Evangelization is Responsibility of All Catholics:
The Message of the first North American Institute for Catholic Evangelization (NAICE), held in Portland, Oregon, July 9-12, 2003.

The Secretariat for Evangelization, U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, provided a conference for national, diocesan, and parish leaders in evangelization to come together, learn more about evangelization in the Church today, and reflect on their various ministries through the lens of evangelization. The Institute emphasized evangelization as the "essential mission" of the Church, not just as the responsibility of one person or one department, but as the responsibility of all Catholics.

The Institute drew about 470 participants, including bishops, pastors, heads of religious communities, directors of national and diocesan evangelization ministries, and parish ministers from the United States, Canada, Latin America and Great Britain.

Terry Modica of Good News Ministries (see photos) participated in this Institute. Below is a brief outline of speakers and what they covered. (Click on their photos to see them in a separate window, full size.)

Theodore Cardinal McCarrick
Archbishop of Washington, DC
The Call to a New Evangelization

How to preach the Gospel:
1. Know what it says
2. Tell it like it is
3. Speak from the heart, from your life. Let it be alive in you. Like Mary Magdalene, we must be able to say, "I have seen the Lord!" Be a model of e faith

Rev. Eric H.F. Law
Episcopalian priest
Evangelization & North American Culture

The Church has always emphasized the preaching ministry, and thus we've come to evangelize much more by speaking than by listening. Preaching must be based on listening first.

To be effective evangelizers:
1. Ask yourself: How has the Gospel affected me?
2. Know when to speak and when to listen.
3. Be authentic, passionate, humble
4. Be re-evangelized as you evangelize
5. It's not what you say but what you do that counts
6. Create an environment that first listens, then opens others to shift from being heard to listening to you
7. Realize that it's not you who converts people, it's God

Sr. Angela Ann Zukouski, MHSH
Author of "The Gospel in Cyberspace"
Creating a Media Lens for Evangelization

• The heart and mission of the Church is communication.
• We need to capture the imagination of those we want to evangelize.
• Communication technology is a "new culture" that is being formed and influencing the world, whether we get involved or not
• Media planning needs to be part of pastoral planning
• Evangelizers are "artisans of faith" - artists help us break out of old ways of viewing the world
• We need "imagineers" of the Gospel

Bishop Wilton D. Gregory
Then-President of the US Catholic Conference of Bishops
Homily: Finding a Worthy Person in Today's World

From where do Christians come? Missionaries & Catholic parents, but these are not enough! We are living in an evangelized society full of people who need to be evangelized. They are open to the hope and love found in Christ. They are looking for purpose in life.

Dr. Carole Eipers
Director of Catechetics for William H. Sadlier, Inc.
Catechesis: Evangelizing Moments

• Evangelizers must be catechized to proclaim the Gospel faithfully
• Those evangelized must be catechized
• Those who are catechized must evangelize others
• Obstacles to evangelization are (1) divisiveness in the Church and (2) not enough resources are being given to evangelization in finances or time

Archbishop Adam Exner, OMI
of Vancouver BC in Canada
Homily

St. Benedict's Rule stresses:
• Pursue holiness from deep love of Christ
• Prayerfully discern what Christ wants you to do (75% of Catholics don't think they should be evangelizers, because they think their faith must be kept private and that they shouldn't impose beliefs on others)
• Adult catechesis should be the top priority in every parish
• We are called to be distributors of hope

Dr. Robert McCarty
Executive Director for the National Federation for Catholic Youth Ministry
Catholic Youth Evangelization - A Method to the Madness

The spirituality of young people:
• See www.youthandreligion.org
• It's "me and God"
• They want a genuine experience of faith
• They want to hear more from genuinely faith-filled adults
• They know more about what the Church is against than what the Church stands for
• The parish community should be a place of love and inclusion for youth
• Youth ministers must be Good News in the flesh
• To evangelize them, join them on their journeys in personal relationships
• They're looking for a noble adventure: call them to discipleship
• They want to learn faith skills

Fr. Brett Hoover, CSP
Editor of bustedhalo.com
& Michelle Miller
Executive Director for the National Catholic Young Adult Ministry Assoc.
Beyond Safe Space - Evangelizing Young Adults

• Young adults are 40% of all Catholics
• Half don't know what Vatican Council II was
• 90% still claim to be Catholic, but only 41% are engaged in Church life
• They practice a self-defined Catholicism - what brings value to their lives. They need to be shown the value of the traditional Church
• Meet them where they are at and invite them to more
• A relationship with Jesus leads them to a relationship with the Church
• When they reach the point where they realize there's more to life than themselves, evangelization means showing them how the Church reaches outward into the world
• They want a sense of belonging to community and need peers in the Church
• They want quiet prayerful experiences because their world is so busy

Msgr. Ray Gerard East
Director of the Office of Black Catholics and Vicar for Evangelization
Disciples In Action

• Black Catholics have their own faith expressions that must be respected and nurtured for effective evangelization
• There's a crisis of imagination that's holding the Church back in its efforts to evangelize the world

Fr. Ronald Rolheiser, OMI
Author, teacher, and
General Councillor for Canada for the Oblates of Mary Immaculate
Creating an Evangelizing Spirituality

• Church programs are better than ever but church attendance is shrinking, because we have a missionary problem: We don't know how to get people onto church.
• Read the signs of the times: What is God saying to us about the Church today?
• The Church's imagination has run dry, it's time for a new romantic imagination to be enflamed in the Church (intellectual imagination is where we're strong). People need to fall in love with Christianity again. Gospel artists are needed to stir the imagination. We're waiting for a new St. Francis or St. Clare or Thomas Merton to awaken the Church's imagination, and it will probably come from today's youth, someone who is wild enough to do it, because refiring the imagination means taking risks.
• We're waiting in the Upper Room, waiting as a group, to be clothed by a new power from on high. God is the one who called us to the Upper Room. This is a dark night of the soul for the Church, not a place of punishment for doing something wrong. We're waiting for the imagination of the Church to be fired up again. The Church doesn't yet have the imagination, for example, to figure out how to do with lay ministers what the Church used to do with religious orders.

Fr. Frank DeSiano, CSP, & Dr. Susan Blum Gerding, co-authors of
"Lay Ministers, Lay Disciples: Evangelizing Power in the Parish"
Breaking Open the Word of God

• Hearing the Word should cause a response of conversion. It helps us die to self and rise in Christ
• Depth of conversion shows up in the sanctuary of our lives
• We need to learn to access the Word in such a way that we can't resist responding