“For generations,” begins a New York Times article, “parishioners whispered their sins in the dark wooden confessional booths of Notre-Dame-du-Perpétuel-Secours, an imposing Roman Catholic church in Montreal.” Not any more.

“The once-hallowed space,” the article goes on, “now illuminated with a giant pink chandelier, has been reinvented as the Théâtre Paradoxe at a cost of nearly $3 million in renovations. It is now host to, among other events, Led Zeppelin cover bands, Zumba lessons and fetish parties.”

Notre-Dame-du-Perpétuel-Secours is one of many churches in Quebec closed because of too few parishioners. Sold off, they “have been transformed — into university reading rooms, luxury condominiums, cheese emporiums and upmarket fitness centers.”

In the 1950s, 95 percent of overwhelmingly Catholic Quebec went to Mass. Now, a couple of generations later, 5 percent attend Mass. The Church, in a word, has been decimated and that in record time.

The article quotes Montreal’s Archbishop Christian Lépine: “There is a sadness when a church is shuttered or transformed, but we have to accept reality.”

Evangelism

That reality is, as my late friend Wayne Anderson used to put it: “Someone forgot to make disciples.” And making disciples begins with evangelism.

You remember evangelism, don’t you? Sharing Christ as the way to salvation and inviting people to receive Christ with repentance and faith, to join the Church, and to begin walking in obedience to Christ.

What ever happened to evangelism?

In the 1970s and 1980s, talk about sharing the Gospel was everywhere in evangelical churches. We all had copies of The Four Spiritual Laws, The Bridge to Life, Evangelism Explosion, and/or those little InterVarsity booklets waiting to be deployed. We used to head out to the Boston Common regularly to share the faith with whoever would listen to us. Most evangelical churches had evangelism training at least once or twice a year.

Across the Tiber, Catholic churches had charismatic groups with a similar desire to lead others to personal faith in Christ. The push came from the top. “Conversion means accepting, by a personal decision, the saving sovereignty of Christ and becoming his disciple,” wrote St. John Paul II in his 1990 encyclical Redemptoris Missio: On the permanent validity of the Church’s missionary mandate. He gave marching orders that he called “the new evangelization.”

Then something — or several things — happened and seems to have killed our zeal for “saving souls” as the old preachers put it.

Not Everyone Goes to Heaven

We developed a tacit belief that everyone (or pretty much everyone) goes to Heaven. We think that Christ’s work on the cross is so big it saves everyone. Or that sin is not really all that serious. Or that it’s mean to claim that people will spend eternity in Hell. And since God isn’t mean, there’s no need to evangelize.

A milder version of this is simply failing to see our neighbors through the eyes of faith. C.S. Lewis wrote, “it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit — immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.” “All day long,” he said, “we are in some degree helping each other to one or the other of these destinations.”

Jesus said that anyone who does not believe in Him, “stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.” Thus, “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life, for God’s wrath remains on them.” (John 3:18b, 36)

The Hurdle of Fear

But our big hurdle is fear. In an era of political correctness where everybody’s “truth” is as good as anyone else’s “truth,” it’s scary to claim what Francis Schaeffer called “true Truth.” There may be a price to pay. We risk being ignored as hopelessly behind the times or shouted down and vilified out as “bigots,” “haters,” or worse.

Changing Questions

While Christ is still the answer, the questions have changed. If we don’t know our era’s questions or how Christ is the answer to those questions, we might well fear.

All of which is to say that we’ll start evangelizing again once we’re renewed in the truths of the faith and learn how to share Christ in love with our neighbors.

Archbishop Lépine seems to believe that as well. “The Church is called to undergo continual renewal in its efforts to help all people experience a personal encounter with Jesus Christ,” he writes introducing his archdiocese outreach program. That program begins September 14, the Feast of the Triumph of the Cross. The cross being where it all begins.

Pray for Success

Let’s pray for success, believing that God wants to fill churches with worshippers in Quebec, New York, Chicago, London, Moscow, Lander, Wyoming and across the world.

Pray that we’ll need to buy back some of those churches as the Holy Spirit fills them again with the light of Christ and men and women who love that light.