Worship and Evangelization Outreach / Sean Hussey

Making disciples in parishes to help others encounter Jesus

When we think about evangelization in our parishes, we often ask the question, “How do we get all of the people out there in the community to come in here?” Instead, perhaps a better question is to ask, “How can we get all these people in our Church to go out there to make disciples in the community?”

In other words, how do we lead the people in our churches to an encounter with Jesus, and then equip them to be the primary evangelists in our parishes, to be disciple makers?

As Pope Paul VI said, evangelization is “the essential mission of the Church … her deepest identity. She exists in order to evangelize.” All baptized Christians have a responsibility to share the good news of Jesus Christ, to participate in evangelization, the essential mission of the Church.

In light of this mission, our archdiocesan Office of Evangelization recently launched a brand new evangelization guidebook, titled “How to Start (or Jumpstart) Discipleship Groups at Your Parish.” This guidebook is meant to serve as a tool to help our parishes to equip the laity for evangelization by launching a movement of Discipleship Groups.

You might be wondering, “Why Discipleship Groups? Why are we placing an emphasis in our Office of Evangelization on discipleship and spiritual multiplication at all?” Well, I think a great place to start is with Jesus.

We should look back to the method modeled by the Master. In Jesus’ 33 years of life, he only chose three years to do his public ministry. During those years, he spent a disproportionate amount of his time with just a few men. Jesus certainly preached to the masses, he healed many people, but in a particular way, the heart of his ministry was that he chose to invest his life deeply in only a few.

Jesus “called his disciples to himself, and from them he chose twelve, whom he also named Apostles” (Lk 6:13). Jesus lived with those Apostles for three years. He was friends with them. He camped with them. He prayed with them. He also taught them what it looked like to follow after him, how to pray, how to seek after the Father, and ultimately, he taught them how to carry on the mission of sharing the Gospel message.

Jesus could have brought the Gospel to the world in any number of supernatural ways, but instead he chose to bring the message of the Gospel to the world in this rather ordinary way, a way that we can imitate. Jesus modeled to us that the most effective way to reach the lost with the Gospel is for each of us to invest deeply in a few. We call this discipleship.

“… What you have heard from me, before many witnesses, entrust to faithful men who will be able to teach others also” (2 Tm 2:2). In this verse from

St. Paul’s Second Letter to Timothy, we see the process of discipleship. This is the model of spiritual multiplication that Jesus gave to us, and this is an extremely effective way for our parishes to become places of great evangelization of discipleship.

The reality is that by ourselves, we can’t invest in every single person. Although we might love to invest in every person that comes to a program, an event or Mass, each of us can only pour our lives into a few people. As St. Paul says, “We were ready to share with you not only the Gospel of God, but also our own selves, because you had become very dear to us” (1 Thes 2:8). Each of us can choose to do for a few people what we’d like to do for many. This is the mission of Discipleship Groups.

(Sean Hussey is the evangelization and discipleship coordinator within the archdiocesan Secretariat for Worship and Evangelization. He can be reached at: shussey@archindy.org or 317-236-1542. To access the entire guidebook online [in English or Spanish], visit evangelizeindy.com/support. If you would like to request any hard copies, please e-mail him at the above address. When you are ready to launch Discipleship Groups at your parish, Hussey and his office can help you begin the process. They can provide in-depth Discipleship Group Leader Formation and Training to pastors, parish staff, evangelization teams, and to anyone who is interested in leading a Discipleship Group at your parish. If you’d like to have a conversation about setting up a Discipleship Group Leader Training at your parish, please contact him.) †