'Evangelism' and 'evangelization'

In yesterday's mail we received a letter from a neighborhood Baptist church. It was the result of a neighborhood canvassing effort, which ordinarily would not have garnered more attention than the usual supply of junk mail. However, this gesture truly touched me. The envelope contained a hand-written letter, signed by a church member. There was nothing perfunctory about this letter. It was printed neatly in ball pen ink. It was five painstaking paragraphs in length. It described the mission of this particular Baptist church, along with worship and Sunday school schedule.

Protestant Evangelicals and Fundamentalists -- usually Baptists of one sort or other -- don't use the word "evangelization." They talk about "evangelism" instead. What they mean by this is welcoming strangers into their fellowship in order to make sure of their salvation. "Winning souls to Christ" or "saving the lost" is how they might put it. A man was willing to sit down and hand-write a five-paragraph letter and mail it to me because, somewhere among his motives, was the love of God and the desire to reach out to those in his community with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. He's a Baptist. He has no ecclesiology such as a Catholic would recognize. He probably couldn't recite a single line of the Nicene Creed if asked, although he would find nothing to object if he were confronted with it. He probably does not know that his European ancestors, if he traced them far enough back, originally had the light of Christ brought to them by Roman Catholics, as the Irish monk, St. Columba, brought the Gospel to the pagan Picts of Scotland. But he understands, and we understand, what he means by "evangelism."

I am not quite sure, however, what "evangelization" is supposed to mean in my parish and diocese these days. Even the USCCB's Secretariat for Evangelization's page isn't much help. One publication featured on its main page is entitled Catholic Evangelization in an Ecumenical and Interreligious Society, noting that we are called to be "people of dialogue"; and a conference notice features the North American Institute for Catholic Evangelization (NAICE) meeting at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio to reflect on Evangelizing God’s People in A Culture of Diversity.

Not in the least would I belittle the genuine philosophical and theological issues involved in asserting truth claims within a pluralistic culture. I simply wonder here what St. Paul, St. Peter, St. Columba, St. Patrick, St. Ignatius Loyola, St. Francis Xavier, and all the great missionaries of history, along with our good Baptist friend, would think of all these workshops, committees, books, conferences, and nuanced postmodern jargon -- given the Great Commission and all those lost souls out there.