The priest shortage is not our biggest problem

Much has been said about the priest shortage over the years. We have fewer priests covering more and more masses.

But there’s an issue more pressing: the shortage of lay apostles. The Church needs to give lay people practical tools to evangelize.

If we focus on that shortage with as much intensity as the priest shortage, we might find that we fix the priest shortage along the way.

We can actually fix the lay apostle shortage

Last year, a friend of mine became the vocation director for our diocese. I half-joked to him, “Please don’t let me die without the sacraments.” As I slowly age, I notice fewer of my peers becoming priests. For every one or two of my peers who become priests, it seems five or ten priests retire. You can see the writing on the wall: in a couple of decades, the nearest priest might have to drive an hour just to give me the sacraments on my deathbed. So I definitely feel the gravity of the situation.

However, focusing on the priest shortage as a layperson seems a bit too easy.

There’s very little I can do to fix the priest shortage outside of having several kids and offering them to the church, which I will do, but with fear and trepidation. I prefer instead to focus on what I can do to fix the crisis in the church.

So we laypeople need to focus more on fixing the layman shortage, particularly the shortage of lay apostles. This is different from not having enough people in our pews—everyone knows that. What we have even fewer of are apostles.

The unique advantage of lay people

I noticed this shortage in 2019 when I started working on the framework that would eventually become my book, Save Your Parish. I divided the jobs of every parish into four different floors: community building, conversion moments, ongoing catechesis, and teaching people how to evangelize. As I’ve talked to parishes trying to implement this framework, I’ve noticed almost zero parishes have anything remotely close to that final floor—the commission section.

Our churches have little to no instruction on how to evangelize the average layperson.

Maybe a church will put up a sign at the exit with “Go announce the gospel of the Lord,” but we don’t give people concrete advice on how to do it. As we see more people come into our church, we need to take these fervent individuals and give them the necessary tools.

When Christ calls for more laborers for the harvest, He is not simply speaking about more priests. We need lay harvesters, too.

Lay people have a unique ability to fit into the cracks and crevices of society. We go to the places where priests will never go. For example, my friends work in engineering firms that require security clearance to get into. A priest is not going to go in there. A priest can go to bars, parks, and ball games, but at the end of the day, a layperson has more mobility than a priest in today’s society.

It’s easier for a parent to go into a school than it is for a priest or even a youth minister.

Give lay people practical tools

One of my parishes started an evangelization team. An enterprising parishioner named Pam wanted to listen to a Catholic evangelization podcast, Every Knee Shall Bow, and practice its content with other people. We got together and role-played conversations with non-Catholics or fallen-away children. Then, they called every parishioner on the parish registry who hadn’t been to Mass in years. Over the course of six years, that small group of about ten people brought three hundred families back to the church.

Another gift the Church can give its people is permission.

That same parish we started an evangelization fund where the church set aside money every month for reimbursement. People could take a friend out to lunch, coffee, or a beer, and the church would reimburse them as long as they talked about Jesus. Very few people actually turned in receipts, but a lot of people did the evangelizing because the permission made them realize, “I am just going to do it now, I don’t really need the church to pay me back ten or twenty bucks.”

Three hundred families—not just three hundred people, but families.

Find more lay people, find more priests

That is the kind of harvest that is out there for the taking. It is fruit that blesses generations. That fruit is available to your parish if you can take it.

We need to focus on this shortage at least as much as we focus on the priest shortage. The more lay people evangelize, the more lay people we are going to bring in, and naturally, the more priests we will ultimately have.

If we fix the lay apostle shortage, we will fix the priest shortage, too.

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I write more about Pam’s parish in my book Save Your Parish.

Read the first chapter here: