The New Wine Press vol 25 no 10 June 2017 | Page 14

The Language of Ministry
by Fr. Garry Richmeier, c.pp.s., Kansas City, Missouri
Over the years, I have read some of St. Gaspar’s
sermons, mission talks, and letters to community
members. To be honest, it is difficult for me to find
inspiration in most of them, and I have to do much
translating to make them pertinent to my life and
situation. I know that Gaspar was proclaiming the
same Gospel message that I do, and he must have
been very skilled at communicating it to the people of
his day. After all, we are told that people in great num-
bers flocked to hear him speak. He spoke in a way, in
a language, that people understood. That is a skill that
all good preachers have.
My problem is that I speak a different language than
did Gaspar and his audiences back then. I’m not talk-
ing about Gaspar speaking Italian and me speaking
English. Things like theological concepts, references
to popular ways to pray, the role of church hierarchy
and authority, and societal and cultural norms were
all part of the language Gaspar used to help people
understand his message. Since many of those things
have changed over the years, they sound foreign to
me, and I sometimes have difficulty gleaning the
Gospel message from what Gaspar spoke and wrote.
As a community, we carry on the work of Gaspar.
Our mission is to proclaim the Gospel message
in a language that people understand. On the
whole, we have done this pretty well over the years.
Traditionally, we have spoken the language of par-
ish church, prescribed church rituals and prayers,
sacraments, male clergy and laity (hierarchy), church
doctrine, the catechism, etc. People have understood
this language, and have heard the Gospel message
through it.
But the “signs of the times” seem to be telling us
that many people, especially people under 50 or so,
aren’t hearing the Gospel message very well through
this language. Indications of this are everywhere:
Mass attendance is low, there are fewer church wed-
dings, fewer confessions, church laws and rules are
taken less seriously (if people even know what they
are), the parish is less and less a center of the com-
munity, fewer people are joining religious orders or
getting ordained, etc. It is easy to blame people of
today and say they have abandoned their faith. But
the Gospel message of God’s love is what everyone
longs for because it is the source of all life, and people
12 • The New Wine Press • June 2017
haven’t abandoned the search for that. It is probably
the case that, like Gaspar’s language being foreign to
me, the language we have traditionally used to com-
municate the Gospel message may not be speaking
that clearly to younger people today.
So what should we as a community do?
One option is to do what we’ve always done, and
speak the language we’ve always spoken. There are
still people in the church who understand and ap-
preciate this language, who hear the Gospel message
through it. If we choose this option, we need to admit
up front that this group of people is getting smaller
and smaller, as is the number of people who will want
to join us as a community in speaking this language.
Another option is to identify and learn to speak
a different language, which will communicate the
Gospel message more effectively to people today.
To identify what language “works,” we would need
to listen, rather than instruct. Towards this end, a
good question to ask would be “Where/how do you
see God’s love speaking most clearly today?” The
answers we receive may or may not have much to
do with institutional church as we know it, but they
would help us identify what speaks the Gospel mes-
sage to people most clearly.
Then we would have to learn to speak the new lan-
guage, which would be no small task. It would prob-
ably require us to adapt to different places of ministry,
different people with whom we do ministry, different
ways of making decisions in ministry, etc. In some
cases it might even mean ministering outside the
auspices of the institutional church.
To be honest again, I’m not sure we as a community
have the energy or the will to learn a new language
with which to proclaim the Gospel message. We are
all getting older, and we know what they say about
teaching old dogs new tricks. But we don’t exist as a