Hi y'all,

On Saturday the 13th, Mason and I met up at the Barnyard once more to evangelize. Mason brought a friend who was interested in what we are doing. Also, an acquaintance of mine also showed up briefly to see what we are doing. There really was not much going on - it was a slow day. A few people came by and grabbed some pamphlets, maybe a medal, but no one really spent much time engaging us on anything worth reporting. Mason took some time talking to an older gentleman about his experience in the military. I believe the gentleman did most of the talking, and Mason listened intently and respectfully. We're building a relationship with the man who sells stainless steel necklaces next door. Everytime we go out he asks a new question and we're able to share a tidbit or two. At least he's got one of our rosaries hanging on his rear view mirror. Maybe someday he'll take up to prayin' it. We spent most of our time bouncing ideas around on a new more welcoming set up or ways to get people interested. And honestly, our friends gave us some fresh ideas.

I do have some thoughts to share about this work of evangelization. Over the years that I have been in the work of evangelization, which is now about 27 years, I've seen so many different efforts, ideas, strategies, successes, and failures. And I'll be straightforward with you, I do not believe that SPSE is the best way to evangelize, at least for me in my current circumstances. I believe it is one way and actually a good way (that's why right now I continue to do it), but I do most of my evangelization at work with my patients and coworkers, and most of that is the witness of my life, not my convincing rhetoric or arguments.

If someone asked me: What is your evangelistic magnus opus? I could only say, leading my children with me to the foot of the cross. Even with that, my wife deserves way more credit than I could ever take. That took 20 years of constant repentance, self-adjustment, hard work, instruction, discipline, prayer, fasting, and anxiety. Even after they have been grounded in the faith and are blossoming into full adulthood, I still worry, I still pray, I still hope that they will continue to grow in their faith and sanctity, reminding them to never forget to say thanks to the One who redeemed them with His own blood. Even when you doubt, when you are troubled, disturbed, suffering either from your own choices or from circumstances out of your control, stay grounded in His Church, show up on Sunday, and thank God.

We Americans are very success driven. We have to be weary of allowing Americanism to govern our efforts and measure our "successes" when it comes to evangelization. I saw this acutely as a full-time Protestant missionary in China. People back home wanted stories, they wanted numbers. I took the unfortunate path of wanting to evangelize Kham Tibetans on the border lands of Chinese occupied Tibet. After about a year of Chinese language studies I traveled to the nearest Tibetan town. A city that was a one day journey by sleeper bus or 16 hours of smelling unwashed feet, worrying about thieves in the night, and listening to people puke out the window from the high altitude and winding roads, which by the way it was a good thing it was dark overwise some would have had panic attacks from the shear mountain drop offs in which thousands of feet down you saw the resting places of sleeper buses that had gotten too close to the edge of the road on a tight curve or it simply crumbled beneath them. At that time only a couple foreigners were allowed to live there and they had to have a really good reason. I traveled into the surrounding mountains and remote villages, finding out soon enough that these people's grasp of the Chinese national language (Mandarin) was about as good as mine.

Nonetheless, we had some interest, and an elder, who spoke decent Chinese, wanted to learn more. I went to an experienced missionary friend and leader, who had started several underground training centers with other minority groups (there are 56 officially recognized ethnic minority groups in China who have their own languages and cultures. 25 resided in the province I lived in, including Tibetans), and told him I needed help. He gave up on Tibetans because the last time he sent two local (Han Chinese) missionaries up there, they got robbed and sent back home (Kham Tibetans fought a guerilla war against the Chinese occupation for years after the Dali Lama fled to India and most of them from that generation do not really like the Han Chinese. Even when Tibet was its own, they still held back Mandarin Chinese occupation during the Qing Dynasty and were infamous bandits), but now that we had a "man of peace" he was all too willing to take the trip back with me. The elder could not accept the Gospel or maybe the way my friend presented it - they said I was welcome back anytime, but he was not. He died later that year after he flipped a tractor on a mountain trail. Long story short, we eventually did find one person interested, who eventually believed and was baptized, but later for unknown reasons, most likely cultural pressure, abandoned the faith.

We started a team of foreign and Naxi (a Chinese ethnic group closely related to Tibetans) missionaries to evangelize Tibetans and start a house church. Eventually a church got started in that Tibetan town I mentioned earlier and some mountain villagers, including an influential lama became Christians. Well, it took awhile for him to realize, even after becoming a Christian, that Jesus wasn't just another Bodhisattva or an enlightened god of the pantheon. I mean, give him a break - I was in a Tibetan home once, in the common room, and noticed a figurine of the modern Santa Claus with a candle and some fruit in front of him for an offering (the Tibetan common room always had beautifully carved and painted shelves and cabinetry with Buddhist symbols and statues of Buddha or a Tibetan deity or other religious images). I asked the head of the household why he had it and he replied that he wanted to have the pudgy Christian god of prosperity available for good measure. "Have you ever heard of Jesus?" "Who's that?" Face plant.

I was eventually cut off from the team for trying to help our Naxi missionary support himself and his family long-term by starting a restaurant in the Tibetan town, which my friend thought was a distraction. I began to question the shotgun approach and its long-term viability, but more importantly, after rubbing shoulders with missionaries from other denominations, I began to question the orthodoxy of my friend who, being a Pentecostal, was teaching that if you weren't baptized in the Holy Spirit - and the definitive proof of that baptism was speaking in tongues the Pentecostal way - you weren't saved. I found out that my Naxi missionary friend (his disciple) was teaching the same thing. Looking back, and now that I'm Catholic, I realize this was like a heresy within a heresy. Thankfully this moment and meeting my wife would leave me restless until I found Christian orthodoxy, eventually in the Catholic Church, years later.

It was very soon around this time that I came to understand that making Tibetan disciples was going to be a long haul effort and many (much better men than I) had gone before without much success. I first needed to become at least proficient in Chinese, that would take about 6-8 years of solid study. Then I would have to learn the dialect of Kham Tibetan, another 6-8 years, only to find out that not all Kham Tibetans speak the same dialect. On top of that was the constant battle of trying to find a way to stay in China without the government finding out our real purpose. I learned from some veteran missionaries to the Tibetans in India, that of the very minuscule percentage (0.02%) of Tibetans who have become Christians, on average it took them at least 10 years from their first comprehension of the full Gospel story and constant relational contact with Christians, to finally decide to believe in Jesus, and that against tremendous cultural and family pressure. All the times I had clear and meaningful conversations with Tibetans about the Gospel, we couldn't get past the fact that there is a God and that he created all that is, let alone why God had to become man and redeem us from sin by dying on the cross (you have to understand Buddhism to understand why it was so difficult).

Obviously this never materialized because I'm here now, writing this in America, or I would still be there. All those missionaries I knew are now gone from China after the central government performed a nationwide intelligence operation and crack down. When the police came knocking on the door, they usually gave you 24 hours to leave the country. Now we pray those Christians left behind are surviving the onslaught of Xi "thought" and the sinicization of all of China. Hey, the previous generations survived Mao "thought" and the Cultural Revolution. A veteran missionary friend once told me the true test of a newly formed Christian community was persecution, and in China it always came. To their credit however, Chinese are naturally very resilient in hardship. When I went to China in 2000, conservative estimates were 6% Christian (and I mean practicing Christian), or 72,000,000, or 1/4 of the population of the U.S. at that time and this was after kicking out all the missionaries in the 1950s and darkness under Mao's Communism until the 1980s. But I'm starting to realize the full grasp of Christ's parable of the sower - the hardest battle is against the temptations of this world and China has become very prosperous. Even the government is giving pay offs and benefits to poor Christian villagers to give up Christianity.

Okay another long way to say this: We can put every idea, every strategy, every effort, maybe even a lot of money and time to good use for the work of evangelization and we should. But most importantly we must remember that conversion is a work of God. We just have to be faithful. Let me give you some examples of what I mean.

Jewish guy gets wrangled by God to go give his mortal enemies a chance. What happens next? Simon the fisherman meets Jesus after a brutal night on the sea without a single fish to show for it. What happens next? After Jesus leaves his disciples, they are praying in the upper room hidden from the Jewish authorities on Pentecost. What happens next? Benedict flees Rome to hide in the wilderness. What happens next? The illiterate young Catherine wants nothing more than her own personal hermitage. What happens next? The poor oppressed Aztec meets a beautiful woman on the top of a mountain. What happens next? At the time that the Chinese Communist Party took over China and kicked out the foreign missionaries, less than 1% of the country was Christian. How did it grow to over 6%? They didn't have a Billy Graham or a Fulton Sheen, or a flashy welcoming sign in front of their church, or a Christian storefront, or a table with free literature, or a bumper sticker advertising the local Christian radio station, or even a webpage or a social media account. Imagine...

These are just some examples of those who made little to no effort toward the work of evangelization, or maybe couldn't even if they wanted to, and yet God ends up using them in incredible ways in that work. So what do we do with a "dead" day out evangelizing and nothing to show for it? We show up and remain faithful. Even if things don't turn out according to our expectations, God is working. I dare to believe that just being there is one of the most important things we do.

Our next outing is Saturday September 13th - pray for us and everyone who sees us.

Peace,

Caleb