Shaun A. McAfee - Filling Our Fathers House

Shaun McAfee

Filling Our Fathers House

What Converts Can Teach Us
about Evangelization

SOPHIA INSTITUTE PRESS
Manchester, New Hampshire

Copyright 2014 by Shaun McAfee

Printed in the United States of America

All rights reserved

Cover design : Coronation Media in collaboration
with Perceptions Design Studio.

On the cover : Wide Open 2012 Matt Frankel.

Biblical references in this book are taken from the Catholic Edition of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1965, 1966 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

Sophia Institute Press
Box 5284, Manchester, NH 03108
1-800-888-9344

www.SophiaInstitute.com

Sophia Institute Press is a registered trademark of Sophia Institute.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McAfee, Shaun A.

Filling our fathers house : what converts can teach us about evangelization / Shaun A. McAfee.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-62282-236-2 (alk. paper) ePub ISBN 978-1-622822-379

1. Catholic Church Apologetic works. 2. Catholic converts.
3. Protestant churches Doctrines. 4. Catholic Church Doctrines. 5. Protestant churches Relations Catholic Church. 6. Catholic Church Relations Protestant churches. I. Title.

BX1752.M45 2014

282 dc23

2014034927

To my wife, Jessica

Contents

Anything wrought by the grace of the Holy Spirit in the hearts of our separated brethren can be a help to our own edification. Whatever is truly Christian is never contrary to what genuinely belongs to the faith; indeed, it can always bring a deeper realization of the mystery of Christ and the Church.

Unitatis Redintegratio , no. 4

Foreword

Its not always easy to recognize and appreciate good things when we encounter them. This is especially true when you stumble across something of value that you never expected to be there on the path. Its tempting to keep moving and not bother to pause and inspect that bump in the road.

Russell H. Conwells famous story Acres of Diamonds is an allegory of how easily we overlook to our own detriment good things that are all around us simply because we dont take time to notice them. Conwell describes a nineteenth-century farmer who sold his farm and equipment to finance his dream of getting rich as a diamond miner. He ventured far off to the diamond mines and, even after many years of hardscrabble effort, never found any diamonds, much less made a fortune on them. Eventually, penniless, exhausted, and filled with despair and disillusionment, he committed suicide by drowning himself in a river.

The man who bought that unsuccessful miners farm, however, had a very different life. One day, as he trudged through his fields, this farmer noticed an odd and interesting rock about the size of an orange protruding from the dirt. After cleaning the dirt off, he displayed the rock as a curiosity in his living room.

A visitor happened to take a close look at the rock and, to his shock and awe, realized it was in fact a humongous diamond. Breathlessly, he asked the farmer if he had seen other rocks like this one.

Yes, of course, the farmer chuckled. There are hundreds of them strewn all over the place. Why?

It turns out that the unusual rock was the biggest diamond ever found in those parts, and, to the farmers joyful amazement, there were countless more of them just waiting to be picked up off the ground.

The moral of this story? If you dont look for and discern the hidden value in the everyday things and people in your life, you will ineluctably miss out on opportunities to acquire new skills, deepen your knowledge, benefit from others experiences, and receive blessings from God, all of which are apt to make you a better person, a wiser and more virtuous Christian, and a more efficacious apostle for Jesus Christ.

Sometimes, like that proverbial diamond in the rough, something precious and important may be obscured by the debris and dross that surrounds it perhaps the taxing personality of someone who rubs you the wrong way, or the irritating fact that someone you think couldnt possibly know something you do not know does know it, or the humbling realization that the path toward becoming a better and holier Christian lies chiefly in the ordinary things of this life.

And those are the things we so often and so easily overlook, are they not?

This book can help you greatly in that regard as it shines a needed spotlight on weighty but, for some Catholics, often forgotten essentials of the Christian life, such as the following:

• evangelically sharing (yes, sharing!) the Faith with others, so many of whom hunger and thirst for the truth, perhaps, without even consciously realizing it
• the practical implications of Jesus command to love one another, including and especially those who might look down on you and reject you for being Catholic
• the commission to share with those around you the awesome, holy, saving power of Gods grace working in your own life, especially in the Holy Eucharist, confession, and the other sacraments
• the importance of reading and assimilating the life-giving, life-changing truths imparted by the Holy Spirit in the Holy Bible, and much more

Perhaps that is how this excellent book can benefit you the most: by drawing to your attention to these aspects of an authentically Catholic life that the saints have always known and made use of in their efforts to shine forth and speak forth the truth of Jesus Christ but, in recent generations, have become lost to us, things that many Catholics have, sadly, forgotten about.

Lets relearn those skills. Lets love and ponder and master the ways and means of communicating the timeless truths of the Catholic Faith in a modern idiom to a modern audience who has barely, if at all, heard them before.

The more we Catholics recognize and adopt those legitimately and historically Catholic talents and techniques for evangelization, the more we re-appropriate and assimilate them into our own lives, the more diamonds lying all around us we can scoop up and add to that treasure in heaven that neither moth nor rust consumes nor thieves can break in and steal (cf. Matt. 6:19).

Patrick Madrid, host of the
Right Here, Right Now radio show,
author of Why Be Catholic?

Preface

I am a convert to the Catholic Church.

What does that mean? In my case, it means that I found extraordinary truth, much to my surprise and frankly at one time to my dismay, in the teachings and hospitality of the Catholic Church. That does not mean I did not find good teachings and hospitality while a Protestant. It simply means that I came to be very convinced that the Catholic Church is the Church that Jesus founded, that she has held the same teachings since her foundation, and that the claims of authority are not her own but those of Christ.

While a Protestant I found myself engaged, active, and happy. None of that has changed since I became a Catholic.

I decided to write this book while on the doorstep of a fellow parishioner one Cornhusker football morning. If you know anything about Nebraskans, you know about their love of watching Husker football on a Saturday morning, so having this parishioner speak to me at length when he could have been watching the game was worthy of mention.

What was I doing there? My parish, St. Robert Bellarmine in Omaha, Nebraska, is home to a group based on the successful book Forming Intentional Disciples by Sherry Weddell. The group serves the function of going door-to-door to engage existing parishioners on behalf of the pastor, receiving prayer requests, listening to concerns, and doing anything else of immediate use to each person or family. Highest of our priorities, though, is to offer each person or family a renewed relationship with Jesus.