Amy Welborn profiles my parish’s evangelization efforts in her ongoing series on Catholic evangelization at her blog – be sure to check it out (and read her other posts on Catholic evangelization – I love hearing what other people are doing in this apostolate).
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I began my study of the Catholic faith in 1991 as an Evangelical Protestant, converting to the Catholic Church in 1993.
I serve as head of evangelization at St. John Neumann parish in Gaithersburg, MD, and am cofounder of Little Flowers Foundation, a non-profit whose mission is to assist Catholic families seeking to adopt children with special-needs.
I regularly speak to parish groups and other organizations on a variety of topics - contact me to schedule a talk for your group.
You can email me at eric@ericsammons.com.
That’s really cool, Eric. (And, no, I’m not being snarky, as usual.) My dad recently sent me an article from Homiletic and Pastoral Review (”The Urgency of Evangelization) talking about how we’ve sort of succumbed to ‘indifferentism’ (at least, I think that was the word he used), basically how one denomination is as good as any other. But of course, that begs the question, how do we go about evangelizing then? I like the idea of those Inquiry meetings. Does your parish also do training sessions for people who want to evangelize, but sometimes have trouble putting 2 coherent thoughts together?
Gretchen,
We don’t do training sessions, but that’s not a bad idea. But when we go door-to-door I do give a quick training to everyone. I basically just tell people a few things:
1) Don’t think you have to know everything to evangelize. Most people don’t have theological questions, but instead their questions reflect deeper personal issues. It is more important to respect the person asking the question than it is to answer it.
2) It’s okay to say “I don’t know, I’ll get back to you” (as long as you do get back to them).
3) Don’t be afraid to invite someone to become Catholic or just visit the parish. Most people freak out at that prospect, but I’ve found that very rarely are people offended, and only if you ask can you get a positive response.