NEEDED: MISSIONARY APOLOGISTS - Jonah Makau

Around the second century a new genre of Christian writing began to emerge. It was called Christian apology. It was a public defense of Christianity and was written by educated Christians, converts from paganism, who were called apologists. They defended Christianity from suspicion, criticism, and hostility by vigorously attacking popular religious ideas and practices, and by presenting Christianity as consistent with the best of classical philosophical reflection of the time.

The Christian apology therefore was not addressed to the members of the Church, but to those outside it, especially the imperial authorities. It was written against the background of Christianity being regarded as an illegal religion within the Roman Empire, where Christians were liable to be subjected to persecution for the practice of their faith any moment.

Today, a reality is arising which necessitates apologists or defenders of the faith. Although some people may not feel that Christianity is threatened, many agree that religion, or rather religiosity is. Unlike the apologists who were defending the faith from mostly external forces, today, as Christians, we are finding ourselves having to defend the faith from a rapidly growing secularism from within.

Why? Because while it should have been easy to counter this growing ideology, it is proving to be an uphill task to fight an ideology which has been gradually assimilated into the lives of the people, to an extent that many of us have become its propagators without knowing it. What can you say for example of a young girl in one of our parishes here in Nairobi (Kenya), who has found herself at loggerheads with the pastors after she got what she considered a God-sent lucrative opportunity to make money through advertisement of condoms for a certain company through billboards, television and other far reaching means of the mass media? How can one convince the young girl, and many other young people, that not every opportunity is the will of God and a manifestation of his providence? And note that this issue of contraceptives is just one of the many issues which are against our faith, yet which seem to have been silently accepted by our society.

To me, it is surprising that while in the second century, when the apologists were defending the Church the doctrines were not refined and clear (remember that at that time the controversies about the nature and relations of the persons of the Holy Trinity were on), today the majority of the truths of our faith are clearer to most of us, yet we seem to be finding it difficult to live our faith effectively. The most scaring thing however is that still equipped with this knowledge of our faith, somehow we are finding rational reasons (or excuses) as to why it should not apply to some certain situations of our lives. Call it selective application of the word of God and Church teaching or whatever you want, but the truth is that we are gradually losing the tenets of our faith and this is becoming a culture.

The solution

As a result of this trend, there is a dire need for missionary apologists today. People who do not take evangelization as just proclamation of the gospel, or converting non-Christians to Christ, but as a task of bringing the good news into all the strata of humanity from within and making it new (Evangelii Nuntiandi, 24). This to many may mean re-catecheses or re-evangelization of the already Christians, but to me it means making evangelization a process which embraces “both the personal and collective consciences of the people, the activities in which they engage, and the lives and concrete milieu which are theirs” (EN, 19).

It means re-inculturating the gospel values in the lives of the people, as a way of helping them shed the obscure foreign anti-Christian ideologies, especially the belief that indulgence and rebellion are signs of freedom and a manifestation of the acquisition of human rights. Although this may look like the work of the local clergy, for us Consolata missionaries this could mean including this reality among the new areopaguses of our mission. Why? Because first as missionaries we are aware that inculturation of the Christian faith into peoples’ lives is what evangelization is, and that cannot be separated from witness of life. Second, we also know that witness of life is the first and primary form of evangelization, since this, and only this, gives credibility to the proclamation of the good news of God’s reign, which it itself a permanent priority in mission.

This is what the Church teaches when she reminds us that today people put more trust in witness that in teachers, in experience than in teaching, in life and action than in theories (Redemptoris Missio, 42). May we be fast to see and act on the spreading need to defend the Church from within. May we become apologists of our time.

fonte: missionari della consolata