implemented.  I think the impact of this may have extended beyond the state of New Mexico (or other Catholic parishes had experienced similar issues) because right now financial accounting in US Catholic parishes, including the one I currently work in, is extremely meticulous and thorough, requiring all kinds of signatures and records, and statements are regularly tabulated and made public.  I don’t think a parish priest would be able to spend $5.00 of church money at McDonald’s without at least three people knowing about it.

Father Louie experienced some pretty harsh resistance when he first brought the matter to the attention of his superiors, and it was determined that he had been seriously hurt in the process.  He was asked to take a short leave of absence from his priestly duties and spend a month on a healing retreat as a way to help him process through and recover from the ringer he had gone through.

Along with all those explanations were frequent apologies made on behalf of the Bishop to the people in the diocese for all the pain we had gone through and for having our offering money gambled away instead of spent on the work of God.

I remember sitting in that meeting thinking wow, it looks like this is being handled amazingly well.  The perpetrator had been confronted, made to pay restitution and sent to a place where he could get help for an addiction which had obviously gotten the better of him, the entire way all the parishes would be handling money would be overhauled, and even the whistle blower was being shepherded.  I totally expected people to leave the meeting satisfied that their questions and concerns were addressed and that justice was being done.

Instead, during the Q and A section, there was just a ton of anger as people made statement after statement accusing the diocese of a major cover-up and calling for the Bishop’s resignation.  People were convinced that the only reason the Bishop dealt with this at all was because he was forced to whereas he had known what was going on for years but had ignored it.  People wanted Father Tom (the gambler) in jail, not some posh treatment facility, and I’m not sure what else they were calling for but it all sounded ridiculous.  Some people just wanted to express how they felt, which was fine, but there was this sense I got of “Can’t you see that this scandal has been addressed?  What more do you want?”  I had to reluctantly come to the conclusion that what they wanted was blood and revenge, not restoration.

Not too long after, I bumped into the Monsignor at some social event and without really thinking about it, asked him how he was doing.  He got really sad for a moment and said in a bit of a broken voice:  ”It’s been very difficult and painful.  People have been saying the most hurtful things to and about me.  Please pray for me.”

We had a LifeTeen retreat somewhere in there, and I will always remember that retreat because we did this four part skit about redemption which was this courtroom drama where a sinner was put on trial for sinning, found guilty, and of course in some way (I forget the details pertaining to that skit) his guilt is resolved as of course Jesus has abundantly forgiven all sinners who trust in Him.  I got to play the part of the prosecuting attorney, an incredibly vicious woman named Lucy Fer (pun absolutely intended), a part no one thought I had it in me to carry out (because I was too nice), but apparently I did it well enough that a few of the teenagers on the retreat were struggling with hating me.  I certainly thoroughly enjoyed playing the villain.

One night during this retreat Father Louie and I sat up pretty late at night as he shared with me his experience of being the whistle blower in the scandal and recounted to me how awfully he was treated.  I don’t remember the details but he was crying and went on and on for a long time.  I didn’t have much to say.  I mean, what do you say under those circumstances?  I had this uneasy feeling that maybe I was being confided in too much but I didn’t quite have the strength of character to resist wanting to know all the juicy behind the scenes information or the “honor” of being treated as a confidante to someone in the center of such a major happening.  I started to think he was taking this way harder than he needed to be and that at some point you have to let go of things, forgive, and move on.

A few weeks later, with that conversation still bothering me, I made an appointment to see Father Louie in his office to share my concerns with him and encourage him to let it go.  I certainly did not want to lose him as a LifeTeen priest.  Also, some of my friends who were also at the retreat had complained to me that they’d overheard Father Louie talking to the teens about his feelings and they’d felt that wasn’t appropriate.

I tried to encourage him to let go and forgive and move on, that there were great things for him that he wasn’t seeing from being so focused on the scandal, but I was way out of my element.  He quickly overpowered me with his talk about how much scandal there was in the Church beyond even what our own diocese had suffered.  He had a two inch thick manila folder on his desk.

“Do you know what is in this file?” he asked me.

“I have no idea,” I replied.

“This is a file of cases involving priests sexually molesting children!” he said with a tone of disgust.

“That entire file?” I asked incredulously.

“I have two more just like it,” he replied.

He went on to give me a lecture about how innocent, naive and unaware I was of just how evil and wicked my own Church was and how you can’t just know stuff like what he now knew and let it go, forgive and move on.  The weight of the evil was simply too enormous.

At the time I knew nothing about the priest sex abuse scandal (this all happened years before it broke).  I didn’t want to discount the possibility that this was true, but I struggled to grasp how that could possibly be relevant to what Father Louie and our diocese were going through.

“I don’t know anything about all these other scandals,” I said weakly, “but I do believe our scandal was handled as well as could be expected, not that people didn’t make mistakes or anything, and you have done your part in it, but now it’s time to put it behind you and focus on being a good priest.  Those kids in LifeTeen really need you to be there for them, and you can’t right now because you are so consumed with your own pain.”

“Yeah, that’s exactly what Monsignor told me,” he spat.  ”He wants to send me on this healing retreat!  As if that’s just going to make all this go away!  They just want me out of the way.”

Father Louie refused to go on the healing retreat and eventually left the priesthood, very much a broken and angry man.  Both in that conversation and on the retreat I could see the seeds of destruction already taking root, and I don’t think I have ever felt more helpless than I did in that moment witnessing it.

I occasionally talk to people who tell me heart rending stories about how they have been hurt deeply by Christians or the Church (and usually “Church” is pretty vaguely defined).  Recently I was reminded of some deep hurt some of my friends from childhood experienced where I was in the picture (though in this case not the one causing the pain) at the time they were hurt in that way.  And I’d be lying to say that I didn’t experience some deep injustice of my own at the same time.

My childhood parish, called Christ the King, was favorably (really, glowingly) featured in the book I just read and reviewed called Forming Intentional Disciples, and honestly, much of the good the author had to say about this parish was true when I was attending there with my family, so much so that when I met my first Evangelical Christian in high school who confided to me that she had grown up Catholic but never knew God, it came as a complete shock to me that this was even possible.  Christ the King parish is what you would call a vibrant parish where people seriously live out their faith and disciple each other.  I was definitely discipled and mentored by many people during my time there, and that early investment into my young life continues to bear fruit to this day–even after years of participating in parishes where I did not get much in the way of discipling or mentoring.

I was part of it in the early days–it was established just thirty or so years ago as a charismatic parish.  At first, the parish was the Catholic wing of an ecumenical charismatic community called The Word of God, which itself founded and was part of a worldwide network of such communities all over the world called The Sword of the Spirit.  It eventually became an independent parish as the 60% Catholics who made up The Word of God community wanted to more deeply express their Catholic faith as well as reach out more effectively to the surrounding community.

But anyway, being involved as a child in the founding days had its definite ups and downs.  In general people learn a lot by trial and error and when it’s a church or community that is the platform for learning, well, the trials and errors can deeply affect people, especially children.  My friends and I were students in the Christian school that was part of the Community, and at times were genuine victims of others’ mistakes and outright sins.

As one good friend of mine who was a teacher in the school while I was attending put it to me in a recent conversation, “We were very young and we thought we knew so much when in fact we knew so little.”

Several months ago I happened to come across an article on an Evangelical pastor site (which I know I won’t be able to find again) which admonished pastors to be conscious of the pain they might be causing people in their congregation.  The author, himself a pastor, referred to it as a church health statistic that is often overlooked but is actually really important.  He talked about the bodies strewn all over the place representing the people the pastor had wounded in some way.

While I certainly am all in favor of church leaders of any kind considering the impact of their words and actions on other people, something about the article didn’t sit well with me because it implied (perhaps unconsciously on the part of the author) that a church leader causing pain to a congregant was always categorically a bad thing.

So I wrote a comment beginning with “As a layperson I expect to be hurt by church leaders from time to time…” and going on to express that I have a choice about how to handle such hurt, meaning it’s not going to be entirely the church leader’s fault if as a result I decide to leave that congregation (or Christianity altogether) in a huff.

That’s what I’m referring to for the purposes of this essay as affliction–the instance of being wounded by a church leader or fellow Christian for any reason, distinguished from suffering in general.

And I contend that affliction is a normal part of life.  Not only that, it can often be incredibly beneficial to one’s spiritual growth.  When I was in eighth grade Confirmation class, we watched the movie The Song of Bernadette, which was the story of how dirt poor and possibly learning disabled Saint Bernadette Soubirous witnessed a series of apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary in which she eventually revealed that she was the Immaculate Conception (coinciding perfectly with the Catholic Church’s 1854 declaration of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception).  Saint Bernadette of Lourdes eventually became a nun, and the Mother Superior of her convent apparently was on a personal mission to prove to Bernadette that just because she saw the Blessed Virgin Mary and as a result got to talk with a number of the eminent Catholic higher ups of the day did not mean that she herself was anything special.  According to the movie, this Mother Superior treated Bernadette harshly and unjustly.

I was an avid reader of Lives of the Saints and several biographies and autobiographies of saints at that time, and it turns out that Saint Bernadette’s experience was not unique.  Many of the saints had someone in their lives who seemed to go out of their way to be tough on them.  And while the saints on the receiving end of this treatment felt hurt by this initially, they would accept the pain, offer it up in union with Jesus and invite Him to use it to purify their souls, and in the end they would be thankful for those difficult people because they saw at least in part the fruit of such affliction of deeper purity and union with Jesus.  As a child I greatly admired the saints for this while at the same time finding this growing love of such affliction an incomprehensible mystery.

And then one day I found myself on the receiving end of it after many years of not having read much of the lives of the saints and not remembering that common detail about their experiences.  I remember mentally going through the standard options of what to do in a situation like that which included bristling, getting very offended, interrupting and telling the other person he had no right to say these things to me, walking out right then and there, and then making sure every one of our mutual friends got told what happened (from my greatly offended point of view).  Yes, all those options and more were briefly considered, but then I just knew deep inside that this was meant to be, even good and ordained by God, so instead I took it all in and let myself feel the pain without resenting it.

A year later I consider this experience to be a major high point of my spiritual life.  It worked out exactly the way it worked out with the many saints who had experienced this sort of thing before me.  The wound I received had a deeply purifying effect on my soul as deeply ingrained sin I hadn’t even realized was there got separated from me enough that I could see and abhor it for what it was and then confess it and experience it being washed away for good.  And it has made me long for more purification of this nature as I know that I have more sins and impurities still staining my soul.

And I have experienced similar little instances of being afflicted and humbled and purified since then, and often those instances have come about due to someone else’s blundering.  No one is on a specific mission to hurt me, but yes it happens.  And yes, I think this is a normal part of the spiritual life, and it can yield tremendous fruit.  Several Scripture passages immediately come to mind when I consider this matter.

Proverbs 20: 30  Stripes that wound scour away evil and strokes reach the innermost parts.

Proverbs 27: 6  Faithful are the wounds of a friend but deceitful are the kisses of an enemy.

Psalm 119: 71  Is is good for me that I was afflicted that I may learn Your statutes.

Proverbs 3: 11-12 (quoted in Hebrews 12: 5-6)  My son, do not reject the discipline of the Lord or loathe His reproof for whom the Lord loves He reproves, even as a father corrects the son in whom he delights.

Although words implying punishment are used in these passages I honestly do not see such affliction coming from the Lord (through other people) as being a punishment, certainly not in the negative sense that punishment is typically understood.  I think of it more as Jesus seeing into my soul and knowing that my heart’s desire is to be completely one with Him, and making the decision that He will do whatever it takes to fulfill that desire.  There are times when that “whatever it takes” means afflicting me or taking me through suffering.  But He is bringing me through this so that He can give me what I want.  It’s more like a sports coach being tough on an athlete, like making him run laps or do push-ups until it hurts because that is how the athlete will excel, which is what they both want.

That all sounds fine and good, but what about when the affliction is genuine injustice?  I used to worry about that more than I do now, but I have since realized that God can use even the gravest injustice for good.  One has only to consider the many martyrs whose blood turned out to be the seed of the Church.  Going back further there are many instances in the historical books of the Bible where God used an evil nation to chastise and purify His Chosen People.  He often would then chastise that evil nation because they got really carried away and acted out of sinfulness.  While I don’t claim to understand how that all works, I do believe that ultimately justice will be done so I really don’t have to worry about it.

Of interest to me is that regardless of whether I’m hurt as a result of a friend’s sincere intentions or an enemy’s outright wickedness, God has the power and authority to determine how to work through that affliction for my benefit as long as I am willing to submit to His work in my life.  He is not going to be overpowered or thwarted by someone else’s motives.  That is an assurance which has given me much inner peace.

Going back to my days as a student in the Christian school and a member of Christ the King parish, I do want to share about a genuine injustice that I did experience while I was there and how God worked through it for my good–if for no other reason than to say I have first hand experience that it can happen.

There was a certain teacher who for whatever reason did not like me very much and did a poor job of hiding it.  Favoritism was one of the injustices done in those early days and many of my friends experienced it in one form or another.  When this teacher directed a production of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, I ended up being one of only two students who were not given parts.  The other student was going to be away during the performance.  Even when I made a point to approach this teacher and suggest minor parts so that more people could participate, while she took my suggestion she still didn’t cast me.  I was an understudy to a major part but I didn’t see that as counting.

In general I never felt like this teacher was happy with me, she criticized me in front of the other students and was in general very tough on me.  My parents held several conferences with her about how she treated me to no avail.

I graduated from the Christian school and began public high school.  I vividly remember the day that the Holy Spirit informed me that it was time to forgive.  I was fourteen and delivering newspapers for the route my brother and I shared and fantasizing about how I was going to finally vindicate myself in the eyes of this teacher, make her see that I really was not only OK, but terrific, make her regret all the mean things she’d done to me over the past few years.  I was already doing quite well in school and would very soon become instrumental in starting a Bible club there as well as become a shining light in the local pro-life movement, far surpassing everyone’s expectations for ministry, even by Christ the King parish standards.

That quiet inner voice interrupted my fantasies of vindication bordering on revenge.  ”Nothing you do is going to vindicate you in her eyes; you need to let go of this and forgive her.”

I thought about this for a few minutes, long enough to realize that forgiveness would not come naturally or easily, pondering whether I really was ready to let go of my resentment.

“OK, I’ll do it,” I finally answered, “But how?”

It was a decision.  I prayed a prayer expressing my sincere intent to forgive this teacher and asking God to help me actually do it, and after that whenever I found myself replaying the old tapes of resentment, I would consciously stop that track and remind myself that I have forgiven her.  It took a few months but that resentment did fade and I quit thinking about proving myself to her.  When I started experiencing some genuine success both in ministry and academics it didn’t even occur to me to imagine ways in which I could make these things known to this teacher.  She just faded from my thoughts altogether.

Today what I remember most about this teacher is that she was a phenomenal literature and grammar teacher.  She taught us grammar all the way to ninth grade, something the local public schools had stopped doing by the end of sixth grade.  I must have diagrammed hundreds of sentences as homework assignments, not to mention writing weekly essays for years on all kinds of topics and reading serious classics by Shakespeare, Nathaniel Hawthorne, L. M. Montgomery, Jane Austen and other authors of that caliber by the time I turned fourteen.  I largely credit her for my current ability to write well (although I have since forgotten most of the complicated parts of sentences).

And I learned a very important lesson about forgiveness, which helped me to not only forgive subsequent wrongs done to me but to also be able to grasp more fully the depth of God’s extravagant and total forgiveness for me no matter how much my own sin offended Him.  Overall, I feel like I came out ahead.  Yes I suffered, but I definitely grew, and I was also free from the devastation of holding onto resentment and bitterness for years and years afterwards, something for which I am extremely grateful.

With all this reflection about how affliction–being deeply wounded by other people in our lives–is not only a normal part of life, but can be a true gift in terms of the fruit it can yield in the life and health of our souls, I do feel the need to insert a few caviats so as to not be misunderstood.  I am speaking about how God can bring a greater good out of difficult experiences we have and this in no way means I condone such suffering caused by genuine evil or injustice.  When we see genuine injustice being done to others, we should defend them and attempt to stop it.  When it is done to us, there are legitimate and healthy ways to confront such injustice and this can be done with the purpose of restoring the perpetrator to a place of not committing such sins.  I am definitely not saying we should all just take every kind of injustice on the chin and never defend ourselves or our children.  Nor am I condoning any sort of willful intent on the part of church leaders to use their power to engage in any sort of “I’m being cruel to be kind” strategy in their dealings with those entrusted to their care.  I am saying that I recognize that while there is an ideal standard for how Christians ought to behave towards one another, Christians will often deviate from following it for the simple reason that we are still sinners and works in progress, and that there will be times when such deviation will wound me.  There will also be times when I will be the one causing pain to another because of my own sin and perhaps it will fall on another to bring this to my attention, which can also cause me pain.  In other words, stuff happens and people get hurt, and that is part of life.  We all have choices about how we will respond when it’s us getting wounded, and I think it helps to not get too bent out of shape about it in the first place so that we can respond out of love and out of obedience to the Holy Spirit rather than out of our own hurt and pride.

I just finished reading the book Forming Intentional Disciples by Sherry Weddell.  Not only did it inspire me in a “That’s it!” kind of way, but it reminded me of an earlier essay I’d written called Why I don’t like altar calls expressing my discomfort with some of the ways I’ve seen evangelism done.

There was definitely a need for personal conversion aspect to this which the Holy Spirit addressed so beautifully in the months following.

But I couldn’t shake the belief that there was a core of truth in what I’d written which at some point needed to be addressed for my own peace of mind, especially considering I do have a deep rooted desire to be involved in evangelism, something which was also revealed to me several months later.  Although I have not fully discerned this, it is quite possible, even likely, that the Holy Spirit has seen fit to give me the gift or charism of evangelism.

So when there is something about evangelism that makes you genuinely uncomfortable, even after you’ve dealt with the part of the discomfort that had to do with the need for further conversion on your part, you really, really want to address this so that you can feel free to fully engage in the use of such a wonderful spiritual gift.

Reading the book, especially after some other experiences and lessons I have learned, did exactly that for me.

There are problems with how evangelism is done (or not done) in both the Catholic and Evangelical traditions that are longstanding and which I have witnessed and participated in throughout my adult life.  They can be summed up, and admitedly oversimplified, in this way.

Catholics tend to believe conversion happens by osmosis (helped along with sacramental pixie dust) and therefore there is no need for evangelism.  The Catholic Church does not teach this, but there is a lot of Catholic practice that would make you think it does.  Catholics in general actually get rather uncomfortable with the whole idea of evangelism, or even discussing the inner workings of their relationship with Jesus (if they even have one) amongst themselves not to mention people outside the Church.  Along with this Catholics tend to assume that if someone is attending Mass, then conversion has happened.  In other words, they assume conversion has occurred too early in the journey.

Evangelicals do not assume conversion just because someone shows up at church (they’ve learned something from their members who grew up as unconverted Catholics or mainline Protestants).  However there is a tendency to assume conversion has happened when there is a response to an altar call or the recitation of a sinner’s prayer regardless of whether their life afterwards shows any of the actual fruit of conversion.  Often there is little to no follow up to determine how the “convert” is doing in terms of actually living the faith.  The Evangelical Christians I know do not actually teach this, but just like with the Catholics, sometimes practice poorly represents actual teaching.  There is also a tendency to force a decision to convert way too early without first determining where someone is at in their spiritual journey, and as a result the effort can come across as coercive even when that is not the intent.

Sherry Weddell writes about five distinct thresholds of conversion in her book, and emphasizes that in evangelizing it is very important to discern where the person we are speaking to is at, because where they are should impact how we approach sharing our faith with them.  I think that is what I was doing such a poor job of expressing in my own essay about altar calls–I had some vague sense that conversion doesn’t happen overnight (or in the ten minutes it takes for an Evangelical preacher to outline the “Gospel message,”) but didn’t understand that it actually takes place in predictable stages (the thresholds Ms. Weddell has come up with are based on many conversations with people who have undergone complete conversion as adults).

Briefly, the five thresholds are trust (having some connection with Jesus that they trust–if that is not in place then you as the evangelist are the one to build it for them), curiosity, openness to change, seeking (as one going on a spiritual quest), and finally active discipleship (the part where they actually decide to drop their nets and follow Jesus wholeheartedly).  The book of course goes into further detail on each one.

It is very important to respect which threshold someone we are talking to about spiritual matters is at and not attempt to force them to the next threshold before they are ready.  This takes immense trust in the Holy Spirit to actually move deep within souls as well as a clear recognition that we ourselves never convert anyone–it is always a work of God, always miraculous.

With that said, a key part of respecting someone is to recognize that they have a right to hear the Great Story of Jesus and we should be ready to share it.  I even learned that there is a fancy Catholic word for this, called kerygma.  And we need to be ready to tell this story.  I actually felt Weddell’s way of presenting the kerygma in the book was rather weak and diffuse (probably because she was writing more about sharing it than actually sharing it), however that is not a problem for me as I am getting training on that from another source and will simply use what I’m learning that is solid and rich.

Once someone converts, or just as importantly, to facilitate their conversion, something else needs to be in place in the faith community which will embrace them.  That something is discipleship,  and just like conversion, discipleship does not happen unconsciously or by itself (or if it does that is clearly a miraculous exception, not a normative way to be counted on).  It has to be intentional.  After brutally identifying the devastation a longstanding lack of discipleship has had on the Catholic Church at the parish level (devastation I am quite familiar with), Ms. Weddell goes into some of the nuts and bolts of what intentional discipleship looks like mostly by sharing anecdotes about what some of the parishes are doing to make discipleship a priority and the good fruit it is bearing.  One of the churches she features is the parish of my childhood, Christ the King parish in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  Towards the end of the book she suggests a bit of methodology but it is clear that this part is very much in development.  If you are a Catholic and in a position to help make your parish one that practices intentional discipleship, you are likely to be developing things from the ground up of course drawing on our rich heritage.  That may sound overwhelming.  To me, it is exciting, the sort of pioneering work that I live for.

The book is written to a Catholic audience and as such, every Catholic (or former Catholic) who has ever felt that there was something important missing from parish life should read this book.  For me, much of it was like reading my own thoughts, including suggestions for things that I have already begun implementing in my parish in the few months since I became the Director of Religious Education (DRE) there.

I think Evangelical Christians, especially pastors and other church leaders, should read this book as well.  Ten percent of Evangelicals in the United States are former Catholics, and the book does an amazing job of explaining what has been going on with this mass migration.  Both Catholics and Evangelicals tend to completely misinterpret what is going on there.  Catholics have a tendency to dismiss the decision to leave as something along the lines of that person just wasn’t cut out of the right cloth (didn’t have what it takes to really follow Jesus), and variations of this theme include “they just are looking for entertainment,” “they couldn’t handle the hard teachings,” “they were like those in John 6 who left because they couldn’t handle living as radically as what Jesus was calling for,” or “they are living in outright rebellion against God and His Church.”  Evangelicals generally assume that the reasons that the former Catholics left were because they disagreed with certain Catholic doctrines, and that assumption is fueled by the fact that in general it is easier to discuss things like doctrine on an intellectual level than go through the vulnerability of baring your heart about your emotional reasons for leaving, so it’s doctrine that most often gets shared and discussed.

According to research cited in the book, the number one reason people leave the Catholic Church is that they feel their spiritual needs were not being met.  Evangelicals also assume that the reason their spiritual needs weren’t being met is because of issues with Catholic doctrine.  While Evangelicals will undoubtedly disagree with certain Catholic teachings for the foreseeable future, that is not the fundamental problem with why Catholics’ spiritual needs weren’t being met.  The fundamental problem was that discipleship was not happening in their corner, if it was happening in their parish at all.  I think pinpointing more precisely where their formerly Catholic congregants have come from as well as what the Catholic Church is doing to address this issue would be valuable information for an Evangelical pastor and the congregants themselves.

Mostly, it’s a wake-up call to Catholics, especially those in leadership. We really do have all we need to make disciples and see genuine conversions in large numbers as the Early Church once did, but it’s not enough to simply talk about all the great things we have.  We have to use them, and we ourselves need to be evangelized.  We ourselves need to be converted.  There are numerous people out in the world who are hungry for God, hungry for a genuine relationship with Jesus Christ.  Not only do we need to reach them, but we need to make our churches places where they are welcomed and nurtured and supported in their walk with God at all its stages.  Forming Intentional Disciples provides some wonderful inspiration and guidelines for getting started in that endeavor.

Generally I consider this blog to be a fairly random collection of my thoughts, stories and experiences.  I’m not sure that there is much of an underlying theme other than me.  You could probably categorize it as mostly spiritual.  My primary interest is in following Jesus, and the spiritual life that results when we do.  Being Roman Catholic, I generally look at things through the Roman Catholic perspective and I adhere to Roman Catholic teachings.

There are a lot of Catholic blogs out there.  One particular genre of Catholic blogging that is rather popular is apologetic writing.  No, I don’t mean apologizing; I mean all manner of defending the Catholic faith and/or refuting doctrines that are not Catholic.  And I recently decided that this blog will definitely not be an apologetics blog.  I may delve into it occasionally but I’m not here to write out ironclad eloquent defenses of the Catholic faith.

For one, many have already done so, and they have produced very good material and I see no reason to replicate it.  If you’re looking for good apologetics, check out the writings of Jimmy Akin, Scott Hahn, Mark Shea, Patrick Madrid, Steven Ray, Catholic Bridge and Matt’s Catholic Apologetics Page, to name just a few.  You can look up just about any topic and see what these various apologists have to say about it.  These are some of the names I look up when people ask me Catholic doctrinal questions because I don’t always have the answer.  You can also look up the Catechism of the Catholic Church and any encyclical you want online and get it straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak.

Another reason is that while I enjoy doctrinal sparring every so often, for the most part I find it doesn’t seem to accomplish much.  I’m not going to change my mind and neither is my sparring partner.  If we can both agree that this is a fun mental sport and keep it fun and respectful, then we can have a good time with it.  But how many people will actually admit that their arguments about doctrine are a fun activity rather than a life and death, truth vs. lies intense and all important affair?  Because the topic of conversation is something as deeply personal as faith, my own doctrinal arguments with loved ones have at times ended up with hurt feelings all around, and it’s just not something I see as a positive thing.

A third reason is that personally, I’m far more interested in evangelism and discipleship than I am in apologetics.  There’s a place for apologetics, but it doesn’t strike me as my particular calling.  A lot of people view apologetics as evangelism, but the two are very different.  Apologetics refers to defending the faith to people who for whatever reason oppose the faith.  It could refer to defending the Catholic faith to Protestants who raise their objections based on how they read Scripture or it could refer to defending the faith to Atheists who don’t even believe there is a God, and a whole lot in between.  Evangelism, on the other hand, refers to sharing the faith with people who are not yet fully converted.  In some cases, they are not converted at all; in other cases, their faith has grown somewhat cold, or they just need to experience deeper conversion.  The point of evangelism isn’t to get into arguments or prove the other wrong, but to explore with them where they are at in their walk with God and provide something they need to take the next step in drawing closer to God, in becoming more fully converted.  By that definition, I’m as much in need of being evangelized as anyone else I might talk to about my faith because I can always grow in fidelity to God and to His Church.

Given that I prefer to focus on evangelism, my fourth reason is that it’s pretty rare that someone becomes convinced and therefore converted thanks to intellectual arguments.  People decide to take the plunge and place their trust in Jesus largely from the inspiration and working of the Holy Spirit and often times it winds up seeming like a very emotional, even irrational, decision.  People also convert from Protestantism to Catholicism (or vice versa) based more on what happens in the heart than in the mind.  Their life experiences play a huge role in these decisions as well as how they perceive God to be working in other people’s lives.  Now people who have more or less already decided to convert–and they are now seeking confirmation that they are indeed making the right decision–will then often turn to apologetics for such confirmation.  So good apologetics is very important.  But that’s rarely where the journey begins.

Conversion is a very personal matter, and faith has a deeply personal dimension as well.  And let me clarify that I do not mean by this that we should keep quiet about either.  When you share your faith, you in a very real sense wear your heart on your sleeve and that is a very vulnerable position to be in.  We are commanded to share our faith anyway.  I have found from experience that getting into doctrinal arguments is completely counterproductive to the vulnerable act of actually sharing my faith.  I’ve at times shared something deeply personal with another Christian about what God was doing in my life only to have some part or all of my experience refuted or demanded to be justified because it didn’t quite match the other’s doctrinal views.  Or, the listener tried to reframe my story in terms that do match.  I suppose I’ve been guilty of this myself.  I think in general we humans do not like having our carefully formed theories challenged by someone else’s real life experience.

When I write here, I don’t really want to be defending or justifying what I’m talking about.  I just want to share.  Mainly I want to talk about my own experience with God and with faith and with Catholic teaching and practice, and sometimes talk about my experience with Protestant (in particular Evangelical) belief and practice since I encounter it so regularly.  I have my beliefs about which is right and which is wrong when there is a conflict and it won’t be hard to pick up on that here, but I don’t really want to focus on that.  I’m not always going to place a value judgment on something even if I have such an opinion about it.

My opinion is that in the end the truth will speak for itself, especially when I am dedicating my life to living out the truth, so I don’t have to harp on it at every turn, tempting as that is sometimes.  I also believe that when it comes to living the Catholic faith, in particular Catholic teaching about Jesus having established the Catholic Church as the One, Holy, Apostolic Church which alone carries the fullness of Truth, the important thing here is not so much to go around bragging about it, but to actually behave the way a representative of such a lofty Church ought to behave.  That is much more difficult and worthwhile, in my opinion, than saying a bunch of words about what our Church teaches about this.  There is a place for the words to be sure, but I think generally fewer people should be saying them and instead focusing on living them.

I want to focus on living my faith and sharing my story and not so much on defending or justifying what I believe.  What you’ll read here is generally the raw story, usually after some time and reflection (this is a public blog after all and not my private journal).  You’ll read as much about how I feel about something as what I think or believe about it.  My goal is to always conform to Church teaching, and to never publicly dissent from it, but sometimes the process of conforming can be a bit messy and involve some pretty strong feelings.  If I’m talking about some major Catholic doctrine or practice, I will try to include links to other articles which delve more deeply into the apologetics or catechesis of these things, so those who want to study more after reading what I have to say about it can easily do so.  If you disagree with what I believe, that is fine, and you’re welcome to share it, but I’d be much more interested in your life story and experiences behind why you believe the way you do rather than a mere repetition of what your own religious tradition teaches.  In other words, I’d really like to share on a different level than apologetics and I hope you do too.