We know that we share faith through words and witness. When it comes to witness, many Catholics share their faith on a daily basis by striving to live faith-filled lives of virtue, love, and service.

But Pope Paul VI reminded us in On Evangelization in the Modern World: "The good news proclaimed by the witness of life sooner or later has to be proclaimed by the word of life" (22). But Catholics are still reticent to do that.

Why?

Why don’t Catholics speak about their faith? I think it is for a number of reasons. The three that I will address here are:

• We did not grow up talking about faith and, hence, are uncomfortable doing it, or we never even think of it.
• We did not grow up talking about faith and, hence, are uncomfortable doing it, or we never even think of it.
• We lack confidence. We don’t appreciate that faith is a gift to be shared.

Other reasons include:

• We fear rejection by others.
• We had a bad experience trying to share faith with someone in the past.
• We don’t have a welcoming and inviting parish community to bring someone to.
• We don’t know how to share faith in words with others. (We need training!)

What can we do?
We really can’t change people’s upbringing, but we can understand where they are coming from when they do not feel at ease talking about their faith. But we do not have to leave them there. We can build up their confidence by making faith sharing in words a normal part of our activities. We can include faith sharing as part of the prayer at our parish meetings. We can encourage parishioners to participate in small Christian communities throughout the year or in a faith-sharing small group such as Renew or Disciples in Mission for part of the year. We can occasionally have a parishioner give a witness at Mass. Whenever we bring parents together around the faith formation of their children, we can include a parent witness talk in the program or a faith-sharing question as part of the process.

We can hold a retreat or workshop where we can help parishioners write their own brief witness story, using a guide like the recently updated Discovering My Experience of God (Paulist Press). This way they will have thought through some ideas that they can share when the opportunity presents itself. Faith sharing comes more easily with preparation and practice.

When faith sharing through word and witness becomes the norm for our U.S. Catholics, we will become something else as well--welcoming and inviting. This is really where we fall short in many communities. We ignore the visitor, the guest, the seeker, the person on the margins, our neighbor, our friend or acquaintance. We don’t offer hospitality when they come to church, and we don’t ever think to invite them to join us.

Hospitality and welcome are among the highest forms of faith sharing in word and witness--forms that our evangelical brothers and sisters use more effectively than we do. Living faith as a private affair treats faith like a possession that belongs only to those who have it. The truth is that faith is a gift. No one deserves or earns faith, but given it, we have the mission to share it. And that mission gives us great joy. We cannot contain ourselves--once we start to share our faith, we can’t stop.

I once worked with a parish in a year-long planning process in which faith sharing was part of every meeting. In September, I heard a parishioner who had just joined the team announce that he never spoke about his faith--that was his wife’s department. "She does enough for the two of us." Nine months later, in the wrap-up meeting when people shared what the process meant to them, this same man announced: "I can’t stop talking about my parish and all the good things we are doing. I am telling everyone I meet, even strangers: Come to our church. See for yourself!"

Share the gift
How can Catholics become better at faith sharing, welcoming, and inviting? By learning that faith is a precious gift that deepens and expands when we share it with others. Ministry leaders and communities need to be raising consciousness about the gift that faith is through homilies, missions, retreats, and renewals. We need to be celebrating every time faith is shared: at baptisms, with newcomers, in service projects, hospitality, and outreach. We need to be engaging one another in asking what is God’s will for our community and how will we carry that out together. When the culture of the parish office and the parish community is permeated with the joyful understanding that faith is a gift and that sharing that gift is our life, we won’t have to ask why Catholics don’t share their faith ever again, because they will be sharing their faith all the time. TP