The Evangelization Imperative

THE EVANGELIZATION IMPERATIVE

The New Evangelization depends entirely on a New Pentecost. Only with a new outpouring of the Holy Spirit will the Church rediscover her missionary dimension. This Evangelization is necessary, as long as those within and those without the Church don’t appear to be seeking God and trying to do His will and follow the light of their consciences.

We are witnessing the dark flowering of the realities described by Paul in Romans 1: people are exchanging the truth of God for a lie, suppressing that truth, and are living in rebellion and immorality. The sacramentalized, but not evangelized, desperately need to be invited to faith and repentance in order to be saved. Evangelization is about salvation; it is not about ‘enrichment’. Evangelization is not optional, it is fundamental.

In the face of the culture’s hostile secularism, as evidenced by the recent Supreme Court marriage decisions, in which the  embrace of sin and the imposition of evangelical opposites as normative are enforced through the power of the state, and confronted with minds darkened through pride, and human beings without the basics of the gospel who “very often” yield to the deception of the devil, the allure of the flesh and the world, and are sabotaged by the intellectual, moral and spiritual confusion that comes from pride, we need all the tools of holiness and virtue, as well as the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Such people become subject to the just judgment of God, His wrath, since their choice, against grace, against conscience and the light, is “inexcusable.” (Romans 1: 18-32).

Another obstacle to the faith is the intensely gnostic and anti-metaphysical Spirit of the Age. This spirit is gnostic in its essence and, as such, is an enemy of biological realities: everything in the universe is subject to the transforming energies of what “I wish to be true”, everything, according to Gnosticism, is plastic, and changeable, even gender and other biological realities, like life in the womb. Everything can be changed in order to conform to what “I”, the imperial self, want. Nothing is a given, everything is relative.

         In the face of these obstacles, nothing less than a total Holy Spirit “event”, another radical outpouring of the Spirit in our time, can tip the scales. The twin idols of ‘relevancy’ or ‘tolerance’ are not the answer. True Evangelization can proceed only out of repentance, conversion, and a total yielding to the power of the Holy Spirit at work in the Church.