It's Our Watch!
Mark Roberti ,
Director of Stewardship, Heartland Parishes of Ellis County

Our Church teaches us that She exists to evangelize. Evangelization means seeking to convert individuals and society – both-- by the divine power of the Gospel itself.

During the Easter season, through Pentecost, and culminating with Trinity Sunday, the Sunday Gospels spoke about baptism, conversion, and evangelization week after week.  Jesus tells us, “Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have command you.” That’s called the “great commission.” Each of us is called to share in this evangelization ministry.  That is our baptismal call.  

The truth is, if a ministry of our Church is not an evangelizing ministry, then the essence of the ministry itself must be questioned.  Evangelization is not just an item on the Church’s agenda.   Evangelization is the agenda.  

In early Christianity and even to this present day, there have been Catholics willing to boldly live, and often proclaim, the words of Jesus, to stand strong in the face of persecutions, to cross the oceans to spread the faith, and – yes – even to die for our faith.  Thousand and thousands, even millions of people have died in order to spread the Catholic faith.  It was their watch, so to speak.  The future of Christianity, our faith today, depended on them.  And they took their watch very seriously.  

Now it is our watch!  We’re called to step up to the plate.  How do you feel that we are doing?  

You know, there have seen some incredible changes in our culture during your lifetime.  The older you are, the more you have seen.  Some of those changes, especially the material and technological changes, have simply been phenomenal.   

But, during this same period, there have also been many changes in our morals and values where, even though our Church has held the line doctrinally, many of us as Catholics have decided we can pick and choose those components of our faith that we want to believe.  In so doing, we have fallen short of our calling as disciples.  This failure to stand united in the breach has been very harmful to both our Church and our culture.       

In the old days, the Catholic Church didn’t use the word discipleship, but as a Church, we practiced it.  We built churches, schools, hospitals, orphanages, and social service networks that were the glory of the world. 

In just a few years, I’ll be fifty.  It wasn’t my generation, or the generations that have followed me, that did those great works.  It was the generations that preceded us.  Mostly they were immigrant, or children of immigrants.  They didn’t have a lot, but they gave of the first fruits of what they had.  They were stewards (though we didn’t use the word steward). 

My generation and those that followed – and all of us reading this article today -- are still reaping some of the fruits from prior generations.  But are we doing remotely enough to replant the harvest from which we have reaped?  

In just over the six months that I have been in the Heartland Parishes, my primary goal has been to get our faithful to understand the true essence of Catholic stewardship, because living as disciples, living as Christian stewards, is the root of our calling as a Christian people.  By the very witness of our lives, people should be able to figure out that were Catholics. 

Somehow, as a Church, we have to re-plant the seeds of our faith.  But for some reason, many of us are not taking the initiative.   And you know what?  We risk losing our most precious treasure… the “Catholicism” of our children and grandchildren.

We have allowed ourselves to be drawn in by the material things, the good things, the convenient things that our way of life has been able to provide us.  But we have lost sight of the terrible price we are paying for them…our children’s faith.

Let me just frame the contemporary Catholic “character” – this tradeoff we have made -- in terms of three questions:
    1)      What does it say about us as individuals and as a culture, that we     would spend so much of our time in recreation, in shopping, in sports,   in entertainment and other non-essential activities…that we have so very little time to spend with God, as individuals and as   families, in prayer and worship?

      2)      What does it say about you and me, that we are so busy and so     involved in so many things, that we can’t find the time to contribute      more of our talents and abilities to making our Church a strong, vibrant, and evangelizing Church? I mean how many new Catholic Churches , schools, and hospitals, are going up, or social service networks being developed?  Or are we seeing more of a trend going in the other direction?

      3)      What does it say about us, as a faith community that we will make multi-year commitments to purchase homes, vehicles, and boats -- or spend a great deal of our income on conveniences like vacations, cable TV, cell phones, the Internet, and a myriad of other things – and yet a good numbers of us won’t make a pledge – or a truly sacrificial pledge -- to our Church?       

Stewardship, giving the first fruits of our time, talent, and treasure back to God, is the first half, and very core, of discipleship.  And to be a Christian disciple, a certain – and unmistakable – conversion needs to take place in our hearts.  

If you honestly think that Catholic stewardship is simply about money, I’d like to gently suggest that you are resisting God’s grace.  You don’t understand stewardship.  Stewardship, like evangelization, is about changing people’s hearts! Make no mistake about it, conversion is an act of God’s grace.  We can’t make it happen.  We can’t force it.  But we can – and should – be open to it. 

Within the first months that I began working within our Heartland Parishes one of our pastors asked me, “how often can we talk about stewardship? Some of our people are already sick and tired of hearing about it.”  To him, I responded,  (and I respectfully respond to those of you who feel that way) that “we should be willing to stop talking about stewardship when we are willing to stop talking about conversion…when we are willing to stop challenging people to develop a deeper, stronger relationship with Jesus Christ”

Each one of you probably has family members – people very dear to you -- who don’t come to Church or do not practice our faith.  Some have left the Church and gone elsewhere.  They never really got the Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Easter Sunday resurrection message.  They didn’t really live their faith, so they lost it.  They have lost the most important thing in their lives… and they don’t even realize it. 

What went wrong? Maybe, just maybe, they didn’t see in us, as Church, a passionate Christian witness that they felt was worth practicing.   Maybe, the truths we teach have been so disregarded by so many of our faithful for so long that they have seemingly become almost indistinguishable from what our culture promotes as a whole?

The point I am trying to make in this article is that it’s our watch now!  We are on duty.   And, what happens, or doesn’t happen, to the Catholic faith in the next 50 – 100 years depends, to a great extent, upon how we rise – or don’t rise – to the occasion. What are we going to do? What is each of us going to do?

You know, the Bible is pretty clear that we are going to go be held accountable for our actions.  What I wish it were clearer on – or that we understood better -- is that we will also be held responsible for our inactions.  Living our faith… that’s stewardship. Promoting our faith…that’s evangelization. We need to do both…we need to be Christian disciples!

A priest can’t do it all, the parish staff can’t do it all.  It takes us, the entire faith community -- praying, working, and supporting – in order to accomplish the work of this Church.   It means taking ownership and investing in what you have at your own parish.  Because without you, “it ain’t gonna happen.” 

When we become good stewards as a faith community, you’ll see an evangelizing Church the likes of which you have never seen before.  As Pope John Paul II has told our youth…”If you are what you should be…you will set the world ablaze!”  That’s how God means it to be!

But until each of us becomes better disciples – and we embrace our call to stewardship and evangelization, we are going to continue to see this Church bleed. We are going to continue to watch people die, or leave the Church – some of them your own children, brothers and sisters, or other family members -- with no one taking their place in the pews. And that’s our sin… because it’s our watch!

On the other hand, if we do guard our post -- and we do respond to our Baptismal call – you will see this Church thrive.

Let’s help Jesus heal the wounds of his Church, you and me, because it’s our watch!