I met this preacher from Australia
He read the Bible searching for its dominant themes
And he counted 87 times when Jesus said, "Follow me"
Well you know that got me thinking
Maybe that's the bottom line of what "Christian" means
'Cause "I follow Jesus" is deeper than "I believe"
'Cause it don't take much to mentally agree
With a set of beliefs written down in some creed
Now don't get me wrong, we need to know what we believe
But lately I've been wondering...

Am I following Jesus, or just believing in Christ?
'Cause I can believe and not change a thing,
But following will change my whole life—
He never said, come, acknowledge my existence
Or believe in me I'm the second person of the Trinity
But 87 times he said, "Follow me"¹

As Bryan Sirchio expresses in his song "Follow Me (87 Times)," the heart of Jesus' call to us as Christians leads us to live our lives differently, not simply to believe particular doctrines. The central mission of the Catholic Church is nothing less than to change the world: bringing the gospel and its values everywhere so that the Good News can transform people and societies.² This work is evangelization, and it is the special vocation of lay Catholics who are primarily called to serve in the world. Some lay people may be called to ecclesial ministry—working within the Church—but the main duty of the laity is in the world.³

While the vision for lay vocation may be well articulated by Church documents and theologians, many lay Catholics are simply ignorant of their role. As Sherry Anne Weddell of the Catherine of Siena Institute relates:

There is an enormous gap between the Church's vision of the lay apostolate and the lived experience of most laymen and women. Most lay Catholics have never grasped the significance of their identity and their mission in the body of Christ. Over and over again in our Called and Gifted workshops, where we talk about the apostolic call of the laity, lifelong Catholics—people who spent 12 years in Catholic schools and attended Catholic colleges—ask, "Why have I never heard this before?"⁴

Many still live out of a pre-conciliar model in which their role is simply as believers in the faith and recipients of parish ministry. While Vatican II has generally succeeded in turning around our presiders to face the laity at Mass, our next challenge is to turn the laity around to face the world.

The Parish Challenge

It is disappointing that this gap still exists forty years after the Council, and this suggests that educating the laity to understand what the Church teaches about their role is a greater challenge than it might seem. And while this first step may be a good start, helping lay people fully understand and embrace this role will take much more support. Living a life of discipleship involves ongoing education, conversion, discernment, and further support.

The local parish is the environment that is best suited to take on the task of educating and supporting the laity to evangelize. In their pastoral plan for evangelization, the U.S. Bishops argue that this is the case "because the parish is where most Catholics experience the Church."⁵ However, this will require some major adjustment for most parishes, which generally have an inward focus and are easily distracted. The hectic reality of parish life results in a focus more on maintaining the parish and its programs than exerting energy on outward mission. In addition, most parishes spend a lot of effort educating children, but have much less experience in teaching adults.

A parish cannot successfully support its members by creating some new program, but must become what Jane E. Regan calls an "evangelizing community."⁶ This kind of parish is a gathering of people committed to the goals of accepting, living out, and sharing the Good News so that the world can be transformed. That commitment extends to adult faith formation and a transformative learning process in order to discover how to meet those goals. The U.S. Bishops continue:

These goals assume that an evangelizing spirit will touch every dimension of Catholic parish life—. Every element of the parish must respond to the evangelical imperative—priests and religious, lay persons, staff, ministers, organizations, social clubs, parochial schools, and parish religious education programs. Otherwise, evangelization will be something a few people in the parish see as their ministry—rather than the reason for the parish's existence and the objective of every ministry in the parish.⁷

Parish programs and liturgical celebrations exist to support the laity in their work of evangelization, but without a strong sense of mission many parish programs have become ends in and of themselves.

Goals

This thesis is addressed to parish leaders in the United States—both clergy and lay—who want to embrace the challenge of supporting the laity in their apostolic role. I will begin by describing the role of the laity and their role in the Church's mission to evangelize the world. I will then identify themes from scripture and Church teaching that best inform the "gospel living" that is central to the evangelical call. Finally, I will explore how a parish community can fulfill its role to encourage and equip its lay members in their vocations.

I approach this thesis from the perspective of a cradle Catholic lay person who spans the secular and ecclesial worlds. I have a bachelor's degree in computer science and have worked full-time as a software engineer for fourteen years, with an upper-middle class income. I also have graduate-level theological training and have served various parish roles as a volunteer, particularly in leadership positions.⁸ I am a third-generation European-American of Italian and Portuguese ancestry that has embraced Catholicism for many generations. My marriage of three years and parenthood of less than a year have given me new insights on these vocations. I believe various aspects of my social location put me in a unique position to consider this question of how parishes can promote the lay imperative to evangelize throughout the world.

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