SPSE teams help new teams get started. For example, four members of our very active Gaithersburg, MD, team recently joined the Front Royal, VA, team on their first outing and evangelized before, during, and after that parish’s public Corpus Christi procession. It was a grace-filled day.
For example, during the Eucharistic procession, evangelists met an inactive Catholic. They connected her with her parish and introduced her to fellow parishioners as well as the pastor, with whom she plans to meet for Reconciliation. Team members also made sure to bring her to the huge ice cream social held at the parish after the procession.
At the social, the team handed out SPSE pamphlets. People are usually amazed to hear about how well evangelists are received out on the streets as they talk to people they don’t know. Yet, during the Gaithersburg team’s nine consecutive months of Catholic street evangelization, they have found that their initial experience has held true: people are hungry to know that God loves them and they are extremely open to invitations to grow in their relationship with Him.
Another grace-filled moment for team members was when they encountered a woman who had met them last October and asked them to pray for a young man facing brain surgery. She told the team that he not only made it through the surgery, but is also completely recovered. The doctors, she said, are calling it miraculous. The Gaithersburg team responds, “Let’s praise God who does these things for His beloved children! And let us continue to pray for all these people we meet and for each other!”
Thank you, Teams Gaithersburg and Front Royal! So many truly hunger for what they can only find in Christ Jesus and the Church that He founded. Yet they need someone to invite them in. And, as our Gaithersburg team reports, the overwhelming majority of encounters are positive when teams use SPSE’s evangelization model. Although many people tell our evangelists that we have been a blessing to them, team members often feel that we are the ones being blessed. Have you joined SPSE yet? If not, please pray about doing so.