From Fr. Aldrich's Desk

I know that many of our benefactor's are themselves striving to evangelize in their own communities and parishes. To do "first proclamation" evangelism well requires leading catechumens to conversion, giving them spiritual and human counseling, instructing them in the Catholic Faith, teaching them to pray, helping them to integrate into parish community, etc. But there is a necessary condition before this process can begin: that a non-Catholic be attracted to begin learning about God, Jesus, the Holy Trinity. We are all looking for the most effective method: but in fact we find that for methods that "work" there is a trade-off between the amount of effort and expense "put out” and the result obtained. That is, for methods that work, some require relatively less effort and expense, but also attract less people; some attract more people, but require relatively greater amounts of effort and expense. More important, it seems all efforts that work require some degree of "one-brings-one" evangelism from the average Catholic of the parish in combination with a professional level of preparation and follow-up of the event. Today, I will focus on why some of the "high effort, high expense" one-brings-one events succeed and why others fail.

In Taichung, Mother of God Parish, the pastor promoted an "One-Brings-One Year-end Party": the parishioners invited their non-Catholic friends to attend this year end dinner (the Catholics paid for the dinner). About 600 attended, with about 200 non-Catholic's coming. Coupled with this our lay evangelist worked very hard to see that each table had a questionnaire for each person attending to fill out (to get basic information of name, phone number, interests of non-Catholics). The fact that the questionnaire was filled out during the dinner and that it was collected led to many difficulties. In the weeks after the dinner, our lay evangelist contacted the non-Catholics who had indicated some interest in learning about the Catholic Church and invited them to pre-catechumenate classes (this process requires intense, difficult work). Eventually 20 were baptized from those who had attended the year end dinner: but the dinner required much effort to organize and much follow-up effort. By comparison, I know of several instances of large scale "one brings one" evangelism events (for example, musical concerts), which required as much effort and expense to put on, where a similar number of non-Catholics attended, 200 and above, but resulted in not a single Baptism: because no one created a method for getting basic information about non-Catholics or else failed to follow-up systematically and invite them to attend a catechumen class.

As the above experiences show, we have learned that high effort, high expense evangelism events can be worth it; but also learned that they have to be very carefully planned and followed-up: otherwise, the final result is frustration and reluctance to make any evangelism efforts in the future. In future newsletters I will share about one-brings-one activities that require relatively "less effort, less expense" and the kind of results they give.