2025 Evangelization Supplement
Parish evangelization teams work to help Catholics share their faith
Participants in a “Rescue Project” evangelization program at St. Jude Parish in Indianapolis share a dinner during a Feb. 16 session at the Indianapolis South Deanery faith community. (Submitted photo)
By Sean Gallagher
There may be some 1.4 billion Catholics throughout the world today, but the Church began 2,000 years ago with a small number of disciples led by the 12 Apostles.
It was they who, empowered by the Holy Spirit, went forth from Jerusalem to proclaim the Gospel to all nations, inspiring others to place their faith in the risen Christ and bringing growth to the Church.
In a similar way, there are small groups of people in parishes across central and southern Indiana who have a passion to draw others to Christ and the Church and want to have more people join them in this effort.
This is happening in faith communities as diverse as St. Jude Parish and its more than 1,500 households on the southside of Indianapolis and St. Patrick Parish with about 100 households in Salem in rural southern Indiana in the New Albany Deanery.
In both instances, those involved in evangelization efforts are following the model of the Apostles who gathered in prayer with the Blessed Virgin Mary before setting off as missionaries (Acts 1:14).
Tammy Stewart, St. Jude’s recently retired director of evangelization, outreach and campus ministry, said that her parish’s evangelization team spent several months in 2024 in discernment and prayer before launching initiatives last December.
Both its “Mission Possible” workshop held late last year and its “Rescue Project” initiative held earlier this year have met with a good response from St. Jude parishioners. About 100 people attended each of the eight weekly sessions of the latter program, which ended in April on Palm Sunday.
“Honestly, I think it’s prayer,” Stewart said. “We’re just going to give credit to the Holy Spirit on this.”
For the evangelization team at St. Jude, this time of prayer flowed into the nine team members sharing their faith in conversation. Stewart said that, at first, some were uncomfortable, believing they weren’t good representatives of the faith because of the many struggles they had experienced in their lives.
Nonsense, Stewart said, noting that such people are the “perfect example” of showing how Christ can change people’s lives for the better.
“We’re all broken, and we need to hear that you were broken, too,” she said. “Now you have Christ in your life. Look at your life. We have to hear those stories. That’s our main message here.”
Learning to listen well to other people’s stories was an important lesson for team member Mary Ball.
“It taught me to stop and to listen to people,” Ball said. “The number one thing I learned from our discernment is that we have to meet people where they are.”
At the same time, Ball also learned how to share her faith in concise ways that can be well-received by others.
And being willing to speak directly about the role faith plays in one’s life is a key skill the evangelization team at St. Jude wants to pass on to their fellow parishioners.
Stewart bluntly said that the saying attributed to St. Francis of Assisi, that believers are to “preach the Gospel always and, if necessary, use words,” is often used as “a cop out” by people seeking an excuse for not sharing their faith.
“We have to use words,” Stewart said. “You have to share how Jesus Christ has made a difference in your life. What was your life like before you encountered Jesus Christ? What’s it like now? You have to share those stories.”
The parish’s “Mission Possible” workshop last December helped the team share that message with parishioners. The one-day workshop emphasized the importance of sharing faith and gave participants practical advice and suggestions for doing so.
“So often, Catholics feel like sharing our faith is impossible,” Stewart said. “They can feel intimidated by that. This [workshop] was a way of showing them that this mission is very possible.”
The team then built upon the success of the December workshop by offering the eight-week Rescue Project, which was developed by Father John Riccardo, a priest of the Archdiocese of Detroit, and his Acts XXIX ministry.
The program is centered around videos featuring Father Riccardo and included dinner for the participants and small group discussions.
The discussions allowed those at each table to practice how they can share their own faith with others.
“Catholics don’t talk about their faith enough,” Ball said. “In the Rescue Project, we did just that. It brought people out of their comfort zones to talk about it so that when they go out afterward, they’ll feel more comfortable doing it.”
When the evangelization team was planning the program, which started in February, they hoped that maybe 30 parishioners would take part. They ended up welcoming around 100 at each session.
“It was encouraging,” Stewart said. “For 100 people to come to show that their faith mattered to them and they’re open to going out and sharing their faith gave us so much hope and really energized our committee.”
Terry Thixton of St. Patrick Parish in Salem said that she and a group of fellow parishioners are taking a “prayer first, action later” approach similar to the one adopted at St. Jude.
They face different circumstances than the team at St. Jude, where the Catholic presence on Indianapolis’ southside is fairly strong.
“We don’t have a lot of Catholics here,” Thixton said. “But the Catholics we do have are very active in the community. I just would like us to be able to share the love of God and have more people come [to the parish].
“We’re a tiny parish. But, you know what? It’s all good. God is good.”
Thixton was moved in part to help get St. Patrick’s evangelization team off the ground by her experience at the National Eucharistic Congress held in Indianapolis last July.
“I was like, ‘I’ve got to share this,’ ” Thixton recalled.
While the team in her parish is still discerning what concrete steps to take next, Thixton and her fellow team members are starting from a place where they know the ultimate goal—making evangelization a part of the everyday life of all Catholics at St. Patrick.
“I don’t think it just ends with our parish,” she said. “I think that it just becomes a way of life.” †
