Everybody is a missionary now

Pope Francis in his message for World Mission Sunday last year pointed out that “faith is a gift that one cannot keep to oneself, but it is to be shared”.

“If we want to keep it only to ourselves,” he wrote, “we will become isolated, sterile and sick Christians.”

None of us are exempt from the call to respond to the mission of sharing faith with others. There is no such thing as a junior Christian. We are all on an equal footing in the eyes of God, and called to respond to Christ’s mandate of spreading the gospel to the whole world.

Mission Sunday is not just about moving from rural Bavaria to rural Zululand, or from South Africa to Mongolia to announce the good news. It also presents an opportunity for all who call themselves Christians to renew their participation in mission.

Mission Sunday is a time of grace for every Christian, a time to ask: “How am I participating in the mission of the Church?”

We are there in the mission when we drop some money into the basket for evangelising purposes; we are there in the mission when we pray and encourage our brothers and sisters working near and far with comforting words; we are there in the mission when we share our faith with others in our daily lives; and we are there in the mission when we allow our children to live out a missionary vocation.

A parish community that is not supportive of the mission misses its purpose. The Church is by its nature missionary. What happens in Egypt, Kenya, Syria, Ukraine or Haiti concerns Christ, and thus concerns us too. To support missions in the world is a universal call; failing to respond to it is to fail the Christian faith.

Once I asked a young lady from Mamelodi West, the Pretoria township, why she is a Catholic and yet her parents and siblings are Zionists. She explained it was because of a Catholic family that “has been good to us since we relocated to this place”. In particular, “their daughter has been a good sister to me”.

The welcoming generosity of that Catholic family moved this youngster. Many converts have come to the Church because their lives have been touched by the goodness of men and women who live Christ’s teachings in their ordinary lives.

People have been more committed in their lives because of what they’ve seen in committed Christians.

In this age of SMS, Whats-App and Facebook, the Gospel message can also be communicated to many people at once.

I know of a young chap who writes on Facebook about his reflections on next Sunday’s readings.

He is a soldier in barracks, and yet he makes time to announce Jesus through Facebook. Is this not fantastic?

Mission is for the tout picking up people at taxi ranks, mission is for the driver commuting from Johannesburg to Durban, mission is for the miner in Marikana many metres underground, mission is for the cashier at your local supermarket.

When all these people in their different circles of life become missionary-minded—even by acts of kindness or decency — our world will be better because they inject the Gospel values of love into society.