From Christendom to Apostolic Mission: Pastoral Strategies for an Apostolic Age

by University of Mary

Our society is full of many — including those baptized and raised with some exposure to faith — who believe that they have seen enough of Christianity to see that it has little to offer them. We are therefore not attempting to make converts from pagans; we are attempting to bring back to the Church those knowingly or unknowingly in the grasp of apostasy, a different and more difficult challenge. C. S. Lewis once described this difference as that between a man wooing a young maiden and a man winning a cynical divorcée back to her previous marriage. The situation is made yet more complex in that many who have abandoned Christianity and have embraced an entirely different understanding of the world still call themselves Christians.

Our view of ourselves, of the natural world, of our families, our work, our mental and emotional furniture, our hopes for this life, all have undergone a radical change. The elements and instruments of this change are well known. Developments in transportation, in information and communication technologies, in entertainment media, and in manufacturing have so changed our way of being that a person who lived a hundred years ago was closer both in modes of consciousness and in the daily rhythms of life to the time of Christ than to our own. Technological development has also brought about an attack, often unwittingly, on human nature itself. Long-standing assumptions about what it means to be human are under siege.

The elements and instruments of this change are well known. Developments in transportation, in information and communication technologies, in entertainment media, and in manufacturing have so changed our way of being that a person who lived a hundred years ago was closer both in modes of consciousness and in the daily rhythms of life to the time of Christ than to our own. Technological development has also brought about an attack, often unwittingly, on human nature itself. Long-standing assumptions about what it means to be human are under siege.

Every age has been sorely tempted to sexual immorality; it has been left to our age to construct a sophisticated intellectual justification for sexual profligacy.

Much of what it means to be converted in mind is to receive and embrace the Christian imaginative vision of the cosmos: to see the whole of the world according to the revelation given in Christ, and to act upon that sight with consistency.

Christendom society is one that goes forward under the imaginative vision and narrative provided by Christianity, whatever the specific polity concerning its establishment may be.

During this time the Church functioned in an apostolic mode, by which is meant that she was making her way against the current of the wider society and needed to articulate and maintain a distinct and contrasting vision. Those who were brought into the Church did more than embrace a set of moral principles or doctrinal statements. There was a need for a profound conversion of mind and imagination such that they saw everything, viewed the whole, differently.

she was making her way against the current of the wider society and needed to articulate and maintain a distinct and contrasting vision. Those who were brought into the Church did more than embrace a set of moral principles or doctrinal statements. There was a need for a profound conversion of mind and imagination such that they saw everything, viewed the whole, differently.

Swimming Upstream = conversion

Christianity came first to challenge and then to replace that original classical vision, incorporating much of the cultural patrimony of the ancient world into its own understanding. From that time on Western civilization has be...

There is a reason why all the saints of Christendom have so constantly and urgently spoken out against the lack of genuine faith of their times.

Their hearts resonated with an effective call to embrace the message more seriously, for it was the bringing alive of dormant truths, the making real of what was often only theoretical, the filling out of what had been reduced or corrupted.

observe the difference in the reception of the Gospel by various groups of people as recorded in the Acts of the Apostles.

the Jews were a religious people whose imaginative vision of the world was similar to Peter’s, who was himself a believing Jew.

The proclamation of the Gospel added something of vital importance to the Jewish understanding, but it assumed and built upon an existing vision.

Lystra seems to have been a believing pagan town where the Greek mythological vision of the world was ascendant. When Paul preached and then healed a crippled man, the crowds in the town were moved and impressed, but they interpreted what they saw and heard through the lens of their assumed pagan vision, and they became convinced that the gods, Zeus and Hermes, had come down among them in human form.

yet another imaginative understanding of the world, one dominated by the philosophical schools to which Athens was the renowned home.

The response he received was in keeping with the assumptions of the environment: it was not nothing, but it was less immediate and enthusiastic than in either of the other two settings. Among some of his hearers an attitude of mockery arose which, although not surprising among the intellectually sophisticated and religiously skeptical, neither the believing Jews nor the Zeus-worshipping pagans exhibited.

two basic modes by which Christianity interacts with human societies: an apostolic mode and a Christendom mode. The first is her way of confronting a society with a very different overall vision than her own; the second is her mode of acting when Christianity has fertilized the soil out of which the society’s basic assumptions spring.

To the degree that a human society is founded on Christian truth and its members have willingly embraced that truth, and to the degree that their vision of the cosmos corresponds to the way God sees things, that society and the individuals within it have overcome ignorance and aligned themselves to reality.

In a Christendom culture, the primary need is maintenance,

“to deepen, consolidate, nourish and make ever more pure the faith of those who are already called believers.”

Fallen humans are always prone to idolize the visible while forgetting more important invisible realities.

In Christendom, believers are fundamentally at peace as regards their faith. Although peacefulness can encourage complacency, there is nonetheless an objective good in living peacefully, worshiping freely, and founding and developing institutions that honor Christ without constant battle.

Despite the many sins and failings of Christians, the presence of Christ sweetens human life. People are generally happier.

Christian devotion can become conventional, losing its radical character and thus its dynamism and attractiveness. The great sin of Christendom is hypocrisy, pretending to be more interested in God and in virtue than one is. Professing Christianity is the norm; living the Faith as a genuine disciple is the exception.

Because in a Christendom society to profess Christ leads to respectability and can bring power and wealth, because Christ is a name to conjure with and by which to gain influence, greedy and power-hungry people prey upon the Church and use its influence to further their own selfish aims.

In Christendom, because institutions are strong and well-founded, they tend to be taken for granted and therefore to lose their originating Christian spirit.

Holiness, prayer, humility, hidden acts of charity are the spiritual means by which the Church is visibly upheld.

he who cultivates only one precept of the Gospel to the exclusion of the rest, in reality attends to no part at all.

Because in a Christendom society the whole of the population (nearly) is Christian, the imperative for mission can wane. The truth that the human race is caught up in a cosmic battle between good and evil in which each individual needs to declare for one side or the other can be effectively hidden.

Confessing Christ in the face of hostility even to the point of martyrdom has always been accounted the greatest of Christian blessings, the most privileged way to imitate Christ,

Death is already a sweet mercy (we were cast from the Garden that we would not be bound to live in this fallen world forever), but what a merciful gift it would be to die well in martyrdom so near to Christ.

Good awareness to read Saint Aquinas, Awake Not Woke, listen to Bishop Barron’s philosophers who shape our modern thinking

Precisely because of the high cost of discipleship, the great temptation in an apostolic age is not to hypocrisy but to cowardice. While in Christendom people are tempted to profess more faith and virtue than they possess, in an apostolic age they are tempted to profess less. Open apostasy motivated by fear becomes more common.

In an apostolic age, because of the bitterness of the spiritual climate, groups of Christians face the temptation to develop an overly rigoristic attitude to faith and the moral life or to become sectarian and abandon the task of engaging and confronting the wider culture with the Gospel. There can be a tendency to “let the rest of the world go to hell” or to become dominated by a fearful attitude that robs the Gospel of its joyful and conquering spirit.

“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo. "So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” -J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

Protestant Evangelical Christianity has seen a sharp rise. Whatever the limitations of that stream of Christianity may be, it goes forward, evangelistically and pastorally, under an apostolic mode.

Whatever the limitations of that stream of Christianity may be, it goes forward, evangelistically and pastorally, under an apostolic mode.

In this dire predicament the servant grew anxious, but Elisha encouraged him with the words, “Don’t be afraid; those who are with us are more than those who are with them.” This made no sense to the servant, who could see no allies but only a vast army of enemies. So Elisha prayed that the servant’s eyes would be opened to see the spiritual world, to catch a glimpse of the genuine reality.

Modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than to teachers, and if he does listen to teachers, it is because they are witnesses. — POPE ST. PAUL VI, Evangelii Nuntiandi, 41

In a particular way, those in positions of influence and authority need to be convinced that Christ is the answer to every human ill, the solution to every human problem, the only hope for a dying race. They need to be convinced of the bad news: that the human race has by its own rebellion brought a curse upon itself and has sold itself into slavery to the prince of darkness, and there is nothing we can do under our own power to save ourselves. At the same time, they need to be equally convinced of the Good News: that God in his mercy has come among us to set us free from our sins and from slavery to the devil, and for those who turn to their true allegiance, the nightmare of life apart from God can be transformed into a dawn of eternal hope.

a world without God is a desolate wasteland, and that new life in Christ transforms darkness into light.

We should expect that many who have attended Mass because it was the conventional thing to do will stop attending and that those who have no real conviction about the truths of the Faith will be reluctant to pay a high price for those truths and will increasingly keep their distance.

There are many “hereditary Catholics” currently in the Church, who have sentimental ties to the way in which they were raised.

Jesus, the greatest and most talented preacher of the Gospel in history, did not gain a good reception from all his hearers; sometimes even a majority rejected his message.

The Church does not grow by mass movement; it moves forward one soul at a time, as each individual catches the fire of belief from another and is grafted into the body of Christ. The importance is not found in numbers but in the intensity of the flame, as the Apostles understood.

Every conversion is a marvel of grace, an astonishing work of God. Saint Augustine once said that it was a greater miracle for God to save one sinner than to have created the whole world.

Saint Augustine once said that it was a greater miracle for God to save one sinner than to have created the whole world.

A sympathetic observer of the state of the French church around the year 1810 or 1815 would have seen nothing but wreckage and, given simple sociological data, would have predicted vocational disaster into the future with everything that implies. What happened was something different. In 1808 there were 12,300 religious sisters in France. In 1878 there were 135,000. In 1830 there were some 3,000 priests of all kinds serving the French Church. In 1878 there were around 30,000, a ten-fold increase in sixty years, and their median age in 1878 was significantly younger than it had been sixty years earlier.

A healthy institution is always ordered to the human person and enhances, or at least does not diminish, the humanity of those under its influence.

Not to exercise such concerted activity is to lose the institution’s original purpose. In other words, for a Christian institution to shed its Christian bearings and spirit in an apostolic time, whether the institution be a family or a parish or a university or a charity organization, it does not need to be led decisively away from Christianity. All it needs to do is carry on in a maintenance “business as usual” mode, and in a fairly short space of time, as the institution conforms to dominant cultural forces, its inner spirit will have been lost to Christ. It is the difference between floating a canoe downriver with the occasional guiding push (in Christendom mode) or steering it upriver against the current with energetic strokes (in apostolic mode).