Straight to the Point

I’m going to be very straightforward in this post. After spending 24 hours in silence at a Jesuit retreat house in Colorado, I have come to two very important conclusions:

          1)     I feel alone.

          2)    I need a team.

Feeling Alone

As a caveat, I know, in my heart of hearts, that I’m not alone. I know that God is with me. I don’t question his presence or his love. Furthermore, I know that my wife is with me. Tasha is one of the greatest and most enduring gifts of God in my life. Beyond that, I am blessed by both friends and fellow sojourners on “the Way.”

Notwithstanding, God has called me to a very unique role – to be a bridge-builder in an age of division, an ambassador of reconciliation in a climate of discord, a catalyst for renewal and a spark for the new evangelization. I believe that God has uniquely prepared me to foster reconciliation and launch a new era of collaboration between Protestants and Catholics, between the mission of Young Life and the Catholic Church worldwide. I love and cherish this calling. And there’s fruit in it. This work could translate into millions of kids knowing Jesus Christ and joyfully contributing their gifts to the kingdom.

Yet I feel like I’m on an island.

I office out of the home. I travel a lot. I speak to audiences. I come home. I follow up. I read. I reflect. I write. I’m encouraged by many people, don’t get me wrong – my wife and close friends, my colleagues in Young Life and the Church, my boss, over 3,000 readers per month. But I feel like a team of one. On a day-to-day basis, I have no one to work with, to pray and ponder with, to reflect and wrestle with, to discern and risk with. I feel alone.

Needing A Team

It was a wise and perceptive spiritual director who said it. “You need a team.” It hit me like a ton of bricks. It was God talking and I heard it loud in clear. What I need right now is a team – actually two teams:

1. Financial Benefactors

·      My work is completely funded by personal giving. 100%. For the last 18 months, my family and I have lived month-to-month (literally) and God has provided. It is scary at times but it has also confirmed this call.

·      I currently have less than 3 weeks of operating budget in the bank. That means in less than a month, I’ll be out. Now I don’t believe this work is over. I just need people to help.

Would you be one of 50 people who commit a monthly gift today? $50? $100?

The rest of my budget would be raised for the year! I need a team. Are you with me?

Giving is simple. Go to: giving.younglife.org and follow the directions below.[1] It’s so easy. Join the team today.[2]

2. Mission-driven Co-Laborers

I need a team of people – no actually I would be happy with just one person whose heart beats for this stuff. Young Life and the Catholic Church, evangelization and discipleship, bridging the gap and inaugurating a change of cultures. I just need someone who I can work with. I can’t do this alone. This has to be fleshed out in community. It would help if you lived in my hometown but I would settle for someone who could really give some time to this. I need a team.

Michael can be contacted by emailing mhavercamp@gmail.com.

---

[1] Online giving is possible by visiting giving.younglife.org:

•  Check the circle for "A Young Life Staff Member's Ministry" (second left justified circle)

•  Click on the green "Search" tab right next to "A Young Life Staff Member's Ministry"

•  Insert my last name – “Havercamp”

•  My information should come up:

 Michael Havercamp (Training Associate I)

MD - Training Fund - 1515 Divisional Development

•  Click on the orange "Select"

•  Enter the gift amount and click "Make this a recurring donation"

•  Then click the blue "Add Gift" and you're all done!

[2] THANK YOU for those of you who already give so faithfully to this ministry! I’m so grateful for you and your friendship in the Gospel.

Clearinghouse Catholicism: Why the Church Is Struggling to Evangelize

Why is the church struggling to evangelize today? It’s a complex question but lurking in the shadows of the “usual suspects” (conservatives decrying relativism while the liberals bemoan virulent strains of fundamentalism), there may be something else at play here, something that doesn’t exactly sport horns and a pitchfork but may very well be the devil in the details of our ministry work.

The question for today is, “What is our operating image for the church?”

The Apostle Paul called the church “God’s field”, “the pillar and bulwark of the truth”, and (his personal favorite) “the body of Christ.”[1] Jesus is the head of this body, the activating agent and cohesive center of the church.[2] Vatican II’s primary image of the Church was the “people of God”, proclaiming the Gospel and advancing the redemptive missio Dei (mission of God) in the world.[3]

But what happens when the church becomes something very different? What happens to mission and ministry when the church becomes a clearinghouse? By definition, a clearinghouse is an agency that collects and distributes something, be it goods, services, or information. A clearinghouse is a third-party player, one that doesn’t actually produce goods, provide services or publish information. It merely connects pre-fabricated goods, ready-made services and packaged information with the consumers who desire them.

In many ways I worry that this is what the Church is becoming today. How do we catechize? We find ourselves scouring the publishing venues for just the right materials. How do we get encounter and conversion? We search for the perfect retreat, conference or DVD series. Parish staff and diocesan directors, caught in the crossfire of a highly pressurized “produce-or-perish” culture, line up an endless litany of programs and events, hoping that this new program or that event (or the perfect constellation of programs and events) will unlock the mysterious doors of ministry success.

The tragic effect of this paradigm is that the catechist isn’t necessarily encouraged to catechize. He merely provides the right materials that will catechize for him. The pastoral minister isn’t asked to personally evangelize. Her role is to promote the right conference or retreat experience that will hopefully foster a life-changing encounter with the Lord. In this scenario, parish and diocesan staff become event-planners, program-promoters and resourcing outlets that market the products and facilitate the ministerial exchange. In a word, they become a clearinghouse while the hopes and dreams of their original call into ministry slither away over a mountaintop of promotional materials and registration forms.

While good events and resources are incredibly helpful, I worry about the hidden consequences of an approach that overplays the promise of program.  I call it the “tyranny of the expert.” We no longer call on our own personal encounters with God as the primary resources for our ministry. We have materials for that. We no longer attune our ears to the voice of God, trusting in the power of the Lord to truly speak to us, guide us and send us out as ambassadors. We have national speakers and professional evangelists for that. We no longer spend our time investing in relationships and building a culture of discipleship. We have DVDs for that.

 “Who am I?” we ask ourselves, “to discern God’s nudges, to read the signs of the times and proclaim the Good News in bold and powerful ways?” In the church-as-clearinghouse model, the pastoral leader unwittingly exchanges his/her God-given calling as a divine image-bearer for the vaunted insights of the latest author or speaker, some “professional” who (we feel) really gets it.

Are we locked in this interminable system? Is this simply the lot we’ve been given? Pope Francis, the servant-leader of the Church universal, speaks to all of us, giving us permission to break out of this clearinghouse gridlock that undermines our true vocation and spins us mindlessly on the hamster-wheel of programmatical promise:

 When the Church summons Christians to take up the task of evangelization she is simply pointing to the source of authentic personal fulfillment. . . May the world of our time, which is searching, receive the good news not from evangelizers who are dejected, discouraged, impatient or anxious, but from ministers of the Gospel whose lives glow with fervor, who have first received the joy of Christ.[4]

That glow is not just in the latest circuit speaker, it’s in you. That spiritual insight and conviction doesn’t just reside in the new DVD series, it’s in you. God wants to reveal himself in an unrepeatable, unmistakable, utterly unique way – in you. “Whenever we make the effort to return to the source and recover the original freshness of the Gospel, new avenues arise, new paths of creativity open up, with different forms of expression, more eloquent signs and words with new meaning for today’s world.”[5]

Return to the Source. Go back to your calling. Revisit your Galilee. Vocation is not just for the “experts”, it’s for all of us. Open your heart and let the joy of the Gospel flow through you. Let us embrace this new phase of Catholic evangelization with enthusiasm and vigor. God is calling.

Without new life and an authentic evangelical spirit,

without the Church’s “fidelity to her own calling,”

any new structure [or program] will soon prove ineffective.

~ Pope Francis, EG, 26

---

[1] 1 Cor 3:9, 1 Tim 3:15, Eph 5:22-23.

[2] Col 1:18.

[3] Lumen Gentium, 9-17.

[4] Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium (The Joy of the Gospel), 10.

[5] Ibid, 11.

Returning to Galilee

The water was calm that day. I stood there, my eyes closed, forgetting where I was for a moment until a single fishing vessel cut through the mirrored surface, inaugurating a rippling dance of light, movement and sound. “Could I really be here?” I thought to myself. “The place where the Savior of the world fed the multitudes, walked on water, delivered the Sermon on the Mount?” Jesus was here. I am here. I would never be the same. The Sea of Galilee.

After the resurrection, Jesus appeared to a couple faithful followers and said, “Go to Galilee; there [my disciples] will see me”(Mt 28:10). Jesus was asking the disciples to return to the place where it all started, the place where they heard the call, the place where they dropped everything to follow the Son of God. The One who was crucified they would see again. But where? Galilee.

“In the life of every Christian, there is another ‘Galilee,’ a more existential ‘Galilee’: the experience of a personal encounter with Jesus Christ,” Pope Francis announced in his Easter Vigil homily. This is a very important place, the Pope explained:

Returning to Galilee means treasuring in my heart the living memory of that call, when Jesus passed my way, gazed at me with mercy and asked me to follow him. To return there means reviving the memory of that moment when his eyes met mine, the moment when he made me realize that he loved me.[1]

This is not some nostalgic return to a golden age, Francis noted. “It is returning to our first love, to receive the fire which Jesus has kindled in the world.” We return to Galilee so that we might carry in these broken vessels the very Light of the world. We return to our first love so that we might love the world and transform it through the power of the resurrection.

 “Where is my Galilee?” the pope asks. “Do I remember it? Have I forgotten it? Have I gone off on roads and paths which made me forget it?”[2] In this Easter season, might we take a moment to reflect on our Galilee, to return to the place where Jesus first touched us, and perhaps, just perhaps, know it for the first time.[3]

Lord, help me:

Tell me what my Galilee is;

For you know that I want to return there

To encounter you and to let myself be embraced by your mercy.

~ Pope Francis

---

[1] Pope Francis, Easter Vigil Homily, April 19, 2014 at: http://m2.vatican.va/content/francescomobile/en/homilies/2014/documents/papa-francesco_20140419_omelia-veglia-pasquale.html

[2] Ibid.

[3] Taken from the famous T.S. Eliot quote, “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

Top 10 Reasons to Evangelize Catholics

1. Approximately one-third of those who say they were raised Catholic no longer describe themselves as Catholic.

~Pew Research Center, Religious Landscape Survey

2. Sometimes even Catholics have lost or never had the chance to experience Christ personally.

~Pope John Paul II, 1993 address to Catholic Bishops

3. Today there is a very large number of baptized people who for the most part have not formally renounced their Baptism but who are entirely indifferent to it and not living in accordance with it.

~Pope Paul VI, Evangelii Nuntiandi (On Evangelization in the Modern World), 56

4. The New Evangelization calls all Catholics first to be evangelized and then in turn to evangelize.

~USCCB, Disciples Called to Witness, Preface

5. The church sometimes has locked itself up in small things, in small-minded rules. The most important thing is the first proclamation: Jesus Christ has saved you.

~Pope Francis, 2013 interview with Antonio Spadaro, S.J.

6. [There are] those who ultimately trust only in their own powers and feel superior to others because they observe certain rules or remain intransigently faithful to a particular Catholic style from the past. A supposed soundness of doctrine or discipline leads instead to a narcissistic and authoritarian elitism, whereby instead of evangelizing, one analyzes and classifies others, and instead of opening the door to grace, one exhausts his or her energies in inspecting and verifying. In neither case is one really concerned about Jesus Christ or others. . . It is impossible to think that a genuine evangelizing thrust could emerge from these adulterated forms of Christianity.

~Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium (The Joy of the Gospel), 94

7. Not everyone who says to me, “Lord, Lord,” shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father.

~Jesus Christ, Mt. 7:21

8. There are Christians whose lives seem like Lent without Easter.

~Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium (The Joy of the Gospel), 6

9. The best of evangelizers allow themselves to be converted and evangelized again and again and in that way grow in holiness.

~Cardinal Francis George, Archdiocese of Chicago, Spreading the Holy Fire, 11

10. The love of Christ compels us.

~The Apostle Paul, 2 Cor 5:14

OK, there are 11 reasons. . .

11. Saint Paul, after his encounter with Jesus Christ, “immediately proclaimed Jesus.” So what are we waiting for?

~Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, 120; Acts 9:20, 22:6-21

"Springing" into Selfhood

As I sat down to pray this morning I was riveted by the singular song of a bird perched near my window. I had only closed my eyes for a moment, and honestly I was hurrying to get into the Word where I anticipated the “main course” of my morning solitude with the Lord. But the beauty and simplicity of that little bird’s song gave me pause to reflect on the glory of Creation and, in particular, the poignant insights of Thomas Merton:

A tree gives glory to God by being a tree.  For in being what God means it to be it is obeying him.  It ‘consents,’ so to speak, to His creative love. . . The tree imitates God by being a tree. The more a tree is like itself, the more it is like Him.[1]

Merton applied this same intuition to flowers and fields, lakes and mountains, clumsy colts and fish of the sea, each one “a holiness consecrated to God by His own creative wisdom which declares the glory of God.”[2] As I sat down to pray this morning I began to realize that the budding signs of Spring rang out with a melodious and surprising invitation - to join the vast diversity of the created world in “being who we really are.”

Merton keenly intuited that trees and animals have no problem being who they are. The plant and animal kingdoms do not have an identity crisis. “God makes them what they are without consulting them, and they are perfectly satisfied,” Merton notes. A tree will be a tree, growing and stretching, bearing fruit and providing shade. A bird will sing and gather, search and soar, and according to Merton, will glorify God by being exactly what it was created to be.

But human beings are another matter altogether.

With us it is different. God leaves us free to be whatever we like. We can be ourselves or not, as we please. We are at liberty to be real, or to be unreal. We may be true or false, the choice is ours.[3]

Human beings have the capacity to strive to be something we were never meant to be. We can spend our time doing things that, “if we only stopped to think about them, are just the opposite of what we were made for.”[4] As we all know, we can wear masks and put on garments and deny the unrepeatable beauty of our unique identity in God’s economy, our “true selves.”

While we have the freedom to do as we please, Merton reminds us, we cannot live with impunity to the consequences.

Causes have effects, and if we lie to ourselves and to others, then we cannot expect to find truth and reality whenever we happen to want them. If we have chosen the way of falsity we must not be surprised that truth eludes us when we finally come to need it![5]

“To be real or to be unreal?” - that is the question of the spiritual life. Let us take our cue from the birds of the air and trees of the forest that give glory to God by being exactly what they were created to be. “Spring” into selfhood and sanctity. God, and somewhere Thomas Merton, is smiling.[6]

---

[1] Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (NY: New Directions Publishing, 1962), 29.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Thomas Merton, No Man Is An Island (NY: Harvest, 1955).

[5] Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (NY: New Directions Publishing, 1962), 30.

[6] I hadn’t heard too much about the “true self” before becoming Catholic. Of course, there was this vague and intuitive notion that being genuine was somehow important to the spiritual life but nothing on par with Thomas Merton’s reflections on the matter (ie. “For me to be a saint meant to be myself”). Merton subsequently deduced that “the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self." Now anyone who knows anything about Merton knows that this is not some sneaky and narcissistic play on secular humanism. Merton was NOT saying, “It’s all about me!” Merton was a Trappist monk who had molded his life around the contemplation of Jesus Christ as the pivotal saving event of human history. What he was saying is that the perennial "Who am I?" question of human existence meets up with the "Who do you say that I am?" question of Jesus Christ in the most fundamental way. Who we are is intimately and inextricably linked with "Whose" we are. Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (NY: New Directions Publishing, 1962), 29.

Hail Mary

Today is the feast of the Annunciation. Translation: This post is going to cause a reaction. Why? Well, have you heard the joke about the three issues that Protestants have with Roman Catholicism? Mary, Mary and Mary. Certainly not a joke, this feast day in the Roman Catholic and Orthodox liturgical calendar, otherwise known as the Solemnity of the Annunciation of our Lord, is all about Mary.[1] And therefore, it is all about Jesus. At least that’s the way it’s supposed to work.

Today we celebrate the coming of the angel Gabriel and his shocking announcement to Mary, a young, poor, Jewish woman who was still months away from proper marriage – “You will be with child and give birth to a son . . . the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God.”[2] On this day, more specifically, we celebrate Mary’s fiat, the courageous “may it be done to me,” not because it represents any merit outside of God’s grace but because Mary’s freely chosen “yes” was the chosen avenue for God’s very Incarnation and a model of Christian discipleship for us today.

If you are Protestant, you are probably squirming in your chair already. Like me (raised Presbyterian), you may have reacted so much to Mary as to push her out of your consciousness and spirituality altogether. As Evangelical scholar Scot McKnight put it, “Most of us know far more about what we don’t believe about Mary – that she wasn’t immaculately conceived, that she had other children and wasn’t perpetually virgin, etc. – than what we do believe about Mary.”[3]

That’s why McKnight chose to write a book about Mary, encouraging his Evangelical friends to desist from such “reaction formation” and begin to see Mary in a fresh and biblical light. “We are Protestants!” he says forcibly. “We believe in the Bible; Mary is in the Bible; we need to believe what the Bible says about Mary.”[4] Ultimately, he writes, and I use his own words, “Because the real Mary always leads us to Jesus.”[5]

This is what most Protestants miss regarding Marian devotion – the Rosary, Novenas, scapulars and pilgrimages to places like Lourdes or Madjugorje. It is all about Jesus. At least that’s the intended design. Our understanding of, our attention to, and yes, our relationship with Mary can and should point to, awaken our faith in, and strengthen our primary relationship with Jesus.

Yet I’d have to admit as a Catholic that at times Marian devotion can obscure its Christocentric focus. I often joke about Catholics giving the impression that Mary is the fourth person of the Trinity, but only half in jest. The way we talk about Mary, if it doesn’t lead us to Jesus, makes non-Catholics very uneasy. Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn’t also make Mary herself uncomfortable.

Msgr. Peter Hocken, Catholic priest and noted ecumenist, cautions against such a consequential separation, suggesting that the Spirit will convict us if in honoring Mary we obscure the clear centrality of Jesus:

The Spirit will make Catholics uneasy, not about honouring Mary (Luke 1:48), but about all forms and expressions of Marian devotion that downplay or ignore the centrality of Jesus. Anything that obscures the uniqueness of Jesus’ role as mediator between God and the human race will be contested by the Spirit.[6]

And so it should. What we celebrate today has been celebrated for centuries because it marks the moment that God “became flesh and dwelt among us.”[7] It marks the moment when, “with the entrance of the eternal into time, time itself is redeemed.”[8] Mary is “full of grace,” because, in a quite literal sense, she is full of Jesus. On this day, I wonder if we, Catholics and Protestants alike, with our eyes fixed on the Lord, might together be able to join in the angelic chorus. . .

“Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with you.”

Luke 1:29

---

[1] Documented celebrations of the feast of the Annunciation date back to the fourth and fifth centuries.

[2] Lk 1:31, 35.

[3] Scot McKnight, The Real Mary: Why Evangelical Christians Can Embrace the Mother of Jesus (Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2007), 5.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid, 6.

[6] Peter Hocken, The Glory and the Shame: Reflections on the 20^th Century Outpouring of the Holy Spirit (Guildford, UK: Eagle Publishing, 1987), 117; taken from Paul M Miller, Evangelical Mission in Co-operation with Catholics: A Study of Evangelical Missiological Tensions (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2013), 138-139.

[7] Jn 1:14.

[8] Pope John Paul II, Redemptoris Mater (The Mother of the Redeemer), 1.