Misperceptions from the inside

I'll just mention two specific misperceptions I think I heard from the attendees, and I'll be done (probably) commenting on the Forming Intentional Disciples mission Sherry Weddell led at my parish this past week.

First: To active, faithful Catholics, passive acquiescence can look like active participation. I should go to Mass? Okay. I should kneel here, bow my head there? Okay. I should get confirmed? Ask Jesus to forgive me? Go to confession? Okay.

It's kind of a disturbing thought, maybe, especially for cradle Catholics who did start doing a lot of those things via passive acquiescence rather than active participation. When you're a child, you of course think like a child. But does anyone check that the adults have put aside childish things?

The antidote to presuming activity is not to presume passivity. For those in the parish whose place it is to know, I'd say it's best to stop presuming at all, and simply ask. Not as an inquisitor, or judge, or evaluator, but as a brother or sister in Christ.

Second: To active, faithful Catholics, the sacraments of the Church can look like the ministry of the Church. I say that because at one point on Saturday, Sherry asked us how well the Church had helped Daniel, whose story we were hearing. We had just watched a video clip of Daniel saying that, when he showed up high at Mass one day, the priest (who knew of his addiction from his confessions) told him, "I can't help you, you need to find someone else." Daniel said he had the feeling the priest didn't want to deal with having him around.

At least a couple of people said the Church had been a real help to him, because he was able to come to Mass, pray, and receive the Sacraments. The church -- that is, the church building was always there when he needed it. The priest was only being honest with him, perhaps even showing him some tough love.

I think those answers sound like answers from people who have never needed help from their parish -- or perhaps never thought of their parish as a source of the help they needed. If the Church is only there to provide the Sacraments and a quiet place to pray, then no, the Church did not fail Daniel.

Or perhaps the answers were simply an expression of piety. The Sacraments and a quiet place to pray are, after all, not chopped liver, even if ideally the priest would have been able to help with drug addiction.

The one priest in the audience shook his head regretfully when Sherry asked how the Church had helped Daniel.

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Perception can be reality

In all the time I've known Sherry Weddell -- call it eleven years -- she's been defending her work against charges of Protestantization. She says things that Catholics don't say but evangelical Protestants do, so she sounds like a Protestant. Her defense is that Catholics -- or at least popes and ecumenical councils -- do say the things she says, and the reason she keeps saying them is to make it normal for Catholics to say them, since the things -- things like discipleship and personal relationships with Jesus and talking to others about your relationship with Him -- are things Catholics ought to be saying, ought perhaps even to be incapable of not saying.

Sherry tried to inoculate the mission she just gave at my parish from these charges by, on the first night, quoting Popes Benedict and St. John Paul II on the centrality of a personal encounter with Christ to the Christian life. And the matter only came up briefly, and relatively mildly, on Saturday morning.

Sherry was going over what the Forming Intentional Disciples program calls "threshold conversations," which are intended to help you figure out what threshold the person you're conversing with is at. (She also calls it an evangelism of listening, which sounds like it has a more general application.) All it takes is the right moment, some guts, and a level of trust consistent with the situation -- the person sitting next to you on the plane needs to trust that you aren't going to make the rest of the flight weird and uncomfortable, your co-worker at lunch needs to trust that you aren't going to make the rest of your time together at that company weird and uncomfortable, your family members needs to trust that you aren't going to make the rest of their lives weird and uncomfortable.

A threshold conversation involves asking two questions, then really listening to the answers (and following up with questions to clarify the answers, not to challenge, correct, or instruct). The two questions are:

1. Can you describe your relationship with God to this point in your life?
2. If you could ask God one question that you knew He would answer right away, what would it be?

Sherry had been talking about the first question for a few minutes when a woman in the audience raised her hand. It may have been the only time during the whole three days when someone raised a hand when sherry hadn't asked for questions or comments.

The woman said she had worked with returning Catholics for fifteen(?) years, and she had a problem, not with the intent, but with the phrasing of the question. A "personal relationship with God," she said, is "Protestant language," and she thought it would work a lot better when talking with Catholics to say something like Sherry herself said she once asked someone on a plane who was telling her about his experience fighting cancer: "And where was God in all this?"

Sherry replied with a brief defense of "personal relationship" as "Catholic language," and said, "You'd be surprised" at how people respond when asked. (It's a powerful question for at least three reasons: most people have never been asked; some people have never considered the possibility of a personal lived relationship with God; some people will find themselves unsatisfied with their answer, and continue to think about the question long after the conversation is over.)

I think there was a certain amount of talking past each other. Sherry isn't (I don't think) hard up over the words "personal," "lived," and "relationship" being in the question (only the last was included in the question as it appears in the handout), as long as the other person is talking about their relationship with God. The woman in the audience isn't (I don't think) hard up over the term "personal relationship with God" actually being Protestant rather than Catholic, her concern is that it's regarded as Protestant.

And I do think she has a point. There's no need to make things harder than they need to be. If a returning Catholic isn't returning from an environment in which talking about God is natural and normal,  don't add to the stress of talking about God by making them do it in unnatural or abnormal terms. I haven't worked with anyone, so what do I know, but if I had to, I'd probably ask something like, "So... how are you getting along with God?"

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Can you hear me now?

Part of the Forming Intentional Disciples mission Sherry Weddell conducted at my parish over the past several days involved watching a video interview with Daniel, a man whose own story is quite dramatic. There's a poor childhood relationship with his parents, an attraction to a neighboring family and to their faith (such as it was) in order to be close to them, there's time in juvenile lock-up, mistreatment of a girlfriend, there's booze and drugs and a decade-plus up-and-down addiction to meth, there's a final, almost cinematic surrender to God and an almost immediate answer from Him, there's a thin gold thread tying him (in a fashion) to God through all of this.

The video interview is broken into parts, so that after each part we can discuss at which threshold -- Trust, Curiosity, Openness, Seeking, and Intentional Discipleship -- Daniel had arrived by that point in his life.

What fascinated me is how bad the Catholic attendees of the mission were at applying the Five Thresholds model to a complicated story.

At the end of the first part, Daniel is a teenager who occasionally goes to Mass with his best friend's family. The father had told him on a car trip that Jesus died to save him and it's not too much to ask to give Him one hour a week. He had prayed once for Jesus to come into his heart, because he was afraid that his friend would go to heaven and he wouldn't.

To the pious Catholic ear, this can sound like the boy had crossed the threshold into Seeking, which is the stage in which a person is actively trying to work out whether to answer Jesus' call to follow Him. My own, less pious ear heard a kid mimicking the actions he saw other people doing, in the hope of getting what he thought they had, which seems to me to be pretty much the workshop definition of Trust.

The point is -- and this shouldn't be news, but we aren't always as wise in practice as in theory -- what we can observe happening is not necessarily what the person we observe is doing. If I see someone kneeling in church, they aren't necessarily praying. If I see someone staring out the window in church, they aren't necessarily not praying. Even when people say exactly what they're doing and why, other people tend to override that information with their own pre-existing interpretive biases.

It's not a Catholic problem as such; I think conflicting information tends to get filtered out of the human brain before reaching the pre-frontal cortex. But the pre-post-modern Catholic interpretive bias is remarkably mismatched with the post-modern religious experience. We have to work to understand what people are going through, even (especially?) if they tell us. The canonical example Sherry uses of this is the assurance with which Catholics tell Catholics that Catholics are leaving the Church for Evangelicalism in order to be entertained. Catholics who leave the Church for Evangelicalism are happy to tell you why, and the reason is never "to be entertained," but since the reason doesn't sound sufficient to Catholics who don't leave, they look elsewhere for the real reason.

In defense of pious Catholics, I'll admit that my own interpretive bias was such that there was little or no chance I'd perceive anything other than "Trust" at the end of the first part of the video interview. (C'mon, there are five thresholds, there are five parts to the interview. The math solves itself.)

At the same time, as Daniel's story went on, with all the inconsistencies and false starts and tangents that an ordinary life tends to have -- and considering the fact that we were watching the interview for the express purpose of applying the Five Thresholds model -- I came to see that the Catherine of Siena Institute is, after all, proposing the Five Thresholds model as itself an interpretive bias that doesn't necessarily match neatly with the post-modern religious experience. It doesn't always sound like that when the model is being explained -- I've had some on-line conversations with FIDites who treated the thresholds as objective realities; we don't merely think  and speak of someone as crossing the threshold into openness, they objectively do cross the threshold that actually does exist.

But even an empirically derived model of human behavior is going to be damaged when brought into contact with human behavior. The question to ask about a model isn't whether it's true, but whether it's useful, and as long as it's proving useful it makes sense to use it.

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From parable to model?

At the Friday night session of the Forming Intentional Disciples mission Sherry Weddell just completed at my parish, she gave us some time to draw our own paths through the Five Thresholds. After trying for some minutes, I said to myself, "Nope. The Five Thresholds model just flat doesn't fit my own experience." As I wrote in the last post, this isn't such a surprise given that I'm not a post-modern.

Which raises the question, what model does fit my own experience? Put another way, is there another model that might help form intentional disciples, preferably one that accounts for the importance of the communal and ecclesial dimensions of our relationship with Jesus? While I'm at it, how about a model that doesn't stop at intentional disciples, but takes the Christian all the way to union with the Father, through Jesus Christ, in the Holy Spirit, so we may be called not just disciples but friends, and indeed children and heirs?

Granted, that might be overkill for working with high school seniors in CCD class who don't know the Lord's Prayer. And a full-blown model would have to be used with care around adult Catholics in leadership positions who don't know a personal relationship with God is possible, or they might be too distracted by all the moving parts to notice that the whole thing sits on the ground of a personal relationship with God.

In any case, I went to sleep Friday night with a brief prayer for illumination on the question of a model for spiritual growth useful for helping others to grow, and I woke up Saturday morning with the thought of the Parable of the Sower.

And I thought yes, that works as a description of spiritual growth at all levels. An individual soul can, as Jesus explains, be described as shallow soil or rich soil, and then within that soul there are different weedy patches and hard-packed roads. Every day is a matter of converting bad soil into good, and making sure good soil doesn't revert to bad.

How might the Four Soils model be developed and used? Got me. I only prayed for illumination, not an action plan.

But when I heard the Gospel reading at the Mass before Saturday's FID mission session -- Luke 8:4-15, the Parable of the Sower -- I thought it was something more than coincidence.

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On the Threshold of the Five Thresholds

Having heard, over the course of two evenings and one day, Sherry Weddell explain her take on applying the Five Thresholds of Conversion in a Catholic context, I think I'm ready to downgrade my objections to quibbles.

My objections chiefly amounted to this, that the Five Thresholds model is too one-dimensional and linear to fully describe all the paths to discipleship Catholics might follow. What answered the objection?

1. Sherry said several times that not everyone goes through all the thresholds in a clear and distinct way.
2. Taken individually, the thresholds do describe transitions people go through, so even if it's not categorical it's still a useful model.
3. I realized that the model was developed to address the post-modern journey, and I'm not a post-modern, so it's okay if it doesn't really speak to my own experience.

That said, I'm still not sold on collapsing the lived experience of so many Mass-going Catholics into "Trust." But hey, maybe they're post-moderns, and besides, it's only a model.

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Nobody said anything about interactive small groups

Sherry Weddell is coming to my parish this week to present the Catherine of Siena Institute's Forming Intentional Disciples mission. It's been two years in the making, which is how far ahead Sherry's schedule was booked when she was invited to come two years ago (our adult formation director is an old pal of Sherry (as am I, in the have-met-for-dinner-in-real-life sense)).

It should be a good mission, although I just now noticed the bit about "interactive small groups" in the bulletin announcement. I don't mind participating, but I don't really do sharing. We'll see how that plays, since I believe a large part of the whole Intentional Disciples program is learning to tell your story. As big as I am on the role story plays in human nature, and therefore in Christian evangelization and culture, I have to say my own story strikes me as irredeemably dull, not to mention terribly plotted, with all the character development of a wacky sitcom neighbor. (--And what happened when the young protagonist finally looked inside the small chest the old man at the bridge had given him? --If he ever does, I'll let you know.)

I'm also curious to see if I come away more convinced the Five Thresholds of I Once Was Lost -- trust, curiosity, openness, seeking, and intentional discipleship -- are as directly applicable to cradle Catholics as I think Sherry thinks they are. The smart money is on Sherry being right, but in my armchair ignorance I have to think the other two journeys she mentions in Forming Intentional Disciples -- ecclesial and active practice -- make the way Mass-going Catholics pursue the journey to intentional discipleship quite a bit different than the way unchurched people become intentional disciples in evangelical communities.

That aside, the fundamental message that Catholics need to be intentional disciples of Jesus, to have a true, lived relationship with Him, is one almost every parish in this country would greatly benefit from hearing. And I wouldn't be surprised if this weekend plays a role in more than one of my fellow parishioner's stories. Who knows, maybe even in mine.

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A letter from the pastor

...
I am asking you to read Forming Intentional Disciples by Sherry Weddell with the goal of growing the vision of our parish and making Saint Andrew Apostle come alive with the heart of evangelization. We have a rich tradition to build on in this parish, thanks to the dedicated laity and religious and priests who have served here. Now, in this Year of Faith, it is time for us to begin to use the grace of our baptismal calling to reach out to others along with the rest of the Church. Then, I'm asking you to come to a meeting with other leaders of our community on June 5th at 7:00 pm in the rectory basement, using the book as a launching point for discussion. It will be about a 2-hour meeting. ...

Well, hell.

Delighted to hear the parish is going to reach out to others. Capital idea to order 70 copies of Forming Intentional Disciples as a launching point.

But how come I have to get involved? If the pastor wants 70 leaders of our community over at his place, why can't I play Eldad and stay home?

I blame Sherry Weddell. She's always doing things like this to me.

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So that *was* my guardian angel I heard snickering

Yesterday I wrote:

But sometimes -- sometimes, the power of God works through a disciple in a mysterious and highly visible way. A disquietingly unsubtle way.

Today I report that I am an unwitting prophet. It turns out that, when I wrote the above, I was in the midst of a series of contingent actions that would combine with other serieses of contingent actions, about which I was wholly unaware, to produce my agreeing this morning to help with my parish's RCIA program, something I hadn't done even back in the days when I was the parish Lenten program.

Not at all disquieting, but definitely unsubtle.

The Punchline: Not only is it a good friend from my years in the Lay Fraternities of St. Dominic, who has occasionally commented on this blog and who, unbeknownst to me, transferred to my parish and was appointed our RCIA director. But her Dominican chapter is studying Forming Intentional Disciples, and she's already given a copy to our pastor.

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Forming Intentional Disciples, pt. 5

I've got more thoughts on the topic of forming intentional disciples, but for now let me conclude my 5-part review of the book Forming Intentional Disciples by taking as my text this passage from the final chapter, "Expect Conversion":

If we are going to seriously evangelize our own, we had better be prepared for the Holy Spirit to do things in people's lives and in our parishes that are not part of our five-year plans, things that we could never have accomplished even if they were part of our five-year plans. We have to expect and plan for conversion and the fruit of conversion. [p. 238]

Those involved in their parishes' five-year plans are referred to the rest of the chapter. Here I want to take up the idea of expecting conversion, not at the level of an individual parish, but at the level of an individual soul.

The Church teaches that every baptized Christian in a state of grace has been given by God

sanctifying grace, the grace of justification:
- enabling them to believe in God, to hope in him, and to love him through the theological virtues;
- giving them the power to live and act under the prompting of the Holy Spirit through the gifts of the Holy Spirit;
- allowing them to grow in goodness through the moral virtues.

A disciple of Jesus not only has this grace and these powers, he uses them. And when he uses the power God gives him, it works.

Sometimes, yes, in a mysterious and hidden way unknown to the disciple in this life. Seeds spring, and grow up whilst the sower knoweth not.

But sometimes -- sometimes, the power of God works through a disciple in a mysterious and highly visible way. A disquietingly unsubtle way. Maybe even a literally miraculous way.

I'm pretty sure the reason this sort of thing doesn't happen very often isn't because God doesn't want to work in our lives. I think we (in particular, I) lack the faith that God wants to be unsubtly at work in the world through our lives, the hope that He will if we ask Him to, and the love to go ahead and ask Him even if it means disquiet.

Being baptized, we can believe in, hope in, and love God as much as we want. When we first sit down, and reckon the charges that are necessary to build a tower for the Lord, we will find that, by God, we do have wherewithal to finish it. The question is, are we prepared to invest it in the tower, or will we be satisfied just building the foundation (or even merely reviewing the blueprints an hour a week).

The disciple of Jesus who is answering the daily call to conversion is prepared to invest in the tower, but he should also be prepared for God to show up, in unpredictable ways and at unpredictable times, to help out. And the disciple who prepares a place for God in his life will not be disappointed.

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To no one's surprise

Mark Shea has a couple of recent posts, one linking to a post of mine about voting and one linking to my series of posts reviewing Forming Intentional Disciples.

As of this morning, about 20 different people (including me) have commented on Mark's post about voting, and 1 person (not including me) has commented on Mark's post about discipleship.

Well, that's just a dull anecdote. But it does suggest a principle (even if it doesn't establish the relevance of the principle to the Church in the United States):

Catholics who manifest their Catholic identity more by talking about Obama than by talking about Jesus aren't doing a very good job of manifesting Catholic identity.

More starkly: If Catholics would rather talk about math than discipleship, we're in trouble.

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Forming Intentional Disciples, pt. 4

In Chapter 9 of Forming Intentional Disciples, Sherry Weddell confronts the fact that, not only does the typical Catholic parish in the United States not form disciples of Jesus Christ, typical parish culture actually inhibits the formation of disciples:

Until discipleship and conversion become a normative part of parish life, many [visitors] will walk in and out of our parishes untouched, and many Catholics who are disciples will continue to feel that they need to hide or minimize their newly awakened personal faith in front of other Catholics. The first thing that must be done is to deliberately and persistently break the code of silence if it is in place. The Catholic norm of silence about a relationship with God, about Jesus Christ and his story, about our own stories of following Christ, and about the need for everyone to decide whether or not he or she will follow as a disciple is stifling the emergence of a culture of discipleship and all that flows from it.

This is a ticklish proposition. It's one thing to tell parish leadership that they're leading the parish all wrong; you will not be the first person to tell them that.

But you may well be the first person to tell a fellow parishioner that they're being Catholic all wrong.

And they, quite likely, will return the sentiment.

Despite all of Sherry's war stories, I still insist that some of the friction is due to misunderstanding. I think there are Catholic disciples of Jesus who don't think of themselves as disciples of Jesus, who would agree with and support efforts to make disciples of Jesus if they could be made to see those efforts aren't protestantizing, who find the reasons for silence (or discretion, from their point of view) about discipleship more persuasive than the reasons for conversation.

I also think -- okay, guess that there are lots of Catholics who have a real but imperfect relationship with Jesus in His Church, the 2% or 5% or 20% at any given Mass to whom 90% of homilies are pitched, those who love God with a goodish bit of their hearts, souls, minds, and strengths. For such as these, there may be other ways of describing their relationship with Jesus that are as good or better than discipleship; the old three stages of the spiritual life, for example, or St. Catherine's stairs of loves, or St. Josemaría Escrivá's divine filiation. When those old assumptions that no longer hold, about the correlation between Catholic identity and discipleship, actually do hold, the old ways of ongoing formation can still work.

Here I'll mention two points on which I reserve my wholehearted endorsement of Forming Intentional Disciples. As someone typing this at his kitchen table, who has never to my knowledge formed an intentional disciple, and who can well imagine the counterarguments, I acknowledge the unmitigated cheek required to tell the professionals how to do their job, and yet: I found it a little off-putting to read of parish catechists identifying who are disciples and who are not. It may well be possible to do that within a group of people who talk about whether they are disciples, but in general -- and not challenging its usefulness or empirical validity -- the Five Thresholds of Conversion framework is a model of a certain process applied to human behavior. It is not the human behavior itself, nor is it necessarily a good model of every human's behavior.

Which is not to accuse Sherry, or anyone else, of treating everyone like a nail under the Hammer of the Five Thresholds of Conversion, it's just to point out that that hammer is not the only tool in the Toolbox of Christian Formation.

My second reservation is the observation that, in the testimonies of parish catechists, there is a high correlation (if it's not perfect correlation, it nearly is) between observed discipleship and observed getting-involved-in-parish-formation-programs. One might almost call this the Forming Intentional Catechists paradigm.

Now, there may be no one in the United States who has thought more about the variety of charisms God gives His people than Sherry Weddell. In fact, there's a section in Chapter 11 on how various charisms can be used "as aids on the journey to intentional discipleship." Clearly the book is not proposing that becoming active in parish discipleship formation programs is a necessary sign of discipleship. And, given the state of parish life in the United States, you would expect disciples to pitch in on discipleship programs in under-discipled parishes, even if their individual charisms aren't geared toward forming others.

Still, more could be said -- even in a book about discipleship within the parish -- about discipleship outside the parish.

Update: Don't miss Sherry's evisceration of my reservations in the comments.

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Forming Intentional Disciples, pt. 3

Gotta keep writing, if I'm ever going to finish reviewing Forming Intentional Disciples and give the book to my pastor.

Having, in Chapter 1, identified -- through vision-clearing, cant-dispelling analysis of truly harrowing statistics -- the problem that the Catholic Church in the United States is failing to transmit the Catholic Faith to Catholics, and diagnosed the reason in Chapters 2 through 5 -- viz, that the Catholic Church in the United States is failing to make disciples -- Sherry goes in in the central chapters to describe the "thresholds of conversion," and how knowledge of them can help Catholic parishes to make disciples, even out of lifelong Catholics.

The five thresholds of conversion,empirically discovered by an evangelical Christian and confirmed over the Catherine of Siena Institute's eight years of Making Disciples workshops, were found to

culminate[] in a commitment to follow Jesus Christ as a disciple. Each transition to a new threshold was a genuine work of grace, empowered by the Holy Spirit, but each threshold also required real spiritual energy and real choices on the part of the person making the journey. Conversion didn't "just happen".... [pp 127-128]

The thresholds are:

1. Initial trust, whether in Jesus, the Church, or even just some nice old lady who happened to be a Christian.
2. Spiritual curiosity, an "essentially passive" state where one wants to know more.
3. Spiritual openness, an acknowledgement that the person is, not yet committed, but "open to the possibility of change."
4. Spiritual seeking, which transitions from passivity to actively seeking God and His place in their lives.
5. Intentional discipleship, "a conscious commitment to follow Jesus in the midst of his Church as an obedient disciple and to reorder one's life accordingly."

If these thresholds are normative, then a parish that wants to make disciples ought to structure its programs and train its evangelists to meet people where they are and help them work their way across the thresholds that lie between where they are and discipleship.

How to do just that, with examples from parishes that are already at it, is the subject of Chapters 5-8.

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Forming Intentional Disciples, pt. 2

Why are Catholic parishes today not forming Catholics? Riffing on Forming Intentional Disciples, let me propose an easy answer and a hard answer.

The easy answer is that Catholic parishes aren't trying to form Catholics. Too often, we settle for a passing grade in attendance at a sacramental preparation course:

...most leaders involved in sacramental prep and RCIA have had to wrestle with conflicts between individual and family expectations and whether or not someone is spiritually ready to receive both the sacrament and the sacramental grace in question. There are two common maxims that pastoral leaders often evoke as solutions in these situations. One is "The sacrament will take care of it," and the other is that "The Church will provide." [pp 105-106]

The possibility that one might receive a sacrament without receiving sacramental grace is not one we dwell on much. But sacraments are not magic. Chapter 4 contains valuable theological instruction in what the Church teaches about the "fruitfulness" of the sacraments, as well as the need for proper spiritual disposition for those who receive a Sacrament to also receive, in a fruitful way, the graces that the Sacrament provides.

In short, no, the sacrament will not "take care of" the lack of a proper disposition, and no, the Church will not provide that disposition if the receiver of the sacrament does not.

I call the above the easy answer to the question of why Catholic parishes aren't forming Catholics, because I think, by and large, most Catholics will agree with it as a generalization. At the very least, I think (okay, hope) they'd agree that a parish whose faith formation programs consisted of check-box style sacramental prep leaves much to be desired.

The hard answer, which I call hard based on the resistance to it I've seen, is that Catholic parishes don't know what fully formed Catholics are.

A fully formed Catholic is not just a Catholic who follows the precepts of the Church, can hold his own in doctrinal disputes, prays the Rosary, and is faithful to the Magisterium. A fully formed Catholic is a disciple of Jesus Christ. It was to convince Catholic leaders that all Catholics are to be disciples of Jesus, and to help Catholic leaders to make, form, and sustain disciples of Jesus, that Forming Intentional Disciples was written.

Why don't Catholics agree that fully formed Catholics are disciples of Jesus Christ? See the easy answer. As the title of Chapter 2 puts it, "We don't know what normal is." Catholic parishes don't try to form disciples, goes the line of thought, so how can being a disciple be an essential part of being a Catholic?

Part of the resistance is due to terminology. Talk of "discipleship" smacks of Evangelical Protestantism. Catholics might find it more natural to talk of "knowing, loving, and serving God in this world."

But much of the resistance is that many Catholics simply

do not know that an explicit, personal attachment to Christ -- personal discipleship -- is normative Catholicism as taught by the apostles and reiterated time and time again by the popes, councils, and saints of the Church. [p. 46]

Call it what you will, there's more to being Catholic than sacramental, liturgical, and devotional acts. If it ever was the case, it is not true today that sacramental, liturgical, and devotional acts imply the existence of an explicit, personal attachment to Christ. It is possible -- even common -- to consider oneself a "good Catholic," perhaps even "faithful to the Magisterium," without having an explicit, personal attachment to Christ.

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Forming Intentional Disciples, pt. 1

I've read Sherry Weddell's Intentional Disciples blog since she started it (with others involved in the Catherine of Siena Institute) eight or nine years ago. Sherry and I have exchanged any number of generally compatible comments on various blogs, I arranged for her to speak at a Lay Dominican Congress in 2005, and we met for dinner once when my business travels brought me to her home town of Colorado Springs.

All of which is to say that I don't claim objectivity in reviewing Sherry's book, Forming Intentional Disciples: The Path of Knowing and Following Jesus. But since the book is of a piece with what she's been writing on-line for years, and since I've thought for years that what she's been writing on-line was important, I don't hesitate to say, "Read this book. Then give a copy to your pastor."



The establishment of one fact is as critical to Forming Intentional Disciples as is the establishment of the fact that Marley was dead is to A Christmas Carol. That fact, established in uncomfortable detail in Chapter 1, is this:

Catholic parishes today are not forming Catholics.

That is to say, what American parishes typically do by way of religious education, faith formation, liturgy, and so on -- which is all the majority of lay Catholics experience in the way of religious formation within the Church -- does not typically produce someone with faith in Jesus Christ and the Church He founded.

The statistics given in Chapter 1 bear this out. The one statistic that really brought me up short came from a Pew survey, according to which only 60% of self-identified Catholics believe in a personal God, while 29% think of God as an impersonal force and 8% don't know.

When two out of five Catholics don't believe in a personal God, I have to ask myself in all sincerity: Why am I blogging about jocose lies?

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Christian discipleship today

I've just finished Sherry Weddell's book, Forming Intentional Disciples. Fuller post to come; for now, two things:

1. Read this book.

2. Have your pastor read this book.

This is an important book, if only because it's perhaps the only such book on a hugely important subject.

Labels: Forming Intentional Disciples

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