Catholic Ministry Professionals—Episode 146: Pathways to Discipleship

In this episode, Jon Konz and Thai Hua discuss how you can take practical steps as you are growing in your journey of discipleship and how to guide others along the way.

Thank you for Briar Cliff University for underwriting this program.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:13

If you work for the Catholic Church and want to transform the culture of your parish and put more souls in the pews, we're here to help. I'm Tyhua here with my co-host John Cons, and this is the Catholic Ministry Professionals Podcast, your favorite leadership development podcast for Catholic churches. Each week you can expect engaging discussions, expert interviews, and actionable advice to help you move Jesus' mission forward in your parish.

SPEAKER_00 0:37

And before we begin, we just want to let you know that Catholic Ministry Professionals is brought to you by Briar Cliff University. Briar Cliff provides a vibrant community, top-notch faculty, and cutting edge programs that empower you to reach your full potential. So whether you're pursuing a degree in business, healthcare, or the arts, Briar Cliff can provide an environment where you can thrive. Learn more at Briarcliff.edu to start your transformative academic experience. And now, on with the show.

SPEAKER_01 1:04

Today we're discussing pathways of discipleship, disciples in the pews, how you can take practical steps to continue growing in your journey of discipleship and guide others along the way. John, how are you?

SPEAKER_00 1:18

It is a good day, Ty. Today we are discussing pathways of discipleship. And I, you know, I want to for our listeners that that don't work for the church but are in the pews and are desiring, and I think we do pick up a number of parishioners that desire to see discipleship flourish in their parishes. Um but if I was to ask you, dear listener, if I was to ask you, are you a disciple? What would you say? And I think most of us, if we're listening to this, are intentional to the point where we would say, Yes, I am a disciple. But I I think the tough thing about that is if I were to lay out what it means to be a disciple, I think we'd have to really ask ourselves, Am I a disciple? Because the goal isn't just to be a good Catholic or a good Christian. It's to follow Jesus. It's to be like Jesus, it's to be discipled by Jesus. And as a result of that effort, we'll necessarily become better Catholics. But that there this means something very specific for our lives. And this is something that took me a long time to realize myself, which was that I was often and for a long time living as a good enough Catholic, but not necessarily as a disciple of Jesus Christ. So again, when we look at creating pathways of discipleship and being disciples in the pews, we have to really look at what it means to be a disciple, which is to live a certain way, to pray with prayer really at the center, but then to be so deeply resonant in our souls with the God who seeks to meet with us heart to heart, so that it pours out into our lives. And so it's a it's a journey. Like discipleship is more than just a moment, it's a journey. And so whatever has led you to this point where you are listening to this podcast, where you are desiring more for your parish, whatever it is that has led you to that point, it means something very specific for your life. And we're going to talk about that as we go through today. But also, I want to speak some hope into our experience. Because what often happens in parishes is that someone has an encounter, they have a moment, they they lose a loved one, and that their desire for prayer is spurned. They suddenly have this awareness that there has to be or they desire for there to be something after this life. Um, they go to a retreat, their friend drags them along to a retreat, they go to a Steubenville conference, they go to a Sikh conference, and there's this new awakening and new reality that, wow, God is real, Jesus is real, I want to follow him with my life, but I have no idea how to do that. And when I go to my parish, I don't see the thing that I need right now. I see the things that they want me to want. And so I want to speak specifically to that person who's listening to this podcast, who's listening to this episode that says, need more and I can't find it. What do I do? And so we're going to talk about three things that we can do as we seek to become deeper disciples, as we seek Christ in our lives and we seek to find ways to share him with our families, with our friends, and to and to grow what God is doing in our hearts outside of us and into our community. So the first of these, and it shouldn't come as a real surprise, but the first of these is prayer and study. This is the first thing that you need to really think about if you are seeking to be a disciple of our Lord is time in prayer and time spent in study. As obvious as this sounds, it's one of the most elusive things at the base level for most Catholics is to have a concrete and dependable time and habit of prayer. But this is bar none, the lowest barrier entry. This is the thing that you need if you want to hear God's voice in your heart and be able to share it out into the world. You need time with Jesus. You cannot be anyone's disciple if you do not spend time with them. And so prayer is the central, the most basic element of this. And what I mean by that is not random prayer, but concrete times and habits of prayer. And so that's what I want to do is just take a moment to think about how concrete is your prayer? If you would you notice if you missed prayer today? And would you notice it because it was something that was on your calendar that you missed, right? That that it has to be very concrete. You need to think about these three things. Where do you pray? When do you pray? And what or how do you pray when you get there? I think those are the three questions you need to have very readily able to answer. For me, I like I'm not good at praying at night. I'm not good at praying in the afternoon, as far as like my concrete time of prayer. My best time to pray is in the morning. So I set my alarm, I get up at 6 a.m. and then I go to our prayer room. We have a prayer room where we have like dedicated to prayer in my house, and then I sit down with the daily readings and I read those, and then after that, I usually have a spiritual work that that I spend some time reading as well. And so that's my concrete time. And when I don't do it, I notice that I didn't do it because it's on my calendar. It is the first thing in my morning routine. The first one is make coffee. But it has to be that concrete so that if you miss it, you notice it. And if you can get that one in place, then you can build from there, right? I have other little things that I do throughout the day. If I'm doing a novena, right, I'll set that in my calendar as well. In the evenings, this is the other part, is we pray a rosary as my children part of their bedtime routine. We pray a rosary together as a family. My wife and I, once the kids we've we've brushed the teeth, we've gone to the bathroom, we've read the books. Now my wife and I sit down in our upstairs landing and we pray our rosary. We invite the kids into that space, and uh that is a concrete time of prayer. And then also before we go to bed, right? 10 o'clock hits, we turn the TV off, we go upstairs, my wife prays. Right now I'm reading uh Jesus of Nazareth by Pope Benedict XVI, right? So I have these real concrete times that are scattered in my day for prayer and for study. And the reason this is important is because many of us on this journey, what we're gonna run into is we're gonna have questions about the faith that people pose to us that we can't explain. Hey, why do you guys do this? You know, oh, I've noticed you're praying. Why are you doing that? Even being able to answer that simple question, like, oh, you know, I didn't realize you were so into your faith. Why are you into your faith? Being able to answer that. Um, or, you know, you're telling someone about your weekend. We went to church, it's like, oh yeah, you guys have all these rules. You, your church is so funny. Why is it like that? Or as we get a little further into faith, someone's gonna ask us a question. We're gonna have one of those, those, uh, those things that comes up that's a church teaching that we struggle with. And that's gonna be a tough thing to wrestle with, right? Okay, why why do we venerate Mary? Why do we hold her to such high esteem? Um, why don't we eat meat on Fridays in Lent? Why are we encouraged not to eat meat on Fridays through the rest of the year? Right? There's all these questions that we maybe know of, we have ourselves, but we don't answer. That's the role of study. Like that, that's it's that simple. If you have the question, find the answer.

SPEAKER_01 8:29

What a great rule of life. Tell me about that. Say more about that. Well, I think look at today's political climate where a lot of people don't look at the facts, they look at the feelings, right? Why why why does this administration do it, and then all of a sudden you got somebody chirping up in the comment section of the this post, right? And then we take that if we like it, and we reject it if we don't without looking at the facts. So if you have a question, go go search it. Go look for the answer, the truth, versus just accepting at face value what somebody says. You know, a great example of that, and shout out to my wife. She said previously that she dated a lot of Catholic guys that couldn't answer those questions, and she grew up Methodist. So she actually at a certain point rejected a lot of Catholic I would say faux Catholic teaching because that's what it was told to her. You know, why do we eat or why don't we eat meat on Friday, like you mentioned? Somebody told her it was because well, a lot of the people said it's just what we do. That's not an answer, that's a non-answer. But somebody else had also told her, Oh yeah, the Catholics, um, back in the day the the fishing market or the fishing industry was struggling, so they had to come up with a way to help the fishing industry. And I'm just like, how ludicrous. How ludicrous that somebody would accept that answer and say, Oh, that's why, yeah, that makes sense. Like, seriously? Why don't you go you ask the question, go and look for the answer. Right? If a Catholic were to tell me that, like, dude, I can definitely tell you were poorly catechized. What else? What other crap are you spewing to non-Catholics to make us look bad? Seriously. You need to get hit upside the head with the the Baltimore catechism. So, anyways, I just love the point that you just made. If you have a question, go find the answer.

SPEAKER_00 10:43

Yeah, it's a different version of the the prophet Vanilla Ice. If there was a problem, yo, I'll solve it. Yes. Um, we just have to remember those words from antiquity. And the second thing that I want you to think about is the role of resolution in the life of prayer, in the life of the disciple. At the end of the day, discipleship is about being with the discipler Jesus. And it can be easy to get caught up in the demands of our life and feel like we're too busy, but prayer is that foundation. And from that prayer, there's going to be a desire for action. There's going to be an impulse to action. There's going to be an invitation to action. So it's not just about spending time in prayer with Jesus, but it's about making that resolution to act after our time of prayer. You can't stay with Jesus and not be changed. And so you have to ask yourself after spending this time in prayer, what is God willing me to do? What is he calling me to do? And how can I put that into action today? And oftentimes there might be little vices that that were gonna, the first thing that's probably gonna come to mind is the vices. I just went through uh in my Lenten journey, I went through Father Josh Johnson, did a reflection on vice, the seven deadly sins. And as I went through that, I was so convicted of every single deadly sin in my life of just like sloth, gluttony, lust, anger, envy. I was like, man, I have so much of all of these. And the desire was to attack those. But one of the core tenets is rather than attacking those, to build virtues, right? So I had to ask myself, what is the prudent thing to do? What is the thing that God is calling me to do in response to these perceived faults, these perceived flaws, these vices? What is the right response? And it was always to implement the virtue. And so your prayer life should always move you forward concretely in the process of discipleship, but it should always move you forward concretely to become a better spouse to Jesus Christ, to be become a better follower of Jesus Christ, whether that's through service or whether it's taking on a more a new ministry, but more likely it's just from more aligning yourself from the process of repentance and renewal, so that it's not just, oh, I know I have sinned, it's, oh, I have sinned. I want to never do this thing again. What is the concrete change that I need to make in my life that can allow me to follow Jesus more closely, to make my life look more like his, to be able to serve my spouse better, to be able to serve my children and my family better, how to be a better friend to my friends, you know, reading their blogs right away when they send them to them. Important things like that, I think, are really the fruit of prayer, but it's it's the thing that helps us to notice that progression in the spirit in our own lives. And I'm reminded in my own journey into discipleship, when I began to concretely pray, like I talked about in that first section, I had no idea what to do, what I was doing. I just knew that when I prayed, it made my day better. It just like I could feel God more present in my life. So I stuck to it. And after a few days, like I could tell there was a difference in my life. But after a year, those incremental changes, those little, little decisions day by day, those resolutions to follow Jesus. After a year, people started to ask me what was different about me or why I was different. And the answer was Jesus. And it was those decisions to follow him to try and align my life more closely with his will and his heart and his plan for my life. So again, prayer is good, but it but it needs to lead to a clear resolution in your mind, in your heart, and follow through in your actions. And then finally, that third part, right? The third thing to think about is the role of discernment in community with accountability. So you're you're you're gonna have, as you start to pray, you make this concrete life of habit of prayer, you start to think like God is calling me this direction, I'm gonna make these decisions. A really crucial element of this is to learn about discernment. You know, pick up St. Francis de Sales' introduction to the devout life, go to ChatGPT and ask it for insights to the like ignition spirituality, but learn the ins and outs of the of discernment, but then also to build around yourself community, to start to seek community that can help you to discern. Because discernment doesn't happen very well in a vacuum because the devil wants to mess with us. He's really clever, he can really play with our minds and make us despair of the good that God is doing in our lives. And so we want to have community built around us that can also give us accountability, right? Discipleship, like Jesus didn't individually disciple the disciples. I mean, yes, there was individual disciplement there, but he discipled them as a group of disciples, right? It's not meant to be a solitary journey. So you you learn where God is calling you on, but then you invite people into that journey. And that that could be a friend that you want to share the journey with, you know, that that that you're looking at and you're saying, hey, you know, you're my best friend. I really feel like I want to take my faith more seriously. I'm wondering if if we can kind of start talking about this together. And that's all more difficult it needs to be. It might be going to a few parish events and and looking for that person that's always there, that you vibe with, that you've, you know, you have a kind of a natural, um, a natural ability to get along and you start talking to them a little more. But even to be beyond that, it might be reaching out to your parish professionals and say, hey, this is what I'm working on. Um, this is this is the thing that I feel God is calling me to do. And I just I need some accountability. I need someone to talk to that can help me get out of some of my old rhythms and get into my new rhythms, that can keep me accountable to prayer, that can help me to figure out, you know, I feel all this desire that my heart is full of God and I want to share it, and I'm not sure what the best way forward is. So people that can really help you discern that. And I think when you do that, then you'll really settle into a rhythm, you'll find a peace, and you'll find that thing that at the beginning we talked about, which is that that thing that my heart desires, right? God has placed this desire in my heart. I've encountered something, I'm not sure what to do with it, and I don't see it at the parish. For the most part, in my experience, it has been true that what people are really desiring is this third part, which is community around their faith. That is what they are looking for, that is what you are seeking. So again, if you have put that habit in place of prayer, if you have committed yourself to be steadfast, to be resolute and following the will of God in your life, and you still are desiring more, it's community. You need friends around you, you need people around you that are striving after the kingdom, that can celebrate your successes, that can be with you in your falls and without judgment, with love to be with you in your falls, and then to help you to get back up once again from your falls and to continue on the way. That is what your heart is seeking. And it may not be a specific program that is offered by your parish, but by opening up those conversations to a few trusted friends, to a few parish professionals, you can then begin to experience that community and begin to find an avenue forward to fulfill that desire. And with that, I think we can move on to the devil's advocate.

SPEAKER_01 17:56

But I'm just too busy to add anything else to my plate. I already have so many things going on with work, family, other commitments within the parish, other commitments that are part of my job. I just I don't see how I could possibly make room for discipleship.

SPEAKER_00 18:16

I actually I I do understand that. But I think often when we think of that, we're we're thinking, I don't have time to disciple others. And what I want us to consider is that it's actually more important that we are being discipled first. And so if you've been listening to this episode and and you're worried that I don't have time to do all of those things, remember that this is mostly and primarily about your relationship with Christ, that once that is firmly established, it can be shared outward, right? And then that's when you might disciple others. So it's not really about adding more to your schedule, it's about integrating your relationship with Christ into everything you do. Now, in order to do that more fully, you have to know the man so that you can encounter him more fully in the moment. And in order to do that, you will have to take time for prayer. So I know we are busy, I know you are busy, you're busy like I'm busy, but I have never been so busy that I didn't need to spend time with Jesus. I have never been so busy that something was actually more important than Jesus. So what you have to really do is make that commitment. Again, your heart is feeling called to something, and you need to make that resolution to act. And that base action is then, okay, finding time for prayer. The second part of it, that that resolution, that's just a part of your prayer. And then the third part is time spent with your friends, focused and knowing that Christ has to be a part of it. So these shouldn't be things that take life away from you. They shouldn't be burdens. They should actually be joyful ways to live out your life. And maybe it means inviting your friends over for dinner, right? There's not time to create a whole new night out with your friends. Fine. Bring them over for dinner. You guys are going to eat anyway as a family. Might as well invite your friends into it. And then while you're there, pray, talk with your friends, see how their faith is going. And to consider that you don't have to start out with an hour, like a holy hour in the morning. You can start with five minutes. It's enough to just start. And then as you experience that, it's starting small, then you can build intentionally towards the future and a more robust habit as you get the start firmly implemented and established. And with that, of course, we never want to send you without some actionable steps that you can take today to move forward in your discipleship journey. So I want you to really take that first part of our conversation seriously, integrating prayer into your life. And so I want you to go to Catholic Ministry Professionals.com slash resources and download our rule of life worksheet. It's a framework for building the life that you're called to live. It's all it does is it takes different elements of your life and gives you space to write down concrete frames around those pieces of your life, whether it's your relationship with alcohol, your relationship with food, your morning routine and your evening routine, to put those things down on paper. And that's all that a rule of life is. These are the rules. This is the framework of life that I'm choosing to live with, live in, so that you can prioritize the most important things. And as a part of that, you're going to schedule time in your calendar for daily prayer. And that is the first step, bar none. And so this rule of life worksheet helps to make that more simple, to really look at it and make it actionable for yourself. And then finally, the second one is just simply to invite a friend into this journey with you. And so I want you to just open up your text. Right. Well, if you're not driving, open your text right now, but compose this text and just say, Hey, Bob, I'm focusing more time on my faith. And I'd really like for us to have some time to talk about it. Would it would it be okay if we hang out and uh grab a beer and I'd like to tell you what's kind of going on in my life right now? That's it. Something that simple, and just text it off to them. And if you do Don't have someone in mind, then you can ask your parish professionals to introduce you to someone who can walk alongside you. And maybe that means joining up for RCIA, even if you're already Catholic, just so you can meet some other people who are on fire for their faith. And you don't have to lead it. Just say, hey, I want to attend. And they'll let you. And you can walk along those others. You'll learn a little bit about your faith. You'll have time for prayer. But more, but also importantly, you'll be meeting people who have a heart like your own that you can pursue Christ together. And with that, I want to thank you for listening to the Catholic Ministry Professionals Podcast. If you found this episode helpful, please take a few seconds to text it to a priest or a friend in ministry that could benefit from it. The Catholic Ministry Professionals Podcast is brought to you by Briar Cliff University. Briar Cliff provides a vibrant community, top-notch faculty, and cutting-edge programs that empower you to reach your full potential. So whether you're pursuing a degree in business, healthcare, or the arts, Briar Cliff provides an environment where you can thrive. Learn more at Briarcliff.edu to start your transformative academic experience. This episode of the podcast has been modified for radio. If you'd like to hear the full conversation, visit Catholic Ministry Professionals dot com Slash Podcast.

SPEAKER_01 23:18

And with that, we'll see you in the Vineyard.