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Contents © 2006
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.

CONFESSIONS
April 2006

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LOW GRADE EVANGELIZATION

My parents came into town for the baptism of our fifth child. My father had recently been in Mexico to give a presentation on kids and character. While there, he saw a billboard advertising his talk. Right across from it was another billboard, advertising something via the presence of a scantily-clad woman. "Our culture is dying," one man told him afterwards. "Girls used to be virgins when they married. People used to have big families. Now, they don't."

The big family may be a pretty low-grade form of evangelization. A friend of mine scoffs when it's held up as some sort of credential of fidelity - conception, after all, need not be a particularly pious act. But the bearing and raising of offspring, the thing which makes a civilization endure, does seem to be increasingly associated with a religious attitude about life. (I hear the Muslims are reproducing.) It's a religious attitude opposed to the simply material attitude which places sex on the billboard instead of sex in the marriage bed; sex as economic exchange of stimulation instead of fruitful union.

"Left to our own devices, we will destroy ourselves," said my mother while she was here. She was responding to the story, broken by Lancet and related by the BBC in January, that "prenatal selection and selective abortion was causing the loss of 500,000 girls a year" in India. You hear about similar goings on in China. Money seems to be at the heart of it. If money is king, then you don't want a girl. But what happens when a generation of men notices that there aren't enough women to go around? What happens to the culture when money is king?

Who am I to lecture the impoverished, I who have been given so much? I hesitate to get into the argument, so I'll stop lecturing. Lord knows, I'm as tempted as the next man to make a god out of mammon. But the kids help to curb that tendency. The willingness to take them on does indicate a kind of commitment to something beyond oneself. And that, however low-grade, is a kind of evangelization.

Evangelization has been on my mind of late, ever since I read about the brouhaha over the casting of a gay man in the film End of the Spear. The story of the movie, sadly eclipsed by the casting story, is amazing. A group of Protestant missionaries killed in Ecuador; their wives going in and converting the very people who killed their husbands; a generation of Protestant missionaries inspired by the story and heading out into the world. It's been on my mind since I started hearing about Baptist families heading over to China to spread the Gospel.

I suspect that the Catholic and Evangelical notions of missionary work differ in some important ways. The Catholic is perhaps not so worried that those who do not know Christ and accept Him as personal Lord and Savior will burn for all eternity. The Catholic may have more of an interest in the transformation of culture, and not be quite as focused on the moment of acceptance. But by God, those Baptists are out there, young couples with young kids, heading into peril for the sake of the Gospel. Where are we? Where am I?

Bishop Edward Slattery of Tulsa was recently named as the representative from the Americas on the supreme committee of pontifical missionary societies. In the CNS story on the event, Slattery struck a grim note. "We are failing," he said. "Even after 2,000 years, we are still really just beginning evangelization. Only 17 percent of the world's population is Catholic." The story went on: "Bishop Slattery said there is a general 'weakening of the missionary spirit' due to secularization and to a misguided form of individualism that has made 'a virtue of minding your own business' even when the good of another is at stake."

Yes, that's me. Regard for my fellow man's religious freedom, for the force of culture, for the delicacies of conscience, for the subtle workings of the Spirit, for the possibility that my fellow man may in fact be holier than I, even if outside the Church -- all combining to create a great silence. I work on passing the faith to my children. This is my first duty; this is as it should be. This is, in its own small way, preserving a culture. But I have not seen, first-hand, the change that faith discovered can make in another man's life. And that has left me, in turn, wondering about the possibility of such change. After all, I have made these accusations against myself before, and what has changed in me since then?

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