LIVING AS MISSIONARY DISCIPLES

USCCB FIVE-PART VIDEO SERIES

The videos have been presented in parts with time for reflection and discussion between the parts, so each one starts at the place where the previous video stopped.
  Transcript -
Introduction: Bishop David Ricken “Brothers and sisters in Christ, I am Bishop David Ricken, the 12th Bishop of the Diocese of Green Bay. I also have the privilege of serving on the Bishop's Committee on Evangelization and Catechesis for many years now. What a joy it is to speak with you today and to give you a bit of an overview to the document "Living as Missionary Disciples: "A Resource for Evangelization." This resource is designed to be a roadmap to help your parish and other church ministries to discover new paths for the Church's journey of evangelization. In this diocese, we have used this document extensively to help foster a culture of missionary discipleship, centered on the very person of Jesus himself. As Catholics, we need to become much more comfortable sharing our heartfelt experience of Jesus with others and to listen as others share their stories with us.” {PAUSE VIDEO}

• {I don’t think that this is the place to start our conversation because, before one is willing to go down a path or try to do something, one has to want to do that. So the real starting point for us here today is to listen to what the Church has to offer us so that we can decide if we want to spend our time engaging ourselves in doing this.
• {Bishop Ricken says that he thinks that what we want (deep down at the core of our being) is to be missionary disciples and to do that he says we need to foster a culture that supports that. I ask you: What is it that you want?
• {Bishop Ricken goes on the say that, “As Catholics, we need to become much more comfortable sharing our heartfelt experience of Jesus with others and to listen as others share their stories with us.” How do you feel about that? I think he is making some assumptions with which you may not be comfortable. Is this the case?
• {Now, I think that Bishop Ricken hits the nail of the head in his next statement and, thankfully, the rest of this video is going to explain this.

  Transcript, continued: “We also need to center all of our ministries on helping people to come to a deeper friendship with Christ and this document has been a huge help to us here, and I know that it will be a help to you regardless of whether your parish is large or small, urban or rural. So what is the document? The first thing I want to mention is that "Living as Missionary Disciples" is not intended to provide an out of the box program for your parish to follow, nor does it create a detailed strategic plan to implement. Rather it offers the fundamental principles that parishes can use to foster evangelization and missionary discipleship in their specific pastoral context. You can also use this resource in your apostolates and in schools. Pope Francis repeatedly calls all to move from a mindset of maintenance to a mission. ‘Mere administration’, he says, ‘can no longer be enough. Throughout the world, let us be permanently in a state of mission.’”

• {Here Bishop Ricken is speaking about a parish spending too much time and too much focus on organization and not enough time and focus on our mission.  Can this not be said about the life of each of us?  Do you spend more time day in and day out on maintenance?  Do you have a mission for your life?  What is it? Do you drive yourself toward it like a MLB Team player drives himself toward his and his team’s mission? Do you let others help you drive toward that?  Do you have others helping you to drive toward your mission and the team’s mission?  How much time do you spend on this? . . . on clarifying what your mission is in your mind and in your heart?  Do you “feed” your mission?  Is it starving?  Do others know what it is?  Can they see that it is your mission?  How different is it to what God wants for you?  What do you think that God wants for you? How do you move yourself (or let yourself be moved) from mere management to a state of mission?
• {In what context do we want to listen to the rest of this video?  Bishop Ricken is talking about evangelization and becoming missionary disciples?  I suggest we substitute being the MLB Players on God’s Team - working toward what end? Maybe “That all may be one as You, Father, are in Me and I am in Thee. That the world may know that You, Father, have sent me.”}

“We know that being focused on evangelization and missionary discipleship takes time, energy, knowledge, careful planning, and implementation. We are learning that we must rely more and more on the power of the Holy Spirit. Moving into being communities that are mission driven, involves planning focus, not so much on the parish itself, but on how a parish or a faith community leads, ministers, and engages people in the call to witness and to become disciples.”
 

{For the sake of these sessions and what you do in your life between these session, we are going to focus on only the first two sentences which we can do ourselves working personally with God, especially, relying on the Holy Spirit to guide us in what Bishop Ricken says, that becoming evangelizers and missionary disciples “takes time, energy, knowledge, careful planning, and implementation. We are learning that we must rely more and more on the power of the Holy Spirit.” And I think what will help us do this is that we focus on being the engaged Players on our ML team – God’s team where each of us is a key player and all of us are on the same team and what we do to open ourselves to the power of God and the gifts that are in us will bring synergy to our lives and the lives we touch as we live out our everyday existence.}

  Transcript, continues: “In the Diocese of Green Bay, we call our process "Disciples on the Way" because we are all on the journey of discipleship together. Discipleship involves helping people enter into that personal encounter with Christ through prayer, study of the Scriptures, the sacraments, works of mercy, and faith formation. My brothers and sisters we all know that this is not an easy journey but it is one filled with abundant blessings and grace, I have personally found that through the call to missionary discipleship, people come alive as they recognize just how much they are loved by God, by Jesus himself.”  

{I think we have to remember that the story of God’s love for us goes back way earlier than when Jesus arrives on the scene.  Remember when we say Jesus, most of us think about the embodied man who walked the road of Palestine.  But Jesus, the God-man embodies the Second Person of our Triune God, that God who is Love itself and existed before time began. God, who “was alive” way before the man Jesus came into being, had all of this in mind for humanity.}

  Transcript, continued: “Pope Francis reminds us in "Evangelii Gaudium" that "the primary reason for evangelizing "is the love of Jesus, which we have received, "the experience of salvation, "which urges us to even greater love of him." It may sound like a clique but it's really true Jesus is the reason. He loves you and he wants to be in a relationship with you.”

{God wants to be in a relationship with you.  How can we say this?

Explore and document this - in Church documents and in Scripture.}

{As you listen to Bishop Ricken describe Mother Teresa looking out at the world and the people around her, let your mind see you, yourself, not watching her on the train and walking around Calcutta, but see yourself going through your day – in the places you are in, seeing the people you are seeing.}

  Transcript, continued: “I want to share an example of a person who has had a deep friendship with Jesus, Saint Mother Teresa of Calcutta. In the hopes that we might gain some insight into how to grow in our friendship with Jesus ourselves. I've quoted Mother Theresa for two or three years now in all my homilies because her quotes are so engaging, so invitational. Mother Teresa had a complete interior conversion in her younger years and even had some extraordinary experiences of Jesus in her personal prayer life as a young religious sister. Even though she had these experiences, Mother Theresa began to feel that God was inviting her to something even deeper. When she was on a train in India, going to the retreat house in the mountains, she saw people discarded and abandoned by the road left alone to die. It moved her very deeply, viscerally. She realized how Jesus thirst for souls. She was called to begin an order whose purpose would be to care for the poorest of the poor and she answered this call by starting the community called Missionaries of Charity. Mother Theresa's experience teaches us that friendship with Jesus requires us to be attentive, to pay attention. It might've been easy for someone who had already answered the call to religious life to assume that God wanted nothing more of her. But Mother Theresa continued listening, continued observing and as a result discovered that God was calling her to a vocation that would change the world. So if you and I are going to have a friendship with Jesus, we need to take time each day to listen and to be attentive to him. Through her friendship with Jesus, Mother Theresa began to see Jesus present throughout the world. This is particularly true as she attended to the poor, the discarded people. She picked them up with her own hands and the help of her sisters. She took them to her hospice. She bathed them, she cared for their wounds and their sores. As she looked into their grateful eyes at the moment of their death, she could see the face of Jesus himself. Many of you who are watching this might think I've looked around and I don't see Jesus so much in the people around me. If so, I would encourage you to spend more time in prayer with God and to ask for the help and the grace to more easily recognize Jesus all around you in others and in the world.

{What does Bishop Ricken mean when he says that Mother Teresa, could “see Jesus present throughout the world. This is particularly true as she attended to the poor, the discarded people. She picked them up with her own hands and the help of her sisters. She took them to her hospice. She bathed them, she cared for their wounds and their sores. As she looked into their grateful eyes at the moment of their death, she could see the face of Jesus himself. Many of you who are watching this might think I've looked around and I don't see Jesus so much in the people around me. If so, I would encourage you to spend more time in prayer with God and to ask for the help and the grace to more easily recognize Jesus all around you in others and in the world.”

{What does it mean when someone says that they see God in the face of another?  Does this story and the way you viewed it from the perspective of your own life reveal anything to you that might help you see your life in a less managerial role and more as being “in a permanent state of mission”?  . . . Is that more like a MLB ballplayer?  More like an integral member of the Church? }

“I don't know about you but as we look around at Masses on Sunday in our parishes, we cannot help but think of loved ones who are not there with us. We miss them. We all know the pain of seeing someone we love drift away from the regular practice of the Catholic faith. So how do we reach them? By living as missionary disciples. This resource is a call for all of us to have a deep or deeper encounter with Christ. This is best expressed in a simple, confident... informed... and joyous witness to the faith. It is our own witness which attracts and invites others to follow Jesus. In other words, the joy of the Gospel. Please don't doubt your ability to reach out. Jesus tells us that there will be much rejoicing in heaven over one repentant sinner who returns to him. I want to take this opportunity to thank you for all that you're doing already in your ministries and for all that is seen and unseen. Many of you work tirelessly for the Lord and the Church quietly and with great dedication. I hope that this document, "Living as Missionary Disciples" inspires you and guides us all to renew our lives and the life of our parishes.