This article originally appeared in the October 2004 Boost-A-Month Club Newsletter

COE Helps Support Evangelization Efforts

Lorraine VanCamp, left, talks with members of one of Glenmary's Mississippi missions prior to the start of a Web site training session.

Navigate to Ideas That Work on the evangelization section of the Glenmary Web site and one finds a variety of evangelizing activities that have been successfully undertaken by Glenmary missioners.

The concept of evangelization is foreign to many cradle Catholics—even a bit unsettling. But Glenmary missioners and Glenmary mission communities make a clear distinction between “evangelizing” and “proselytizing.” They want to share the good news of Jesus and the gifts of the Catholic faith tradition with the surrounding county, but they are not out to solely make converts. Instead, explains Glenmary’s evangelization consultant Lorraine Vancamp, Glenmary seeks to welcome those with no church home and to work with other Christians in the area to build up the Body of Christ.

Helping missioners and mission communities in their important work is the mission of the Glenmary Commission on Evangelization, a group of Glenmarians and coworkers representing each Glenmary district as well as leadership and Glenmary’s Department of Pastoral Ministers & Pastoral Services. Lorraine Vancamp facilitates the work of the Commission. The “COE,” as it’s called inside Glenmary, dates from the early 1980s.

Pope Paul VI’s apostolic exhortation Evangelii Nuntiandi (“On Evangelization in the Modern World”) was the spark that got Glenmary—and the Church in general—thinking and talking about evangelization, says Lorraine. That document, issued in 1975, the 10th anniversary of the closing of Vatican II, says that council’s objectives “are definitely summed up in this single one: to make the Church of the 20th century ever better fitted for proclaiming the Gospel to the people of the 20th century.”

Ideas about how to respond to this new challenge percolated within Glenmary during the presidency of Father Bob Berson and, before the end of his term, he established the Glenmary Commission on Evangelization. Father Dennis Holly, an original member of the Commission, recalls that the commission’s goal was to support and nurture Glenmary missioners and ecumenical workers in their efforts to spread information about the Catholic faith.

Since 1993 Lorraine has served as Glenmary’s point person on evangelization. And since 2002 much of her energy has gone to helping the COE explore the evangelization potential of the World Wide Web—and what this might mean to rural home mission communities. Out of this study came the COE’s decision to provide a Web site for each Glenmary mission that would focus on reaching out to Web surfers—wherever they might be—with the good news about the difference that a Catholic faith community can make in the life of an individual as well as an entire county!

“We want people to come to our mission Web sites, be intrigued and stay,” says Lorraine. The home page of each mission site hopes to grab a surfer/seeker with these questions: “Searching for something more in your life?” “Want to make a difference in someone’s life?” “Looking for help in your walk with Jesus?” “Want to belong to a global community?”

The Web sites are designed as evangelization tools, to reach out to those not already associated with the mission parish—or with any church. Each site includes personal faith stories, answers to frequently asked questions about the Catholic Church, Bible resources, help for Catholics who would like to “come home,” Catholic social teaching, and much more about the opportunities for prayer, fellowship, service, ecumenical outreach and worship in a local mission community.

The Web site project is a collaborative effort of the Commission on Evangelization, Glenmary’s Communication Office, and CatholicWeb, an Internet host and Web developer. Training sessions to teach parish leaders how to maintain a mission Web site and how to use it as an effective evangelization tool are taking place in each Glenmary district. Lorraine says these sessions have proven to be the most effective opportunity for evangelization training since she began with Glenmary.

In its early stages of launching this Web project, the Commission reflected on the ways that Web sites could enhance evangelization—and ways they could not. “You have to have person-to-person contact to have real evangelization,” Lorraine says. “However, parish Web sites are the perfect places to give people a lot of information in a safe, non-threatening way.”

Often, the most effective evangelization comes during unexpected times, Lorraine says. “That’s why we encourage all Catholics to ask themselves, ‘Do I make time for casual conversation with neighbors who don’t go to Church?’ Those casual times can be evangelization moments.”