The term evangelization used to be reserved exclusively for the work of missionaries in distant countries, but recently it has become something of a Catholic buzzword. Parishes now regularly offer evangelization programs, ordinary Catholics are encouraged to embrace their call to evangelize, and authors write books about how to evangelize our family, friends, and neighbors. So what is evangelization, who is it for, and how is it to be carried out?
The root of the word (evangel) is Gospel or Good News, and so evangelization can be thought of as “Gospelization,” saturating a person or culture in the Good News of Jesus. St. Paul VI called evangelization “the carrying forth of the Good News to every sector of the human race so that by its strength it may enter into the hearts of men and renew the human race” (Evangelii Nuntinadi, sec.18). This activity is not only meant for the natives of distant and remote places. It’s meant for you and me.
St. John Paul II explained that there really are three groups of people that evangelization is meant to reach. The first is people who have not heard the Gospel yet or who have always rejected it. This can include the tribal peoples of a remote island, but it also just might include your next-door neighbor. The second group are active and practicing Christians. We all need Jesus to enter more deeply into our hearts and renew us. A priest once told me that he didn’t get the recent focus on evangelization because everything the Church does is evangelization, and in this sense he was correct. Ordinary pastoral care at the parish is an aspect of evangelization. The third group is the people who live in a traditionally Christian culture and might even have been baptized but live a life far removed from the Gospel. This third group also might live next door to you, go to school with you, work with you, or even be related to you.
Evangelization, then, is for every single person. Its goal is to introduce a relationship with the Lord, to deepen that relationship where it already exists, and to reignite that relationship where it has gone cold. Every person we meet is meant for the Gospel. They were created for a relationship with their Creator, and like the Sower in the parable, their Creator has sown seeds of the Gospel throughout their lives. All of them are ready for us to introduce or reintroduce them to Jesus.
So how do we do it? The Church lists five means of evangelization. “Proclamation, witness, teaching, sacraments, love of neighbor: all of these aspects are the means by which the one Gospel is transmitted, and they constitute the essential elements of evangelization itself.” (General Directory for Catechesis, sec. 46). These are the means by which we can bring every sector of the human race into close relationship with Jesus Christ.
What is most striking about these five means is that only one of them, sacraments, requires ordained leadership, and only one other, teaching, is closely but by no means exclusively linked with ordination. These means can and should be employed by every one of us.
The primary place in which the average disciple of Jesus evangelizes is by witnessing within our relationships. In Evangelii Gaudium, Pope Francis said that individual lay evangelization looks like witness within conversation, within the dynamics of friendship. St. John Paul II applied this same dynamic to kids saying, “Children, too have an apostolate of their own. In their own measure they are true living witnesses of Christ among their companions” (Christifideles Laici, sec. 12).
Witness frequently is the silent example of a Christian life lived differently than a worldly one, but frequently enough it calls for words. When Christians live differently, we should expect others to ask, often in very unpolished ways, why is your live so different from everyone else’s?
Our answer is the opportunity for proclamation. Simply put, proclamation is a clear statement that Jesus is Lord. It can take on different forms in different contexts, but it always clearly points to Jesus by name as the answer to the deepest questions and the reason for our joy as disciples. As Christians, we all have what St. John Paul II called “the noble obligation of working to bring all men throughout the whole world to hear and accept the divine message of salvation” (Christifideles Laici, sec. 3). The Church even articulates the means for doing this. As it turns out, by embracing our call to evangelize others, we allow ourselves to be more deeply evangelized in the process.