Articles on all sorts of topics related to becoming a missionary disciple, and creating evangelizing parishes. These articles are free to reprint with attribution and the article URL, by permission of Gracewatch Media.
A Missionary Discipleship Daily Examen A daily general examen is a beloved prayer from Ignatian spirituality. It is meant to be 15-20 minutes of your day, usually at the end, where you place your day before God and look for where he was especially close, and how you responded to his presence. It is meant…
Welcome back to another “starting conversations” article. Feel free to share with your staff, volunteers, prayer group, social media friends to initiate some specific conversation on evangelization. God bless your discussion! It’s late summer and people are swimming. What better time to offer a parable for becoming an evangelizing parish? …Once there was a person…
Hint: it is supposed to be the focus this year…. As we move into the parish year of the Eucharistic Revival, we need to be clear what God is reviving: the people of God through the outpost of every parish in the United States. That is exciting and worth all of our prayer! But if we…
In a previous post, I asked why we have such a hard time recruiting volunteers in parishes. It’s an article meant to be discussed, so perhaps find your parish team (staff, or leadership, or core volunteers) and have that discussion before moving to this article. But this article should be good news–there are ways to…
Why can’t we recruit volunteers? I don’t know a parish–or non-profit of any sort–that isn’t short on volunteers. Some have more of a volunteer deficit than others, but it seems to be universal…or at least the norm in the United States. If you are reading this article, I don’t have to tell you how difficult…
An honor and a sale!
In our series on how to foster a Eucharistic revival, we addressed the need to pray for and expect signs and wonders, and then the critical importance of small group spiritual multiplication. The third way to foster a Eucharistic revival is to invest in the hospitality and first proclamation model of evangelization. The first part…
I’m pleased to announce I have an article on parish evangelization, “Stuck in Neutral: When Parish Evangelization (Still) Fails,” published in May 2023’s Homiletic and Pastoral Review. A taste below, and you can read the rest on HPR’s website: It has been five years since the four-day United States Convocation of Catholic Leaders on Evangelization…
In my previous blog post, I made an argument that we anticipating the fullness of Eucharistic Revival need to pray for and expect Eucharistic signs and wonders. Before anything else, we need an encounter with the Lord in the Eucharist…or a re-encounter with the profundity of that truth. This 70% of Catholics not believing in…
In my last post I mused on how one fosters a Eucharistic Revival. I offered the perhaps bold statement that there is no way revival happens without the signs and wonders model of evangelization. I’d like to unpack that a bit….