Confessions of a reluctant Catholic evangelizer

By John J. Boucher  | Special to The CFP

 The Parish Renewal and Evangelization (PREA) Committee, Diocese of Worcester, recently hosted an online workshop, “Reaching Catholics Emerging from the Pandemic: 101 Ways to Evangelize.” The guest speaker was Susan Windley-Daoust, author of six books, including “101 Ways to Evangelize.” She serves as the director of missionary discipleship, Diocese of Winona-Rochester, Minnesota.  

CFP: How did you become interested and involved in Catholic evangelization?  

Oh, I was the reluctant evangelizer! I had a lot of baggage with the term and for 22 years have been doing academic teaching of theology. I was the chair of my college’s department and had published four books. But I was grading an assignment I had given for years, a write your spiritual autobiography paper, and noted just how bleak our students had become. They were what many people call the “nones.” When checking a religious preference survey, they would check “none of the above.” They had no interest in committing to God through any religion, but that wasn’t making them happy.  
They told me about their depression and trauma more than previous generations of students. One day I was grading and had enough. I asked God why these young people were so distant and bleak. The Lord showed me that they are too wounded to get to Church on their own. After sitting there stunned by that insight, I knew I had to begin doing evangelization.

CFP: What is a diocesan director of missionary discipleship?

Shortly after deciding to leave academia to do something more directly in evangelization, our diocesan bishop and vicar general invited me to become director of missionary discipleship. 
My role in our diocese has two wings: first, helping parishes discern how to become evangelizing parishes, moving from maintenance models to mission orientation. Second, I help create initiatives across the diocese that do deliberate outreach to spiritually wounded and marginalized people. 

CFP: Can you tell us more about yourself?

 I grew up in a family with a Catholic mother and a non-practicing Protestant father, with two younger brothers. We moved around a lot when I was younger for my father’s work - Virginia Beach, New Jersey, four different towns in the Panama Canal Zone, back to rural Virginia. I went to Mary Washington College as a theater major and accidentally took a theology course. I fell in love with theology immediately and decided to go to graduate school only five weeks in! I received a MA and Ph.D. in theology from Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, because I hoped to work in ecumenism. I fell in love and got married, and now my husband and I are parents of five kids, aged 11 to 20. After teaching at two Catholic universities in Minnesota, I left in 2018 to serve in evangelization for my diocese, Winona-Rochester, Minnesota.

CFP: How detrimental have pandemic restrictions been to Catholic parishes?  

My limited experience is that parishes that had strong small faith-sharing groups going on have weathered this the best. These small groups knew what to do – they kept meeting, online if they had to. Even in best-case circumstances, we have a lot of people who are just now returning to Mass for the first time in a year or more. It’s going to be a real test of our hospitality to welcome and to remember who we are and whose we are. 


CFP: What will bring Catholics who stopped Mass-going to return?

The return will happen through the power of the Holy Spirit and the quality of our invitation. Parishes should be thinking seriously about how they’re going to make sure every person registered is invited in the most direct and personal way possible back to Mass. Parishes should also have a plan how to do outreach to those who have not been to Mass in a very long time, far more than a year, or ever.  

CFP: What led you to write the book, “101 Ways to Evangelize” (Gracewatch.org, 2020)?  

I wrote the book because I talk to lots of fantastic, observant Catholics regularly, encouraging them to think about how to share the Gospel and an encounter with Christ outside the parish walls. And I consistently encounter struggles about picturing what that will look like. We don’t have great models in our American Catholic tradition for this, so I wrote the book just to give ideas of what evangelization looks like. I hope people come away with one, maybe two, good ideas that they can do themselves! In the end, it’s a really practical book. This is evangelization, we’re called to do it, here are some ideas you may not have thought of. Now go and do it!  


CFP: Who are the greatest influencers in your approach to lay evangelization ministry? 

I strongly recommend that every Catholic develop a “prayer posse,” and in a world full of “influencers,” I’ll choose the saints. Most of my prayer posse are beatified lay people, religious sisters, and priests, but I take from all of them that at one point in our lives, we’re called to give everything to God and let him lead. Lay people aren’t excused from that call. On the contrary, we’re charged with the sanctification of society (See the Catechism of the Catholic Church and papal documents on evangelization over the past 45-plus years).