I've been thinking about evangelization at the parish level.

First of all, who am I and why would my thoughts about this topic make any difference.  Fair enough.  Let me talk a little about myself (my favorite topic!) so you can decide whether or not to keep reading.

I was born into a nominally Catholic family in 1961 (that's right, I'm 50 this year!) and had six years of Catholic elementary school before the parish started charging tuition and my parents were forced to send me to public school.  I was an altar boy and loved our parish priest who taught me the fundamentals of the faith.  I even momentarily entertained a vocation to the priesthood and wrote a letter to my pastor.  The response I got disuaded me from this path and so I enlisted in the United States Air Force as a senior in high school and as soon as I graduated in 1979 left home never to return.

When I left home I also left the religion of my birth.  It wasn't that I had such a rough childhood; I loved my parents and did fairly well in school; I was focused on my future, anxious to excel in the new challenges I'd be facing and my faith just didn't matter all that much.

Within five years of enlisting I had met my wife, Mary, married, had our first child and lost her to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.  But that's another story, suffice it to say here that this emotional shock brought my faith back into focus.  I could see then that there was a place for God in my life.  He could help me through tough times and I'd better stay close to Him in case I needed Him again in the future.

By this time in my military career I'd been stationed at Okinawa as well as several state-side bases.  We received orders to Alaska and shipped out in 1985.  Our second child was born there, a daughter, Stephanie.  God was nothing more than a distant great-uncle to us at this time even though Stephanie was an obvious answer to our prayers.  She was a miracle, born after three years of trying to conceive after the death of our first daughter. 

We moved stateside again and then back to Japan in 1991.  Sometime during our stay there I read a book called "Surprised by Truth" edited by Patrick Madrid.  This is a book of 11 conversion stories.  I read it in one sitting and it changed my life forever.  These converts were Protestant ministers with so much to lose and yet they became Catholic anyway, just because it was true.  I was shocked and awed.  They were willing to give up family, friends, careers, homes, stability--all of it--just to become Catholic?  And here I was taking it all for granted.  I knew it was true.  I never doubted the Catholic faith.  But I just never let it penetrate.  I had access to God Himself every week in the Eucharist and I didn't take advantage of it.  He loved me so much that all He wanted was for me to know Him and serve Him and He would take me home to Himself to be eternally happy with Him.  I knew this but I really didn't know it.

So at this moment my life changed.  I went back to confession, I started going to Mass every week and began to consume Catholic material.  Every spare moment I read.  I bought cassette sets to keep in the car.  I joined various groups at the parish and made friends with other Catholics who took their faith seriously.  And my faith began to grow roots and sprout leaves and fruit.

We were transferred back to the states in 1994 to my last duty station in Maryland.  We bought a house just outside Baltimore and enrolled Stephanie in Catholic school.  I we elected president of the pastoral council of our parish and began to see some of the problems of running a parish with a dwindling urban population.  I retired from the Air Force in 1999 and we stayed in Baltimore.  Mary and I found good jobs in the corporate world and we settled into our lives raising Stephanie and helping out as much as we could at the parish.

One of the things we did was we would order cassettes from the Mary Foundation by the hundreds and we would distribute them far and wide.  We put them in the liturature rack in the back of the church and we placed bulletin ads encouraging our fellow parishioners to take them for free.  Many people thanked us for doing this and we even started leaving some in neighboring parishes.  But our pastor did not necessarily appreciate our efforts as much.  He considered the tapes old fashioned and too fundamentalist and the majority of the parishioners agreed.

As pastoral council president I was always pushing for more.  I wanted us to do more to educate the people and to evangelize the neighborhood but I was always the lone voice.  There were cliques and it was very difficult to break into these as an outsider (after all I only lived there for 10 years!).

Then in 2005, my mom passed away in March and Stephanie graduated high school in May and suddenly there was nothing keeping us in Baltimore any more.  At the same time our next-door neighbor sold his house (same floor plan as ours) for three times what we paid for ours.  Mary and I decided that it might be time to move on.  So we searched for a region of the country with a very low cost of living and found that the Steel belt was suffering and that real estate costs were very depressed.  We took a day-trip to Steubenville, OH and fell in love with the beautiful parish church and an old 1880 house in downtown and decided to put our house in Baltimore on the market.  Everything fell in place and by January of 2006 we were living in Steubenville.

We put all this in motion without knowing what we would do for income.  We bought the house with the profit from the sale of the Baltimore house and we have a small military retirement check, but we do need additional income each month to stay above water.  That's where Lighthouse Catholic Media came in. 

In December of 2005, just weeks before the move, I received an e-mail blast (sent to all customers of St. Joseph Communications) inviting me to become an account manager.  I made the call and now, almost six years later we are full-time Division Managers with Lighthouse, leading a team of account managers that serve over 70 parishes in the southwestern Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Southeastern Ohio.

So, I've seen a lot of parishes, talked to dozens of pastors, have experience in parish leadership.  I'm in an organization whose sole purpose is to help parishes with evangelization and I have been thinking about it.

So, for then next few posts, I want to discuss my observations about evangelization and look forward to feedback and comments from readers, so stay tuned.