What the World Needs

by Fr. John Parks  |  03/17/2024  |  Weekly Reflection

When I was a child, they would put missing children on the side of milk cartons. It was to bring awareness to the problem of missing children and to empower you if you saw one of them in public to call the authorities. Question—what would you put on the side of a milk carton today because you think it is “missing” from the world? It can be anything, even something abstract, like justice. For me, and I am following the lead of the last few popes of the 20th Century and into the 21st, the world needs above all “joyful missionary disciples.”

As a staff, we have been exploring a little book called, “Making Missionary Disciples” by Curtis Martin – the founder of FOCUS (the Fellowship of Catholic University Students). They started with 20 students on one college campus in 1988 and have now had over 40,000 college students encounter their formation. After asking themselves why some missionaries bear more fruit than others, they came up with three fundamental habits—Divine intimacy, Authentic Friendship, and a Clarity and Conviction about Spiritual Multiplication. As I think these are essential for making “joyful missionary disciples”, I will focus on the first two habits.

Divine intimacy refers to our deep abiding union with the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. In biblical language, God doesn’t want us to know merely things about Him, he wants us to know Him, personally—the way you know a close friend, or the familiarity loving spouses have with each other after many years together. Jesus promises us that our fruitfulness as disciples is directly related to our relationship with him. As he relates in John chapter 15, “He who abides in me and I in him will bear much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.” It can’t be any clearer than that. We cannot give what we do not have, and step one to becoming a joyful missionary disciple is to have a deep, personal communion with the living God.

And then there is authentic friendship. As St. Paul says in the New Testament to his disciples he wanted to share with them not only the Gospel message, but his very self (1 Thess 2:8). We are called to love others from our heart and to “share life” with them. Our parish community should be a place where everyone is known and loved personally. Do we make this kind of investment with those that we are walking with to the Lord? This is the “art of accompaniment” spoken of so fondly about by Pope Francis.

The world needs joyful missionary disciples who know not only the Lord, but also how to share him with others in the context of friendship.