Get Out of Your Comfort Zone

 

Do you want your faith to come alive, be vibrant and truly enrich your heart and soul? Or are you fine just the way you are – Mass most weekends; confession every once in a while; parish picnics, Lenten fish fries, maybe; tossing a few dollars in the collection basket. Soul searching will tell you that’s not enough. The New Evangelization calls us to renew our faith so that we can share it. Before one can evangelize, one must be evangelized. A disciple of Christ must continually renew his or her faith. The disciple who then shares the faith is an evangelist. The Church is called to renew her faith in every age and at the same time proclaim it: The Church is an evangelizer, but she begins by being evangelized herself. This means that she has a constant need of being evangelized, if she wishes to retain freshness, vigor and strength in order to proclaim the Gospel. And that freshness, invigoration and renewed strength begins with you! Secularism wants to confine faith to Sunday. The New Evangelization involves the proclamation and demonstration that the Christian faith is the only fully valid response to the problems and hopes that life poses to every person and society. The New Evangelization offers hope, not in a program or philosophy but in the person of Jesus Christ, who comforts those who are burdened.

 Get Involved! 

Do not simply be a “consumer” of the Church, be the Church! Good Shepherd hosts and enables 53 lay ministries or “Connect Groups” which are ways to kick-start your own evangelization; plus there are dozens of Small Church Communities at Good Shepherd. By bringing your own precious time and talent to bear within a group working together toward a goal you are an evangelizer!

Just because you’ve expressed an interest in a lay ministry by checking a box on an information form, don’t think you’ve done your part. Don’t wait for someone one else going through those forms to call you someday – take the initiative to call or ask someone you know who volunteers in that same ministry how to get involved. Whether it’s Greeting, Ushering, Archangel Moms, Prison Ministry, being a Lector, or something even simpler – waiting means doing nothing and doing nothing isn’t enlivening your faith or evangelizing. The New Evangelization does not seek to invite people to experience only one moment of conversion and “get comfortable.” Rather to experience the lifelong process of conversion: to draw all people into a deeper relationship with God, to participate in the sacramental life of the Church, to develop a mature conscience, to sustain one’s faith through ongoing catechesis, and to integrate one’s faith into all aspects of one’s life – to become the Church! Get out of your comfort zone.