Understanding the Apostolic age and recovering the Apostolic zeal
There’s been an ongoing debate in my house about the definition of “middle age”. A certain Dad has been in denial that “48 years of life” qualifies as middle age. Yet the growing realization that I can no longer play sports like I used to (although I will take pride in making the game winning shot in a basketball tournament this past summer). I now have “progressive lenses,” apparently, they’re no longer called bifocals. And my Christmas gift a few years ago was a reading lamp next to my chair in the living room, which does better facilitate story time with the kids each night after family prayers. We can live in denial and keep trying to do the same things we used to, or we can come to terms with the current reality and adjust accordingly.
I was recently taking my 16-year-old driving, and she asked if she could use the cruise control. Without thinking, I noted that “in the old days we didn’t have cruise control.” To which my daughter lovingly replied: “Dad, we’re not living in the old days.”
Times change. Ages change. And perhaps the wiser among us adapt accordingly.
Monsignor James Shea, who serves as the President of the University of Mary in North Dakota has written a book: “From Christendom to Apostolic Mission: Pastoral Strategies for an Apostolic Age.” In it he makes the very compelling case that our current times much more closely mirror the early days of the Church, the “Apostolic Age.” At the same time, most of our current structures and ministries are geared toward an age of Christendom, where the Church was widely respected and had a large role in shaping worldviews and culture.
The structures and supports of the Age of Christendom are either no longer present or can even be a hindrance to our mission in an apostolic age. For example, consider how much time we spend focused on maintenance and upkeep of buildings versus the amount of time we put into evangelization and outreach. And paradoxically, we have fewer and fewer people coming to those buildings. Similarly, many of our parish formation programs struggle mightily to attract, much less catechize, young people in our current cultural environment.
To take another example, parents whose children no longer practice their faith. Often these families sent their kids to Catholic schools or religious education, took them to Mass, and then are heartbroken and confused when as adults, they don’t continue in their faith.
Monsignor Shea states, “A way of living Catholic family life that would have been at least adequate in a Christendom culture is now sadly inadequate to compete with the overpowering atmosphere that their children inhabit.”
We know that “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever” (Hebrews 13:8). And that the Church will be around until the end of the age. At the same time, how the Church goes about proclaiming Jesus Christ and carries out her pastoral ministries has changed through the ages.
This is not a dire book. It is better described as a sober analysis of our own age; with an eye toward then tailoring our approach to best carry out the Apostolic mission within it. For this, Monsignor Shea looks back to the early Church, the time of the Apostles. Materially and organizationally, they had next to nothing.
He notes that if you were to tally the resources available to the Apostles, just having been commissioned to carry the Gospel to the whole world: 11 bishops, zero religious orders, zero seminaries, a few hundred believers, zero written Gospels, zero church buildings, and a culture that was either ignorant or hostile toward them. From a worldly standpoint they didn’t have much going for them. Monsignor Shea notes: “But they weren’t discouraged; they were filled with joy and hope. They had great confidence in their Lord, in their message, and in the creativity and fertility of the Church. They knew that their task was to be used by the Holy Spirit to grow the Church … And grow it did.”
In that same spirit, Monsignor Shea invites us to also look at our structures, our approaches, our formation programs, our way of approaching the world. He invites us, as the Spirit prompts, to recover that Apostolic zeal, the adventure of following Christ and inviting others to the same self-giving, self-sacrificing, all-encompassing Christian life; which the world will not understand. Indeed, to present Christianity as not just a set of rules within a structure but “to experience daily the adventure that arises from the encounter with Christ … to be caught by the perilous and joy-filled work of learning to be transformed into divine beings headed for eternal rapture in the exhilarating embrace of God.”
We too should acknowledge our change of age and both the challenges and new opportunities that accompany it, whether it be personally or how the Church ministers to the world. As my daughter sagely commented to me, “We aren’t living in the old days.” For our part Monsignor Shea notes, “is to understand the age we have been given, to trace out how the Holy Spirit is working in it, and to seize the adventure of cooperating with him.” And we do all this with the faith, hope, and love that God imbues us, in every age.