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    Everybody Evangelizes About Something
    Everybody Evangelizes About Something
    Everybody Evangelizes About Something
    Ebook68 pages1 hour

    Everybody Evangelizes About Something

    By Matthew Kelly

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    About this ebook

    Everybody evangelizes about something. Some people evangelize about their favorite restaurant or vacation destination, others about music or a movie, some about their new iPhone, and still others, about a politician or political agenda. Everybody evangelizes about something, and everyone is a disciple of something or someone.

    This is the heart of Matthew Kelly's message in this book. It begins with his presentation at a Vatican summit to discuss the challenges of sharing the Gospel today. His words are bold and insightful.

    It is one thing to write such bold words in the quiet of one's room. It is another thing altogether to stand in the Papal Palace, before one hundred bishops and one thousand ministry leaders from around the world, and boldly announce these confronting truths.

    But the boldest ideas in his text were met with spontaneous applause on several occasions despite the solemnity of the occasion. Part way through his speech, as Matthew presented his most challenging idea, a group of bishops stood in the middle of his speech and began to applaud his ideas. At the conclusion of his remarks, the whole audience rose in a resounding ovation.

    Imagine yourself there, in the Vatican on that day, as you read and reflect upon these words. They echo forth from the heart of a man who loves the Catholic Church deeply, from the heart of a man who has powerfully served God's people for three decades
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookBaby
    Release dateOct 15, 2022
    ISBN9781635821604
    Everybody Evangelizes About Something
    Author

    Matthew Kelly

    Matthew Kelly has dedicated his life to helping people become the-best-version-of-themselves. He is the author of more than forty books, including: Life is Messy, I Heard God Laugh, The Rocking Chair Prophet, Holy Moments, and The Fourth Quarter of Your Life. His books have been published in more than thirty languages, have appeared on the most prestigious bestseller lists, and have sold more than sixty million copies.

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      Book preview

      Everybody Evangelizes About Something - Matthew Kelly

      PART ONE

      EVERYBODY EVANGELIZES about something. Some people evangelize about their favorite restaurant or vacation destination, others about music or a movie, some about their new iPhone, and still others, about a politician or political agenda. Everybody evangelizes about something, and everyone is a disciple of something or someone.

      There are now 2.5 billion iPhones on the planet. That didn’t happen without some serious evangelization. And there have been many times when I have heard people speak with great passion about their new iPhone and thought to myself, Imagine if Catholics were this passionate about sharing the Gospel!

      It is in our nature to evangelize. It is in our nature to share good news with others. Those who have had a deeply personal encounter with Jesus do not need to be told to evangelize: it is an inevitable consequence of that encounter. If you place an empty bucket under a dripping tap it will eventually overflow. It has no choice.

      Though we have traveled different paths, we are each here today because we have accepted God’s invitation to serve his people.

      I was raised in Sydney, Australia. Each Sunday I went to Mass, I attended Catholic schools, and I received the Sacraments. And yet, although I had been immersed in the activities of our faith, like millions of my generation, my heart had not been won for Jesus and his Church.

      I knew about Jesus, but I did not know Jesus-and knowing about someone is not the same as knowing that person. This is the difference between catechesis and evangelization.

      When I was fifteen I was evangelized. My path crossed with a man who challenged me to pray and read the Gospels, reflect on the larger questions of life, and consider my responsibility to the poor and lonely. He patiently answered my questions about life and the faith. It was at this time that I encountered Jesus in a deeply personal way. The direction of my life was forever altered.

      As I delved into the Catholic experience, one idea captured my imagination above all others. It was the idea that holiness is possible and that each moment is an invitation and an opportunity to grow in holiness. It was the first time holiness had been set before me as a possibility. Each moment was now filled with purpose and each moment grasped for God produced an explosion of joy in my soul.

      When I began speaking and writing about the faith in my late teens, I wanted to share this joy with others. By that time, I had immersed myself in the documents of the Second Vatican Council and was convinced that the universal call to holiness held the key to helping people find meaning and purpose in their lives, and the key to helping them understand the genius of Catholicism.

      Over the next seven years, I visited the Church in more than fifty countries speaking to people of all ages. Standing before audiences I noticed that when I began speaking about the universal call to holiness their eyes would glaze over. There was a disconnect. This was magnified when I visited high schools. Standing in front of a thousand teens you can tell how each and every sentence is received, and the concept of holiness was simply unable to capture their attention.

      I didn’t know it at the time, but now I realize that the reason they were unable to engage in a conversation about holiness was because they had already fallen victim to the biggest lie in the history of Christianity. It is not a lie that non-Christians tell about Christians, but rather a lie we tell ourselves: Holiness is not possible for me. This is the lie that hundreds of millions of Catholics have accepted consciously or unconsciously. This is the lie that has paralyzed the inner and outer lives of Christians in the modern world.

      When I first started speaking and writing I found this incredibly discouraging, because I wanted others to experience the joy that I was experiencing by immersing myself in relationship with God and this quest for holiness. So, I began to experiment with language.

      How could say it in a way so they could hear? How could I set them free from all the false stereotypes and caricatures about holiness? How could I explain it in a way that cut through bias and prejudice? How could I help them to hear the message as a beautiful invitation to a new way of life?

      It was out of this search that the phrase the-best-version-of-yourself emerged. I can still remember the first time I used it. At the time I was traveling and speaking more than two-hundred days a year, and one night, speaking to a large group at a church in California, it came to me.

      God has an incredible dream for you, I said, He wants you to become the-best-version-of-yourself! Their reaction was instantaneous. I could see in their eyes that they had heard the message in a new way, that it had captured their imaginations. I went on to

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