Evangelists are wasting time if people have to guess whether they are Christians. Our business is too urgent. There is no time for dropping hints.

Even apostles had to be told rather bluntly that discipleship is not about holding on, but about going and telling.

The problem isn’t that we don’t know what the truth is. The problem is that just enough people have been challenging all that, and we have gotten confused.

The feeding stories of the New Testament are not meant to portray the mission of the Church as a hunger program. We do not fulfill our calling as disciples by having soup kitchens and food pantries. All the feeding stories of the New Testament are signs of a much deeper and broader mission, viz., to make disciples of all nations.

Christians are to be the people who are odd because of Jesus. Christians are to be the people who have saints on their calendars and beads in their pockets. Christians are to be the people who have Bibles on their coffee tables instead of coasters, and who never make plans for Sundays that don’t include Mass. Christians are to be the people who know the truth that makes them odd even while it makes them free.

But it isn’t Christian people who save. It isn’t the Church that saves. The Church and Christian people are not “the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” Jesus does. Jesus is. What do you say about Him? Jesus is the one that matters.

We were never meant to keep the words and insights of the Bible to ourselves. In fact, Jesus said that keeping those insights to ourselves amounts to denying Him, and denying Him is a ticket to hell.

If we want to be the kind of people who are prepared to create the next institutions that will lift, advance, and bless the culture we need to do what St. Benedict did, and cultivate an orderly life that makes time daily not just for work, but also for study and prayer, who have a rational relationship with information technology, who find in the Bible an answer for the dull ennui and psychic despair that is the daily bread of so many young people.

Young people especially are experiencing a crisis of meaning, depression, hopelessness and anxiety. At the same time Bible sales are up 22%. Conversions to Catholicism in some places are up dramatically – 73% in Dallas-Fort Worth, 160% in France since 2015. People might not understand a thing we say about Reconciliation, Sanctification, or Evangelization, but it looks like they are trying to find out.

There were bigmouths in the Church from the start, people who dared to talk about Jesus out loud, very loud, louder than the people who were uncomfortable, louder than the people who hated them, louder than the people who killed them, loud enough to be heard by the people who finally recognized them as the salt of the earth and the light of the world.

Not all divisions are bad because not all divisions are born of jealousy.

Within a single lifetime after the Resurrection the Gospel of Jesus Christ was circulating in the two largest world languages of the ancient Mediterranean world and that Jesus Christ is the most well-attested historical figure from the entire ancient world – more than Homer, Plato, Aristotle or Caesar.

We can’t understand why the world is, or why it is the way it is, without considering God.

The disciples didn’t have the Bible, the sacraments, and the Holy Spirit so they had to think it through, talk it through, and write it down. We have the opportunity with all those things to “get it”.

The gospel has always been about movement. Christians eventually used the Roman roads to spread across the Roman Empire. Later they would use ships to cross the sea to new lands like North America.

This perfect love relationship between God the Father and God the Son is what we humans know as the Holy Spirit. And it is the Holy Spirit that Jesus says He will send to us.

The Truth can be missed when the quiet part is not explained correctly, is not lived correctly.

The Canaanite Woman recognized Jesus because people talked about Jesus, talked to Jesus, were unembarrassed by Jesus.

Depravity prospers in all places where there is a conspiracy to keep the quiet part quiet.

When the chips are down nobody yearns for someone, some church that is merely “nice.” We want true believers in all their oddness.