The Where and the What - Letter from Our Executive Director

Dear Members,
 
Back in 2016, while ministering in mission education with the Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, I was invited to contribute to the Archdiocese of Chicago’s fledgling effort to renew parishes and schools through the lens of evangelization. Pope Francis had recently launched “missionary discipleship” to the forefront of our ecclesial lexicon with the release of Joy of the Gospel, and many in the US Church were eager to answer this call to missionary transformation. It soon became clear, however, that we all had varying levels of experience with—and ideas about—missiology and missionary activity. I was grateful, then, when Fr. Norman, a priest of the archdiocese who maintained a ministry of solidarity with his home country of Honduras, spoke up in one of those early meetings. “If you want to understand missionary discipleship,” he said, “you need to read Ad Gentes, Evangelii Nuntiandi, Redemptoris Missio and Evangelii Gaudium.”
 
Ever since the Second Vatican Council affirmed the baptismal call to mission, the question of “where” mission happens has not only challenged and stretched the entire Church in its identity, but also often vexed many of us in articulating our own missionary charisms. After all, if mission is truly “everywhere,” then why go anywhere? Conversely, how can everyone be a missionary if few will ever leave their homes to answer this call? Increasingly, however, I wonder if the more pressing question is not so much where mission might or might not occur, but what it even means in the first place. When I consider the missionaries I’ve met in places like Haiti, Bolivia and Guatemala, I think less about the unique, deeply personal journey which brought them there, and more about what, in collaboration with the Spirit, they strive to embody: seeking encounter with Christ in the stranger, entering into authentic community and solidarity with the poor and marginalized, witnessing and proclaiming the Good News of God’s borderless and compassionate reign…
 
We who seek to cross borders and boundaries—be they national, cultural, social, religious or economic—have a profound responsibility to help the entire Church embrace and fully embody our communal missionary identity. When Pope Francis first shared his dream that our “ways of doing things” be geared towards evangelization instead of “self-preservation” (EG 27), there was an implicit acknowledgment that the evolution of missionary thought over the preceding fifty years—encapsulated largely in the very documents Fr. Norman mentioned—had not fully taken root. Even today, the conversation around missionary discipleship, at least here in the United States, often gives the impression that mission not only “begins where we are,” but ends there as well. When we do “go forth from our comfort zone,” as Francis urges, we often stitch together methods and practices from other traditions with little to no grounding in our own. And, too often, we see our people and communities embark on pathways which, however well-intentioned, had until recently been abandoned as anachronistic, assimilationist or coercive.
 
In this regard, Pope Francis presents those committed to global and intercultural mission with a unique imperative and opportunity. As the Synod on Synodality proceeds this month with its second and final session of the Sixteenth General Assembly, we are together invited into continued discernment over how to be “church” today and into the future, a people who strive always to rediscover, proclaim and participate in God’s mission to creation. We at USCMA seek to continue this conversation with you our members and partners, beginning with our upcoming conference at the end of this month. I look forward to continuing to dialogue and collaborating with you in the months to come, that we might better follow the Spirit into our collective future—wherever that may lead us.
 
Sincerely,
 
Kevin Foy
Executive Director