Making Disciples 101

This is the transcript of an interview with evangelist and author Sherry Waddell done in anticipation of her April 14-16, 2024, seminar at St. Francis Retreat Center in DeWitt, Michigan. In it she says some fascinating things about making new disciples (Matthew 28:16-20). It is crucial we do so. In a February 2023 study, The Pew Research Center found, “In all the scenarios, Christianity’s share of the U.S. population declines. “Depending on whether religious switching continues at recent rates, speeds up, or stops entirely,” the report says, the Center’s projections show Christians shrinking from 64% of Americans of all ages in 2020 to between 54% and 35% by 2070.

Can you give me the context around this event, “Making Disciples 101”?

Basically, it’s for anyone who’s interested in evangelization, who’s concerned about people who are leaving the Church, which is, of course, most serious Catholics because our children and grandchildren, many of our friends and our siblings and friends are doing that.

And the implications for what we can do as individuals, as parishes, as communities, intentionally, to reach out to these people and engage them and sorta in a sense build bridges so that they can return or they could come for the first time.

Because basically we are living now outside of Christendom, which I know everybody knows. I call it “Missiondom.” But basically, we’re living in a world where this is no longer normative, and so we have to start acting like missionaries, like apostles like Christians and Catholics have done through the centuries when they live outside of Christendom. We’re having to learn that.

So this basically is a journey for Catholics at any level, lay people, staff, leaders of any background or nothing or even just curious. You don’t have to be a leader or something like that. If you’re just interested in sharing your faith with people or your family, your friends, your neighbors, your coworkers or just acquaintances that you know.

Why is it so important for Catholic lay leaders to participate in this work?

All of us are supposed to be participating in this by virtue of our baptism. This is the big, universal mission of the whole Church. So we don’t have to be formally recognized leaders to do it.

But for those of us who are leaders, it’s because it’s the center of the life of the Church, and if we don’t … Well, ok, you probably saw the Pew Forum just put out a study yesterday and basically found that 28% of American adults are what they would call “nones.” Basically, they say, “I’m not affiliated. I’m atheist or agnostic.” And the younger you are – and most of these people are under 50. They’re younger. And so they are our children, our grandchildren, the current parents of the next generation.

And they won’t walk into our parishes. That’s the deal. We have to go out to them. We have to learn how to be outward facing. There’s no reason we can’t do that in our own setting.

We can’t take it for granted that they’re going to show up. They’re not operating out of obligation anymore. It has to be personally meaningful. They have to see it as positive. A lot of them don’t trust religious organizations. They’re not just going to walk across our threshold. So we have to take on, the parish itself, the community itself, the local community, has to take on a missionary stance. And how to do that, how to help people in the twenty-first century make that journey is what Making Disciples 101 is all about.

So you and I just as regular people, we don’t have to have theology degrees to do this. We don’t have to be experts, all that kind of stuff. Catholics often think they need to, but they don’t.

But we do have to understand what the journey’s like for people now. It’s different than it used to be. We have to understand how to walk with people, how to be supportive, how to listen, how to ask the right questions, how to talk about our own stories of our lives being changed by Jesus Christ. Being able to hear their stories and understand and see where God is at work in their lives and help them recognize that. So that’s all part of what we cover.

The three things we cover in 101 … We’re going to focus a lot this time on that really crucial first step of establishing or reestablishing trust because of all the things that have happened, say, in the last 20 years, the scandals … There’s just negative stuff going on about the Church and news and people’s experiences. And then the culture going around … Your peers don’t support you anymore in having an active faith, and so people feel pretty isolated.

All those things, we know, because other churches are doing it around the world, really, there’s positive ways to address this to help people see and learn and recognize and experience the power of the living God, you know, and the healing and transforming impact of knowing Jesus Christ and following him. And so, there’s just … that’s what this is all about.

We’re in the early stages, so we’re really going to focus on establishing trust. Most of the people who don’t trust us now, who came out in this Pew study, were raised in Christian homes in the United States. So they didn’t come from nowhere. Probably the majority of them are baptized. But right now, they’re highly, highly skeptical, and someone has to be the bridge building that builds the bridge of trust to them, that someday they can walk back across that bridge and into the Church in order to encounter Jesus Christ there. And so that’s what we’re going to focus a lot on, that journey of helping people move from distrust to trust, and first evangelization, and how parishes can become what we call outward facing. In other words, we’re not primarily just for insiders or those of us who will just show up automatically. We are here for outsiders, too. Not either or. We are here for those who don’t trust us yet, who don’t know about the good news of Jesus Christ yet. But we’re here to build the bridge of trust and be a witness to the power of the gospel and its impact on people’s lives, on our lives. And so that’s part of what we talk about.

We’re going to talk a lot about the crucial turning point … this is based on the book, Forming Intentional Disciples, and we do ask people to read it before they come. But basically, it talks about the stages that people in the twenty-first century go through as they move toward Jesus Christ and discipleship. And one crucial stage is what we call openness, where people are not just casually curious anymore, they actually tell God, in their own personal way, maybe just in their own words, you know, “Hey, if you’re there and can hear me, and you care, uhm, hi. I’m open. I’m here in case you really are there.” They don’t have to be certain, but they have to be in a sense, there’s what we call a prayer of openness where people say something like that, and it’s authentic. I have never known God not to respond to a prayer like that in a really powerful but really personal way.

And so to help people make – even Catholics within the Church … a lot of people who attend Mass on a regular basis, we have found from listening to their stories, they don’t necessarily have a personal relationship with God. They don’t think God is interested, a lot of them. They don’t think God really cares. They’re there for other reasons. And for them, it’s a big discovery, too. And it’s really important, whether someone has spent their whole life in the Catholic Church or maybe they were baptized as infants or small children and they disappeared as adults, whatever happened, all those people, to help them, in a sense, feel there is some reality here. It’s really important that we help them at some level come to the point where they start to think, ‘I wish it were true. I don’t know if it is true. I don’t know if Christianity is true. I don’t know if the Catholic faith is true. I’m not certain that God really is there and really cares about me. But I wish it were true, because what I’m seeing in the lives of these people who are my friends is there’s something there that’s really compelling. It’s hopeful. There’s joy. There’s a love there. There’s compassion. And, you know, I wish it were true.’

And that’s a really important turning point for people who are skeptics in the twenty-first century.

And then we’re also going to talk about the crucial role of intercessory prayer. St. Ignatius Loyola said, “Pray as everything depends on God, work as if everything depends on you.” We spent a lot of time focusing on the work part of it, and putting people through retreats and all kinds of wonderful things, and that’s really important.

But the other part of it, the other half of it is equally crucial, especially when you’re in a culture that is not supportive. And throughout Church history, serious intercessory prayer that actually begins to change the spiritual climate of your community and lift … there’s like a cloud of skepticism and all that means that kind of hides God’s presence and His reality from people. It isn’t just that they just don’t see it. There actually is other spiritual forces that are blinding them in a sense, kind of obscuring the presence of God and the reality of God. And intercessory prayer, when we take that seriously, that sort of climate lifts, it begins to change, and it’s much easier for people to hear and respond to our witness, to Jesus Christ and what He is doing. It makes everything else we do in the parish much more fruitful and all of our evangelizing efforts much more beautiful.

So those are some of the things we’re going to be dealing with. Now, this is going to be in sort of a retreat format. You’re staying in the same place. You’re going to be together for three days. It runs April 14-16. So we’ll be eating together. We’ll be having Mass together. We’ll be praying together. We have opportunity to wrestle with these things and wrestle with their implications for you yourself, whatever ministries you may be involved in, your parish community, your relationships with all the people in your life who are not coming to Mass, who are gone or have never even known or don’t believe there is a living God, a personal God.

So it’s a community event. There’s a lot of different facets to it. But we’ve seen people really have a lot of major “a ha’s,” a sense of new direction for their ministries and in their own personal relationships and whatever things God may be doing through them out in the community. So there’s a lot of really exciting and interesting things that we’ll be wrestling with that are very concrete, that are very practical. I mean, they’re rooted in the Church’s teaching, and we’ll talk about that, but they’re real. This is real stuff. These are real people in the world we’re living in right now.

Why are there so many “nones”?

Different people have different reasons for this. A lot of them, basically, they’re just skeptical. Now what is interesting is that people say, “I’m not affiliated with any religion,” but a lot of them are still open to spiritual things. What they’re not necessarily open to is organized religion and congregations and churches. A lot of them are very skeptical of that.

And things like the sex scandals that have been endlessly publicized for the last 20 years or experiences they’ve had themselves with believing Christians. They’re very skeptical about that. A majority of them think of themselves as spiritual people. They have spiritual interests. They believe in the supernatural, but they don’t call it “God.” What they don’t believe in is the God of the Bible. The vast majority of them really don’t. So they believe in an impersonal God, a universal force of some kind, things like that, but not the all-knowing, all-loving God of traditional Christianity. And so that’s one of the big gaps.

They need to know people and have relationships with people who do know that God and who can be living testaments in their lives that this God is loving, this God is transforming. He is a source of incredible hope for yourself personally and the world and your family and the thing and people who are important to you.

And so that’s all part of it. What’s really interesting is 40% of adults from 30-49 call themselves “nones” now. They fall into this non-affiliated category. That’s the largest group, the largest age group.

And so especially for this group and for everyone in general, the power of having a real, believing Christian in their life, a real disciple who believes in Jesus Christ and who believes in His Church, who has seen the power of God at work in their lives and can talk about it in ways that make sense, who are not scared by the fact that this friend doesn’t believe and is skeptical and maybe is even traumatized by big, big questions, and can come alongside them and just sort of exude that confidence they have in their own lives. That’s a huge first step.

Then, the next step is, though, the connection to the parish. I run a large Facebook group that does nothing but talk about these things. Yesterday, somebody raised a real big question. They said, for instance, there’s a lot of young men who are raised without any faith background, who are discovering Christianity online. They have no living contact to a local Christian community. They’ve never been part of a church or anything like that. But they discover it online, and they start hanging out on various sites and where people are debating these questions. That’s their first exposure.

But at some point, they have to get to know, you know, in real life real Christians, really believing disciples who can walk with them and help them enter the Christian community. And that is one of the hardest things. As people said, a lot of our parishes don’t know how to do that. But that’s part of living in this new world of becoming outward facing Christian communities that are expecting … We want skeptics to show up. We want them to feel welcome. We want them to bring their real issues and their real questions to the community, to actually cross the threshold and be able to talk about this with believing Christians in the community. Because that’s part of their process. They’re starting much further back than people used to start.

And so we’re having to help build all those things that we used to presume they would inherit from their parents and their family and their grandparents and the culture. That church was good and religion was good and God was real. “This is what you do. This is what a good person does.” Most of that is missing now for most people. And especially the younger you are, the more of this is true.

And so we have to deliberately provide it [for] them. And we need many, many what we call “Ananiases.” Basically, just regular people who are ready to be evangelizing companions for people who are outside the Church, people who are inside the Church. No matter where you are in your journey, they can come alongside you and recognize where God is at work in your life and befriend you and be a witness and encourager and foster and help you begin to move toward Christ instead of away from Him and away from the Church.

So that’s the heart and soul of Making Disciples 101.

Why should parishes be so invested in equipping their parishioners to help create and form new disciples?

Because that’s the only Christianity community 98% of people have access to. I mean, if it doesn’t happen at the parish level locally, it’s not going to happen for most people. Yeah, there’s the internet out there, and that’s great, but you can only get so far with that. You don’t have access to the sacraments through that. You don’t have access to Jesus in the Eucharist through that. You don’t have access to the liturgy and the Mass.

It’s intended. We’re intended to flourish and to grow and to become holy through immersion in a Christian community. And a parish is the only one that overwhelmingly, anybody has access to.

Lay movements are great, and they do fabulous work, but only small numbers have access to them. The parish is it.

That’s the practical answer. Theologically, the parish is supposed to be a center of mission for every one of us. The Church actually talks about us as an apostolic community. I was just reading that in the Catechism this morning. We’re not just there to be sort of passive recipients of the clergy’s ministry. We are there as apostles in our own right, as sent ones, ones who Jesus Christ is sending Himself. All of us were baptized for that. We were anointed for that. We have been given charisms. We do talk about the charisms and how the spiritual gifts we’ve been given by God for the sake of others are crucial in this process. Discernment usually occurs within the Christian community.

That’s the goal. Ultimately, we will be following Jesus in the midst of His Church. And the entry place is going to be the local parish for all of us.

Are the stakes high for such an endeavor? If so, why?

Oh, they’re huge. Because right now, as the Pew study finds, the numbers of people who have jettisoned Christian identities and who are calling themselves nones has been growing by leaps and bounds for decades now. The number of people who show up at religious services at any time has [not] grown and grown and grown.

So now we’re facing a possibility which seemed impossible maybe even 10 years ago in the United States in the near future, that less than half of Americans will consider themselves to be Christian. That’s a huge change in our culture. People in their 20s and 30s, etc., for them, it is definitely a minority experience to be a believing Christian in their generation.

We used to think people would just come because of the family and the culture would provide the ties. And you would just show up. You knew that was the way to be a good person, and you would just be there. You didn’t have to do anything.

The American Catholic Church learned that if we just build it, they will come, because for 80 years, we had massive immigration from all over the world. Millions and millions and millions of people just pouring in from Catholic backgrounds who weren’t practicing in Europe but were evangelized in the United States. But they would show up for other reasons because they needed support in this new world. So they went to the Italian parish or whatever because they were Italian. It was the link to home. We could count on them showing up. Then we could deal with them.

You can’t count on people showing up now at all. We can’t even count on the ones who are in the pews staying there forever.

We learned habits when we lived in Christendom that we thought we could just depend on things outside. And now we know every single parish is a mission outpost in a culture that’s either indifferent or not caring that we’re there or actively hostile sometimes. It depends where you live.

But that means that we have to be intentional about this. They won’t hear it out in the larger culture anymore. They won’t hear about God. They won’t hear about Jesus Christ. They won’t hear about the Church, except sometimes bad things in the news. That’s all they hear.

We have to be actively making sure they know there’s so much more. This is real.

What topics for the seminar are you most excited to have people hear and why?

The topics that are the most interesting, most concrete and most helpful are helping people understand the journey, how different it is now in the twenty-first century, that people – as they move toward Christ – and be able to name that and help people recognize the patterns in their family and friends. That’s very important.

We’ve seen the power of helping people of any background to declare themselves open to God and God’s response to that. That’s been very exciting. All that we’re learning about intercessory prayer and how that changes the spiritual climate so that, literally, people experience God in whole new ways, and that He takes this initiative with them. And we’re seeing that all over the world.

People get a chance to talk about our real, lived experiences here, the things they’re really wrestling with, and grapple with those in a way that gives hope. And seeing Catholics become hopeful, become proactive, and develop apostolic hearts and minds, have confidence in the power and the presence and the love of Jesus Christ and what it can do for the people they love. That is really exciting.

To purchase Weddell’s book, Forming Intentional Disciples: The Path to Knowing and Following Jesus, Revised and Expanded, go to Amazon.com.