Deacon Bruce Fraser speaks during a Dec. 17 Mass for migrant workers at Our Lady of Sorrows Church in Vancouver, British Columbia. (CNS photo/Ben Nelms)

Exploring Our Apostolic Mission

Deacons can be part of a missionary role strategy

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The Smiths were the last family on the block to get color TV. That wasn’t all bad. By the time the color set arrived, I’d seen the “Wizard of Oz” half a dozen times, so the moment when Dorothy opened the door in Technicolor was doubly wondrous.

The Archdiocese of Vancouver wasn’t the last place in Canada to welcome permanent deacons, but we were close. Archbishop J. Michael Miller, CSB, ordained our first cohort — 16 men — less than 10 years ago. That timing, too, brought benefits. Latecomers to the permanent diaconate, we are also newcomers to diaconal ministry, without years of expectations and “typical” assignments.

So our deacons are ready for the startling arrival of a new paradigm, a fresh way of approaching diaconal ministry. It has appeared in a short book from the University of Mary Press titled “From Christendom to Apostolic Mission: Pastoral Strategies for an Apostolic Age” ($14.95), which suggests that the Church must return to her roots now that her institutional presence is crumbling.

In fact, permanent deacons everywhere are ideally suited to respond to the challenges of what the book calls apostolic mission. Permanent deacons arrived too late on the scene to have been a fixture of what the book calls Christendom, the era during which society broadly embraced the Christian vision, so they are not so entwined in the Church’s institutions and methods.

Or if they are, such a connection is more recent and flexible. The other ordained ministers, bishops and priests, will be bound to aspects of Christendom — what might be called the Church in “maintenance mode” — for some time to come. But deacons can readily be a key part of a new pastoral strategy — the Church in “missionary mode.”

New Way to Engage

The book is short, but its thesis is vast, touching every aspect of the Church’s life and ministry as we confront “the first culture in history that was once deeply Christian but that by a slow and thorough process has been consciously ridding itself of its Christian basis.” The book does not evince nostalgia for “Christendom,” arguing only that the end of Christendom demands the Church adopt a new way of engaging with society.

The death or dying of Christendom deprives the Church of many advantages — hard-earned fruits of generations of institutional service and ministry. But it also brings certain advantages. The cost of discipleship is now higher, but so are the benefits. “The great adventure of Christianity is more palpable: its contours show up with greater clarity, and the Gospel attracts many high-hearted people who have a strong desire for God and for goodness,” the author(s) state.

Some of those “high-hearted” people will be called to be deacons. In some places, their decision to serve will no longer arouse admiration from colleagues and friends, who will feel only confusion or even contempt. In the face of a bitter spiritual climate, deacons may risk “a fearful attitude that robs the Gospel of its joyful and conquering spirit.”

Such risks, however, pale by comparison to the potential blessings of an apostolic mode of engagement with society. “From Christendom to Apostolic Mission” overlooks deacons in a passage where it states that an apostolic age demands greater purity of intention in bishops and priests — this is equally true of deacons, who must also meet the new era with “truer and more dynamic leadership” and “a higher standard of holiness.”

Will this mean fewer deacons in conventional parish ministries and more deacons engaging the culture and on the road as preachers, evangelizers and organizers? That strategy worked in the apostolic age, and it can work again.

MSGR. GREGORY SMITH is the vicar general of the Archdiocese of Vancouver and was the founding director of its Permanent Diaconate Program. He holds a doctorate in canon law from the Gregorian University in Rome.

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Confronting secularism

As a sequel to “From Christendom to Apostolic Mission,” University of Mary has released “The Religion of the Day” ($14.95), which addresses how secular gospels and dogmatic faiths offering salvation are prevalent in today’s culture. “The Religion of the Day” looks at how secular beliefs are displacing Christianity as the assumed narrative of a post-Christian, modern society. The book explores how we ourselves need to be converted out of it if we desire to be fully converted to Christianity.

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