Can We Talk? - Mary Beth Bonacci

The Reluctant Evangelizer
How do the pros do it? The same way you do (including ocassionally chickening out).

When Patrick Madrid first asked me to write a regular column for Envoy, he told me he wanted it to contain lots of practical hints on evangelization, based on my experience as a "professional" evangelist.

So here it is — the best possible advice, coming straight from Mary Beth Bonacci, Professional Evangelist: Get a graduate degree in theology, hang out your shingle and wait for the phone to ring. And it will, because people are always eager to hire someone else to do the uncomfortable and unpleasant work of sharing the gospel with those closest to them.

My point? It's easy to do what I do. I stand up in front of an audience which expects me to evangelize. They come of their own free will to hear me speak. (Well, except at the high school assemblies. But they're captive audiences nonetheless — prisoners of the threat of detention.) To a certain extent, I don't care what the people in the audience think of me. I don't have to face them day after day. When the talk is over, I get onto an airplane and leave.

What about the rest of my life? What about my family, my friends? What about those uncomfortable moments at dinner parties when someone — pumped full of martinis — starts loudly ragging on the Catholic Church? What about the neighbor who gleefully informs me of her impending tubal ligation? What does the "professional" evangelist do in these everyday situations?

The same thing you do. I roll my eyes. I groan. I try to rationalize my way out of what I know I have to do. Sometimes I summon my courage and do the right thing. Sometimes I don't. Personal evangelization can be particularly difficult for me as a professional evangelist. Why?

A. I have so many more opportunities. Once people at parties or on airplanes find out what I do for a living, all other conversation flies out the window. "Really? You speak on sexual morality? So why is the Catholic Church such a fascist presence in the Third World?" I once sat through an entire flight (in first class, no less) trapped by a man expounding his viewpoint on the positive social benefits of a certain private sexual sin.

B. When I'm "off-duty," morality is sometimes the last thing I want to discuss. For me, it's "talking shop." It's work. It's like a dentist spending an entire party examining people's molars.

And C., everyone expects me to evangelize. At any gathering, as soon as someone says anything remotely anti-Catholic, every eye in the room turns to me. My friends have even been known to send disgruntled Catholics my way, just to see the fireworks fly.

The Bible tells us that "A prophet is without honor in his own land." Even Jesus had a tough time playing to the hometown crowd. To the rest of the world He was an extraordinary rabbi, a teacher unlike any other — quite possibly the Messiah they had awaited for generations. But in Nazareth, He was Joseph's kid, the boy who hung around the carpenter's shop and ran errands for His old man. What of value could He have to say?

The real courage in evangelization is in everyday life. It's in bearing witness to the people around you, the people you know and love. And on that score, I struggle just like everyone else (if not more).

Why am I telling you all of this? Because I want you to know — right up front — that I'm not coming to you as an "expert." I'll be writing this column as a fellow traveler, looking at the struggles we all share in spreading the good news to those closest to us, and exploring ideas that will help us all spread that news a little more successfully.

So fasten your seat belts. We're in for the ride of our lives.

Mary Beth Bonacci can be reached at: Real Love, Inc., 1520 West Warner Rd., Suite 106-138, Gilbert, AZ 85233, 602-812-1194.