The Catholic Church has a Gospel problem.
No, I'm not switching teams, going rogue, or making a pilgrimage to Joel Osteen's Lakewood Church any time soon.
I love being Catholic. Once I fully grasped the Church's mission and scope, I really fell in love with it and think it's the best Christian faith bar none.
I once heard that the only reason to be Catholic is that the Church is true.
No, when I say Catholicism has a Gospel problem, I mean that I think most Catholics don't understand the fullness of the basic tenants of the Faith handed down through the ages.
Let me backtrack a little.
I've been in and out of the Catholic Faith my entire life. I got serious about Catholicism about ten years ago.
About five years ago, I got interested in the idea of doing Street Evangelization. I thought it would be a cool idea to set up a booth and preach the word. In my research, I stumbled onto Saint Paul Evangelization, a Catholic organization committed to preaching the Gospel. Yes, Catholics do street evangelization. I was surprised as well.
They had these training courses to prep you for engaging people on the street. One of the training videos was this man talking about something called the Kerygma. The explanation of the Kerygma blew my mind.
It's something I had never heard before in my Catholic life.
Now to be fair to all the Priests and catechists in my life, they may have taught it, and I didn't pick up, much like grammar, and I don't remember.
The Kerygma is the essential proclamation of the Gospel message.
Some three years ago, it was this moment that Christianity finally crystallized for me. I was gobsmacked.
I did a little more digging when I finally landed on a talk by Father John Richardo.
Father John Richardo's talk leveled me.
For years, I've heard the word that I was saved but never connected what I was saved from because that part was never articulated well.
I binged Father John Richardo's talks like there was no tomorrow.
I finally found one where he broke down the Gospel message in four simple words: Created, Captured, Rescued, and Response.
He once said in a video that he could pitch the Gospel message in less than five minutes. So I worked towards that goal.
I mention this because I met with my small group for the first time last night. These teens are in their first year of faith formation as young adults. Our goal is to get them to Confirmation. So we're talking teens about fifteen or sixteen years old.
And I asked them, did they know the Gospel message, and none of them did.
So I shared it with them.
I believe that once you understand the whole story of salvation or the Kerygma, everything slides to place a bit easier.
Last night our Youth Ministry team talked about Faith and Reason. I think the only thing that was missing is that we didn't define what that Faith was.
And as Catholics, we have a particular kind of Faith.
I think we have a Gospel problem, which is why we're bleeding believers by hundreds.
It's because we don't articulate the Gospel story well.