The Missing Link of Evangelization: The Family
Every Catholic wants the Church to grow and every Catholic wants strong families.
But we rarely talk about these two things together.
And that’s a problem. Because you can’t have one without the other.
The Evangelization Silo
The Catholic world is siloed.
Evangelization apostolates are staffed by single missionaries reaching college kids and high schoolers. Family apostolates teach married couples how to keep their kids Catholic and these two worlds rarely intersect.
But the Church’s own teaching says they should.
The USCCB put out a document called “Marriage and Family: The Home of the New Evangelization.” The title says it all. The new evangelization doesn’t just include families, it begins there.
John Paul II wrote that “the future of evangelization depends in great part on the Church of the home.” Not the Church of the campus ministry. Not the Church of the discipleship group. The Church of the home.
So why do we treat family life and evangelization like separate departments?
Families can evangelize
We think of families as isolated. My family does stuff together, and then there’s evangelization, the stuff I do outside the family.
But that’s not how it works.
You live in a neighborhood. You go to a parish. Your kids go to school with other kids. A solid family is already a witness to the Gospel just by existing. Your neighbors see you pray grace before meals when their kid comes over for dinner. Other parents at school see your marriage holding together. People at your parish see your family show up week after week.
That’s evangelization. You’re just not calling it that.
Families are the foundation of evangelization
To go a step further, families aren’t just a part of evangelization; they are the foundation of evangelization in the Catholic Church.
We have a retention problem in Catholicism. Converts come in, but we can’t keep them. And the reason is simple: they show up in weak communities.
Strong families fix that.
It’s not donuts after Mass that builds community. It’s families eating donuts after Mass. It’s not parish picnics. It’s families at parish picnics. That’s what makes a parish thrive. That’s what makes someone stick.
Your faith is determined by who you spend time around. If you spend time around holy families, you’re more likely to be holy. If you spend time around families that aren’t living Christian lives, you’ll drift. This is self-evident.
What about single missionaries?
“But Patrick! The early Church was evangelized by single men. Paul was celibate. The apostles left their families to preach.”
Fair point. But consider this: The first evangelist—the Word made flesh—chose to come through a family. The first people called by God in the Gospels were a mother and a father. Before there were apostles, there was the Holy Family.
The Church began with a domestic church.
Yes, single missionaries spread the faith across nations. But if you add up all the people brought to faith throughout history, most of them were evangelized by families. Parents evangelizing their kids. Kids bringing friends to the faith. Families multiplying faith three or four times over, generation after generation.
We hear about the missionary saints, but the families do the heavy lifting.
I only say this because my parish gets this right (and has for the past 30 years).
People show up to the 9:30 Mass and immediately get plugged in with five or six families. Our kids hang out. We hang out. It happened organically. The parish provided the setting, and families took advantage of it.
We’ve had so many people come back to the faith just because they walked in on a Sunday, saw all of us, and thought: I want that.
There’s no reason this can’t happen on purpose.
We need cross-pollination
We need cross-pollination in the Catholic Apostolate World.
Evangelization apostolates should read Familiaris Consortio. Family apostolates should read Redemptoris Missio. John Paul II was the exemplar here: pro-evangelization, super pro-family. He understood these aren’t two separate things.
We need to make families holy. Then neighborhoods. Then parishes. Then towns and schools. And that happens through families, not through transient friend groups that come and go. Families are permanent. You’re stuck with each other for life.
The family is the domestic church, and the Church is an evangelizing entity. So let’s combine the two.
I created a handbook to help the average Catholic evangelize their family and friends. It’s called The Battle Plan and you can get it for free here:
In my humble opinion you won’t be able to fix this problem if the priesthood is separated from family. The church took the priesthood out of the home and the home out of the priesthood. There are churches that have figured out this family evangelization strategy and they don’t have this limiting factor. Something to consider.