Be missionaries of illusion!"Faithful to missionary sending": the EEC's guidelines for 2021-2025Which priests do we need? To form missionary pastorsWe live in a time of paradoxes. The faith that transformed continents and gave identity to entire peoples now seems to be relegated to the margins of public life. Europe, and also a good part of America, shows clear signs of secularization: empty churches, young people who no longer identify with any religion, and a growing distrust of institutions.
Faced with this panorama, many ask themselves: what is the point of talking about mission?
The temptation is to respond with nostalgia or lamentation. To recall past times when the Church marked social life, or to complain that the world no longer listens to us. But mission is not born of nostalgia, but of certainty: Christ is still alive and active. The missionary Church is not a memory, it is the very identity of the people of God. There is no other possible Church.
Today the mission is played out on a different terrain: not in the conquest of spaces, but in personal and community witness. The secularized world does not need long speeches, it needs men and women who live the faith they profess in a coherent way. To be a missionary today means to have the courage to be different without falling into arrogance, to live the joy of the Gospel in the midst of indifference.
The mission is not religious marketing either. It is not about designing expansion strategies like someone launching a new product. The mission is to go out to the encounter, like Jesus on the roads of Galilee: with compassion, closeness and truth. It is about opening spaces for listening, building bridges, showing that faith illuminates the deepest questions of the human heart.
In schools, parishes and religious communities, the mission is concretized in simple gestures: an education that forms people who are free and in solidarity; a pastoral ministry that is not limited to rites, but accompanies processes; a community that welcomes, forgives and walks with the most fragile. Mission is not measured by numbers, but by the capacity to sow hope.
The missionary Church in a secularized world is not the one that shouts the loudest, but the one that loves the most. It is the one that is not ashamed of being a minority, because it knows that the small yeast leavens the whole dough. It is not about conquering, but about serving. Not to impose, but to propose.
In short, being a missionary Church today means returning to what is essential: to proclaim with one's life that Christ is risen. And if the secularized world seems closed, all the more reason to show that the Gospel continues to be the good news capable of transforming every human heart.
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