 I'm very, very grateful to have grown up as a Methodist. My grandfather was a Methodist pastor. My great-grandfather was a Methodist pastor. My great-great-grandfather was a Methodist pastor. My great-great-great-grandfather was a, yes, he was. Bunny, you should know that. And so I grew up, obviously, in a thoroughly Methodist environment. My parents worked at Methodist colleges. And so it just never occurred to me that there was anything beside Methodists. And so I'm very grateful to the Methodist church. And what I share today, I guess about 30% to 40% of Methodists would consider themselves or what I used to be evangelicals. Methodists were the original evangelicals under John Wesley, but that's a whole other conversation. And so I'm very grateful to that background. And so what I say today, I share out of love and appreciation for my background and also love and appreciation for where I am, because I just need to say, begin by saying, it is really, really, really wonderful to be Catholic. It really is. Amen. And I'm really glad to be home. And so to set the table for just a minute, just kind of the cliff's notes, since I didn't share my own journey beforehand, I was a pastor for 20 years, as you know. For many of those years, I was the pastor at Mt. Pisgah, which is a megachurch in Atlanta. It was the largest Methodist church in terms of attendance and people served. We had about 5,000 people on Sunday. We served about 15,000 people in our different ministries in an average week. And so we're the largest church east of the Mississippi, one of the largest ones, Methodist churches in the world. And it was an extraordinary privilege to be there. I came into the church in January, Feast of the Epiphany, January of 08, on my 44th birthday. And when I came in, you're doing the math, yeah, that means I'm 36 now. And it's amazing. You come into the Catholic Church and you get younger automatically. Ponce de Lyon. And so I came into the church and I now partner with a guy many of you know, my good friend Matthew Kelly, he and I lead Dynamic Catholic, which is headquartered in Cincinnati. Even though I live in Atlanta, we have about 80 people in Cincinnati that we work together with to help reenergize the church with a particular focus on engaging disengaged Catholics to help reenergize lives and parishes. So as part of that, in your bag, you got a copy of one of my books as a gift from Matthew and me to you. I hope that that's helpful to you. If you've read it before, share it with a friend because that's what they're for. So when I came into the church in Atlanta, my house was not far from St. Bridgette Parish, where a good friend of mine, Eddie and Karen Hughes go, I saw her sister here a minute ago. And so I met the pastor there, Monsignor Paul Reynolds, who was about 70 years old. He was an Irishman. I'll share more about him tomorrow. And a wonderfully holy and loving priest, an extraordinary man, one of the holiest people I've ever met. And he passed away a couple of years ago when his leukemia came back and I miss him every day. And when I came into the church, he was unbelievably gracious to me because the Catholic Church doesn't exactly have advertisements on catholicjobs.com for former megachurch pastors to come in and we'll put you to work in some meaningful way. And so I came in not knowing, having any idea what I was going to do to use my gifts or to make a living for that matter. And so Monsignor Reynolds invited me to lunch one day and he said, Alan, your megachurch is about 300 yards, former megachurch is about 300 yards down the road from St. Bridgette. And I'd like to pick your brain a little bit about a conversation that I have more often than I would like to have. So we sat down for lunch and Monsignor Reynolds said, Alan, I have to tell you, I don't understand this conversation and I'm hoping that you can help me understand it. And he said, basically it goes like this. He said, it happened to me actually the day before yesterday, a 40, 45 year old man came into my office and he said, Monsignor Reynolds, just wanted to come by and tell you that I love you. But we're leaving to go to another megachurch here in Atlanta because we're trying to have a deeper personal relationship with Jesus. And Monsignor Reynolds said, I have this conversation and unfortunately I have this conversation a lot and I have to ask you, I don't understand what he means that we're looking for a deeper personal relationship with Christ because to me it just seems obvious that in the presence of the body and blood, the true presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, it's the most intimate relationship we could possibly ever have. So can you help me understand what people aren't finding here and they are finding in megachurches so that I can understand that a little better and perhaps be a little better priest and a little better pastor. And so he and I began a friendship, then it had a number of conversations and I'm gonna try to distill them into 45 or 50 minutes and then we'll have some Q and A at the end to dialogue on this. So to start with, as I shared with you last night, I wanna share three things that evangelicals in particularly megachurches and it's important to say on the front end two things about megachurches. One is we define a megachurch as a church that has an average worship attendance on a weekend of 2,000 people or more. Lots of people throw that language around in different kinds of ways but that's technically what the definition is. If the church averages 2,000 people or more on Sunday that by definition is a megachurch. Secondly, it's important to understand that oftentimes the culture and sometimes we as Catholics paint with a broad brush when we talk about megachurches. And I have to tell you, from personal experience, there's a wide array and diversity of types and charisms, if you will, within megachurches and they're not all the same. And so we're gonna look today in the latter part of my talk and then in the workshop and discussion, we're gonna look at three different megachurches and one thing that each of those can teach us but before that I wanna share with you the three things I believe that megachurches would benefit from learning from us and they're a big part of why I came home into the church. So my mom grew up down river here in Ohio and if you got on a boat here in Steubenville and you went a couple of hours and you got off and literally got onto the banks of the Ohio, that's where my mom grew up, in a house on the banks of the Ohio. And her mom was the telephone operator in this little town, town of maybe 1,000 people, poorest county in Ohio and they were poor, they lived right on the water and so much so that we have the furniture from my mom's childhood that still has the water marks from when the Ohio River flooded. So she grew up on the river, actually in the river. And so my grandmother was a little spitfire of a lady. She was probably five feet tall and I don't know that she ever weighed 100 pounds in her life and she was the telephone operator back when the telephone operator was the center of the universe in a town. So she knew everything that Myrtle was telling Gladys and everything that Tom was telling Bob. And so when the Ohio River flooded she left her job so much she had a little rowboat that she would get in and she would float down to downtown where they had a ladder on the outside of the phone company and she would climb that ladder into the second floor so that she could keep the phones operating. Unbelievable lady. So when she died back in 1991, my mom was an only child and she has two sons, my brother and I. I got the looks and the brains and my brother, well, he's my brother. So we go up to this little town in Ohio for my mom to kind of begin to close up things and sell my grandmother's house and to have her funeral and my mom is taking care of everything inside the house because my grandmother was a pack rat and my mom tells my brother and me to go to the tool shed out back because my grandmother until she was 87 still cut her own grass and go back to the tool shed and clean out all the stuff that she's got back there. So my brother and I would go back to the tool shed and we go in and on the floor of the tool shed is a trunk like a footlocker. It's got one of those curved tops with a sort of the gold bands across the top almost like a pirate treasure chest and my brother and I look at that and I said, do you remember James? Do you ever remember seeing this thing? And he says, no. And I said, me neither. And I said, I wonder what's in this thing? And so I go to open it up and it's locked. And so immediately I began to think, you know, here's my grandmother who lived on nickels and dimes and she lived on her social security check. That was all that she had. Maybe all those years she had been sandbagging us and she had this special treasure back in behind her house just in case and she was gonna hand this on as an inheritance to my brother and me. And so I go and I find a crowbar and I say, hey, let's open this thing up. And so my brother and I are getting excited and we're beginning to think about how we're gonna spend all that Spanish galleon and all those gold and jewels that are inside of that treasure chest. And so I popped that thing open and the lid goes open and the thing is completely full all the way to the top with old pictures. Old black and white pictures and many of you are old enough to remember the kind that even had the lace around the outside of them. And there's all these pictures and black and white of all these people and I don't know who they are. I don't recognize any of these people. And I mean, there's literally thousands of pictures in this foot locker. And so I'm thinking, hey, these are all the people. I don't know much about my mom's side of the family in the Ohio River Valley and I'm gonna learn all about them today. And so my brother and I are excited and so I pick up one of these pictures and there's a man and a woman standing next to a mule and a plow and then there's another one with an old man standing in front of a country store and then there's another one with a family together with their little kids and I pick it up and I can't wait to find out about my mom's family and I turn it over to see who these people are and the back was blank. And I start to go through all those pictures and not a single one of them had any names or identification written on any of them. So what I had discovered was this treasure chest of all these people and I had no idea who they were. I knew that they must be important in some way. My grandmother wouldn't have kept them and they were probably related to her in some way but she hadn't left us any way of knowing that and so it was like being an orphan. I knew I had all these relatives. I just didn't know who they were and what they had to teach me. All my years as a Methodist, I grew up as a kid. I learned the Apostles Creed. We didn't really use the Nicene Creed very often but we use the Apostles Creed every week in my entire life. I learned that saying it next to my father as a little kid and we would always say the communion of saints and I would say to my parents and I would ask in class and stuff, what does that mean? They go, well, you know, there's, you know, we have communion with the saints. And I said, well, what does it mean to have communion with the saints? They said, well, you know, you got communion and you got saints. That's what it is. And I always kind of wondered what that was and in my mind, the communion of saints was kind of like that treasure chest. It was like there were all these people who had lived before me, who had been Christians before me and some of them had even died but we didn't know anything about them. We didn't know anything about our ancestors. We sort of knew who they were. We kept them in a chest locked up in the tool shed and we knew they were there. We just didn't know who they were, what they had to teach us. And so as I began to make my way into the church, you can imagine my surprise and really my encouragement that came when I met a guy named St. John Fisher who's really helped my journey. You remember the story. I won't give you the whole story, but you remember King Henry? King Henry had a little issue, right? Had a little issue and he wanted to get rid of Catherine of Aragon and he wanted to bring in a new wife and ultimately he wanted to bring in multiple wives and this was before that was cool. And this was before it got you on entertainment tonight, right? And so he had this issue, this adultery issue, this lust issue called whatever you want. And so he told the church, I'm gonna divorce Catherine and I'm gonna marry Anne. And the church said, you know what, Henry, we wanna invite you to a deeper yes. We wanna invite you to a deeper yes to marriage. We wanna invite you to a deeper yes to fidelity. We wanna invite you to a deeper yes to understanding your life and the grace of God. And Henry said, I reject your deeper yes and I give you a firm no. And Henry became the first Protestant in the lineage that I come out of with the church of England and the Methodists and the Assemblies of God and the Pentecostal Movement, all of which came out of King Henry's saying no to the yes of the church. King Henry said, I'll go create my own truth and I'll create my own church and in fact I'll be the head of the church and so we won't have this problem anymore. There's gonna be a lot of agreement with me in my church. And so Henry became the first man to say no, I'll create my own. And one of the things that the mega churches could learn from us is this notion of truth. The notion that the church exists so that I can conform to the church rather than the church can conform to me. Amen. I am not the center of the universe in spite of the fact that I think that I am. I am not the person who knows everything. The church possesses a truth about marriage, about the real presence of Jesus, about the teaching and the dogma that we have that we have refined and elucidated for 2000 something years. And I hope to conform to that church and I hope to conform to that truth. And so the notion of truth is a slippery thing when you go to a mega church and frankly to any Protestant church, but that's a whole nother conversation. When you study mega churches, what you'll discover is that most of them, not all of them, but most of them, probably 75 or 80% of them are still have their original pastor. The founding pastor, because typically what happens is you have a pastor who's a particularly gifted or effective leader, usually a man, occasionally a woman who's a particularly gifted preacher and leader and the strength and the tour to force of his or her personality creates this movement and this growth over time. And it usually grows up around him or her. And so what happens is that person becomes the arbiter and the determiner of what is true. You with me? And so rather than the church possessing a truth, it goes back to King Henry where one man determines the truth. And what you also find is because of that, because of the strength of that pastor's personality and because he has been typically the arbiter and determiner of what's true, succession planning in mega churches very rarely works. What usually happens is the mega church grows, the pastor stays, it leads that church 20, 30, 40 years, he or she retires or passes away. The mega church struggles to figure out how to pass the baton and then it slowly declines and either sinks to a much lower level and sustains or it goes away altogether like the Crystal Cathedral with Robert Shuler. But other young pastors are coming up so new mega churches are being born as other ones are aging out. You with me? Because it revolves around one man rather than the body of truth. You still with me? So the first thing that I would hope that mega churches could learn from you and me and I think that's part of why we're at defending the faith, sharing the faith, defending the truth, sharing the truth and why we spent the whole morning talking about what is truth and why Dr. Shree last night helped us understand what is truth is because you and I understand that if you don't have truth to pass on you don't really have much to pass on, do you? All you have is a personality and a really, really good time. Now I don't mean that in a diminishing way, I mean it's helpful to a lot of people but if you wanna sustain something and you want to actually share the faith across generations, across places and across time you have to embrace truth which leads to number two. The second thing that mega churches could learn from us is that truth because the Catholic Church possesses the truth as the one holy Catholic and apostolic church the fullness of truth, Pope Benedict reminded us that salvation is still available in Protestant communities but the fullness of truth belongs in the Catholic Church for multiple reasons including the apostolic succession and the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist and because of that, that leads to holiness, holiness. If you go ask the average American think of one person, name one person who is holy. You know who the number one answer is and it's almost eight to nine out of 10 people the first answer they'll give you? Mother Teresa, almost without exception. 80 to 90% of the people will say, ah man, I don't know, Mother Teresa. Think about that. Here's a little woman who spent her time, not that there's anything wrong with being little. She had a little more hair than she probably needed but still that's, being little and Harry is good and so here she has given herself over to serving the poor and the dying and the rejected and over the course of her life by the time she passed away, 3,000 other women had come to join what she was doing in hundreds of hospitals, hospices and settings across the globe and she never recruited a single one. Why? Because holiness is attractive, isn't it? Holiness is like a magnet. Holiness that resides in the church because of the truth, holiness attracts people when we live it. Think about St. Francis of Assisi. You take a little guy, you stick him into the middle of Italy, you give him virtually nothing to eat or drink and say, hey, just go around and preach the gospel and love people and guess what happens? This entire movement swells up around him because holiness is attractive. As I think back and I'll share more of this in much more detail tomorrow in my talk, as I think back in my journey, hear me, this is kind of an odd thing to say. The holiest people I've ever met without exception were all Catholic. The holiest people I ever met were all Catholic. Before he clapped, let me give you the inverse of that. Ironically, the least holy people I've ever met were all Catholic. I don't know why that is. I'll leave that to another speaker along the way. But the holiest people I ever met were all Catholic. Tomorrow I'll describe one of them in my journey. Let me just share another one of them with you now. When I was in graduate school, which is sort of when my journey began to take root, I became close friends with the Dominican friar who's still my best friend today. And we were in grad school and he was really smart and I'm not, and he was really well-prepared and I wasn't. And so I would go by the priory where he lived every day to get some help with our New Testament Greek because I'm from Georgia and we don't speak Greek in Georgia. And so, or they quit right before I got there. And so I'd go by and I'd see Father Steve and I'd go in the back door to the kitchen and Mary would be the cook and she was preparing the meal for the friars. There was 10 or 12 of them there. And every day when I was sitting in that kitchen, an older retired priest who when I met him was 89 years old. Father Caj, she in. He was a little wisp of a guy. He was probably about five-five at this point and he probably weighed about 110 pounds soaking wet. And he had sort of wiry hair that is sort of blue in the wind so he could pick up AM and FM just off the top of his head. And so the first time I'm down there and here I am, this Protestant kid sitting in this Dominican priory at the kitchen table because I wasn't allowed to go anywhere else. They had been like, ooh, we got quality standards. You gotta stay in the kitchen. And so I'm there at the table and Father Caj comes in and he goes, who are you? He's this old New England curmudgeon. And he said, who are you? And I said, well, I'm Alan. I'm friends with Father Steve. He goes, all right, good to see you. He said, what do you do? And I said, well, I'm trying to work on this PhD in New Testament and ancient Christian history. He goes, huh, you're from Georgia? You're working on a PhD. Never heard of that before? You can read? I said, yeah. He said, you married? I said, yeah, got the ring. He says, you got kids? I said, yeah, he goes, I'll pray for you. And so every time I would come by the priory, which was about every day, Father Caj would come through. He'd be getting a cup of coffee or he'd be getting a sandwich or whatever. And he'd come down and he'd come in. Hey, Alan, good to see you. How you doing? I'm doing all right, Father Caj. I'm praying for you. And when he said I'm praying for you, he actually meant it. He was praying for me. I mean, that was his, it wasn't like in the South when we say, y'all come see us. We don't really mean that. I mean, we're just being nice, right? We do not mean that, hear me. It's just being nice. And so when he said, I'm praying for you, a lot of people say I'll pray for you and they're just being nice. They don't mean it. But Father Caj meant it because his ministry was a ministry of prayer. And when I began to discover about Father Caj because I got real sick and while we were there, we had a tough time for those years. I lost my whole colon. I wear a bag, a chunk taken out of my back where I got melanoma. My wife suffered two miscarriages. We had two little kids. It was a hard several years. And so every day Father Caj would come by and he'd say, how you doing? In his own gruff New England curmudgeonly way. But I knew that he actually genuinely cared. And he was praying for me because there was a little prayer chapel upstairs where Father Steve said Father Caj would spend most of his days praying. He had a life of prayer. He's a retired priest. And so he's living in the priory and the woman who answered the phones before the priory knew that if somebody called with an emergency at three o'clock in the morning about a car wreck, about a surgery, about a heart attack and they wanted a priest. She knew not to call any of the active priests. She knew that the priests who actually not only would go but wanted to go was Father Caj. He didn't care when the call came. He wanted to go. He was called to be a priest no matter what. He's 89, he's gonna do the best he could. And so he would go do that. He had his ministry of prayer, this ministry of service. Now you got Dominican friends. They don't get paid much if they get paid anything at all. I don't know how much Father Caj's retirement stipend was but I'm guessing it was like 20 bucks a month. And Father Caj got his retirement check every month and he would sign the back and he would stick it in the poor box in the back of the church. Every single penny, every single month. When I asked him why he would do that, he said, well, I got everything I need. I mean, he was wearing the same clothes he'd been wearing since 1940. But for him, they weren't. He didn't need a haircut. They fed him. So what else do I need? There's people that don't have. So he gave it all, this life of prayer, this life of service, this life of generosity. So one day I'm in that kitchen, Father Caj comes down and he's got a big bandage on his forehead. And he comes in and he goes, hey Allen, how you doing? I said, I'm doing all right. He goes, I'm praying for you. And I said, I appreciate that Father Caj. I said, you okay? He goes, yeah, I'm okay, why you ask? I said, we got like this big thing on your head. What's that? Kind of bows up, puffs up. Yeah. Had to go to the hospital last night. I was in the prayer chapel. I was praying for you. And I fell asleep. And I fell over and I hit my head on the rail in front of me and it busted open my head. And so I had to go to the hospital and it had to stitch me up. And so he had on this red badge of prayer courage on his head. And I thought to myself, you know what? He's the first person I've ever known who was wounded in prayer. I mean, how holy do you have to be to be wounded in prayer? I'm telling you the holiest people that I have met without exception. We're all Catholic. So we have truth. And because of that truth, there's a holiness. And then the third thing quickly that I would want mega churches to understand from us that I would hope that they could figure out is that that holiness leads to beauty. Next week I'll lead a pilgrimage to France. Pray for us, truthfully. And we'll go to a lot of places. But you know, almost no matter where you go, if you go to Paris, what's the most beautiful place? Notre Dame. You go to Natchez, Mississippi. What's the most beautiful place? St. Mary's Basilica. If you've never been there, you ought to go. You go to New York City. What's the most beautiful place? St. Vincent Fair. You ought to try that parish sometime. You go to Rome. Try San Clemente. Almost anywhere you go, the most beautiful place in that place is the Catholic Church. Why is that? Because you and I, the church, we understand that the building is not just a gathering place for like-minded people, is it? The building houses Jesus. Holiness, which flows from the truth, resides in the church. And so this isn't just a place for us to gather because we all think the same way or we like the same pastor. This is a place that we're building for the beauty and the glory of God and that God has revealed to us through the beauty, but that the beauty is also an outflowing of the holiness that he puts into us. So my hope would be that mega churches could understand from us, truth, holiness, and beauty. Amen? However, we're also gonna talk about the flip side because you and I are about evangelization, as Pope John Paul II has called us, as Pope Benedict has called us, as Pope Francis has called us. You and I have the luxury of being able to spend three days together at Franciscan University thinking about how we share the mercy of God in a way that impacts people's lives, not just to be right, amen, but to love people. That's why we're here, is to love people and to speak the truth in love. And so I think there's some things that you and I can learn from mega churches and we're gonna look at three different ones and then we'll have a conversation about that together. There's three things I think that we can learn, there's actually more, but I think there's three that are particularly helpful to us as we think about evangelization and sharing the good news and sharing the faith. The first one of those is simplicity. Simplicity, and you might put in parenthesis next to that, clarity. Simplicity and clarity. I'm not talking about being a simpleton. I'm talking about simplicity. When you're going through the desert and you are by yourself and you run out of water and you don't know where the next way station or the next oasis or the next canteen is gonna be and you're getting increasingly thirsty, you are desperately hoping, yearning and looking for just a little Dixie cup of water, aren't you? God, I would give anything, Lord, for just a Dixie cup of water. You're not looking for somebody to come teach you about the theory of water. I don't have any water, but let me tell you why water's really important to you. Let me show you some pictures of water and let's look at that together. Let me describe for you what it was like when I had some water before I came out to you here in the desert and how wonderful it was and how great it's gonna be when you find that water. Let me tell you what they thought about water in the Roman Empire, because I think you're gonna find that fascinating on your journey, trying to find that little Dixie cup of water. Let me show you some beautiful paintings of water, because those will sustain you in your desert journey, trying to find water. No, what you're looking for is a Dixie cup of water. It's really pretty simple. When you're thirsty, what are you looking for? Water. It's pretty simple, isn't it? And yet, sometimes, as Catholics, I'm afraid we complicate the heck out of things. I mean, we love complicated. The more complex and complicated it is, the more we like it. You know, that's part of why I became Catholic, was I realized at some point I've gone as far into the heart of Jesus and into the heart of God as I can go as a Protestant. I want everything Jesus can give me and that includes the Eucharist and if that's gonna happen, I gotta come home. But that's not where I started. Before you can understand the complex, you have to understand the simple, don't you? Before you can do calculus, you have to do addition and subtraction. Before you do algebra, you have to understand multiplication and division. And I'm afraid that as Catholics, we love the heck out of algebra and calculus. And you can't go to the moon without algebra and calculus, hear me. You can't build a car without algebra and calculus. You can't even build a house without algebra and calculus. But you can't understand algebra and calculus until you understand addition and subtraction. Let me give you an example. True story, somebody who's extremely close to me and extremely important to me. After a number of years, wanting to come home into the church, wanting to, for the first time, take a step into Catholicism. And so he called the parish near where he lived and said, I would like to take some steps toward becoming Catholic. What do I do? And the person on the phone said, well, you need to go to R-C-I-A. And he goes, what's that? And they said, what's about 30 week course? And it starts in September and you called in October. And so we need you to wait for a year. And if you come back next August or September, we'll sign you up and you can go through that 30 weeks. So if you'll just stay in the desert for two more years, we'll get you a drink of water. It's essentially what we're telling them. Now I love R-C-I-A, but is that the only way that we can think about how we welcome people? Is R-C-I-A the only thing that we have? What would happen if five, six, eight times a year, depending on your parish and the location and the demographics of your parish, what would happen if you had five, six, eight times a year to sort of a one night open house for people who wanted to come ask questions and understand a little bit about the church? What would happen if you had three or four times a year and just a welcome group for three or four weeks where you can come and we'll introduce you to the basics of the faith? And how about we date a little bit before we ask you to marry us? I got a great wife. She's beautiful. On our very first date, blind date, I went up to her and I said, here's a really nice ring. Would you marry me and bear all my children and be faithful to me for the rest of our lives? No, I did not do that, you're correct. I did that to three other girls that didn't work out so I took a different strategy, right? But I got more use out of that ring. So what happened? I dated, I quartered her, I wooed her. We grew in love for each other as we got to know each other and over the course of two years, we got married. But in the church, we say, hey, when you come into the church, you better be ready to get married. We don't date. We don't want to get to know you. We really don't want you to get to know us. Be ready. Mega churches, I just want to help you as simply as I can. Mega churches, almost without exception, specialize in simplicity and clarity. Let me give you one example. I know that I may bite off more than I care to in this, but we're all friends. Joel Osteen. Okay, there you go. So Joel, people criticize Joel a lot. And Joel's not perfect. You will notice, however, that Joel doesn't criticize us back. Joel shows a lot more charity at those of us who criticize him than we show to him. But Joel, in spite of some of his shortcomings, which we all know, Joel has a ministry that reaches a huge segment of our population that no other church is reaching. Let me describe one of them for you. She's a friend of mine. She committed adultery when she was about 35. Her marriage broke up. She was rejected by everybody in her life. She had blown up her life. And for the next 20 years, she paid for it. She was lonely. She was broken. She was wounded and nobody gave a rip, least of all the church. She wouldn't go anywhere near the church. She wouldn't do anything to do with church people. And one day, just by half an instant, she turns on the television and lo and behold, there's Lakewood Church used in Texas. There's Joel Osteen. And for her, it was the first time she had heard maybe in her whole life, let's call her Christine. It was the first time Christine had heard, you know what, here's a couple of simple things, Christine, God knows you and God loves you and God wants what's best for you. He has hopes and dreams for your life. Now you and I would quibble with Joel about saying that that includes material blessings. Set that aside. My point is that there is a simplicity there of offering a simple cup of water that's effective for a huge number of people that's not confined to Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas but you'll find in different kinds of formats with different kinds of theologies across megachurches that's why people oftentimes go because it's simple. You go, there's 20 minutes of music, there's 40 minutes of preaching and teaching and then you go home. It's simple. And hopefully you get some encouragement along the way. Simplicity and clarity, number two, that might be helpful to us as Catholics. Number two, what's the number one way that the church in the New Testament between the Book of Acts and the Book of Revelation, what's the number one way that the church is described as a family? As a family? Brothers, sisters, family of God? A hundred times between the Book of Acts and the Book of Revelation, the church is described as a family. In fact, the church in the first four centuries of Christian history, the church was known for radical hospitality. If you came and you were a brother and sister from Lebanon and I lived in Rome, I took you in, man. And you did the same for me in the Roman Empire, the streets and the highways were rough and Christians, we counted on each other. We showed radical hospitality. We were known as people who would take in folks and welcome them and house them and love them. Radical hospitality. How well are we doing as Catholics of hospitality? How well is your parish doing with hospitality? Maybe you're doing great. My experience is this is not a strength for us. I went to a parish in the last year. I won't name names. I won't tell towns. I go and my wife's with me. I've been invited to speak. I'm the invited speaker. We go into town, it's night, we pull up to the, we pull up and there's no sign. Anita, do you think this is the parish? I don't know. There's no sign. It doesn't say it's St. Joe's or St. Anne. It looks like a church. Oh, there's a school. Oh yeah, it says St. Joe's school. This must be St. Joe's church. Pull into the parking lot. It says no parking in this lot at any time. Translated, that means welcome. We're glad you're here. We drive around, it's dark. There's no lights in the parking lot. There's nobody in the parking lot saying, hey, maybe you should park over here. We drive around. We finally say, you know what? I don't want to have my car towed while I'm the invited guest speaker. So I think I'll park on the street. We get out of the car. We walk up to, I'm not making this up. We walk up to the front door. The lights are off. The door's locked and there's a piece of notebook paper on the door that says we're expecting a large crowd tonight so we'll be meeting in the Parish Hall. Where's the Parish Hall? Yeah, I didn't know either. You don't know where the church is. You don't know where the Parish Hall is. I didn't know either. So we start wandering around the campus in the dark with no lights, with nobody out there. And we see a few cars over there. We go, that must be the Parish Hall over there. We get to the Parish Hall and so we're walking in. We're 30 minutes early because I'm supposed to be speaking at this place. And we walk in and there's some ushers. And these ushers are really nice guys. They love each other. They serve together as ushers every week. So they're all talking to each other. And they're having a great time. And they need to walk in and they keep talking and they keep talking. And I'm looking to see if there's a bulletin or a program or something. So I go up and I tap one of the ushers on the shoulder and I say, hey guys, sorry to interrupt your conversation, but I'm the speaker. And is there a program? Yeah, they're over there. You can pick it up over there. And they go back to talking. I'm not making this up. Now if that's what we're doing with the invited speaker, what happens if you just stumbled in off the street? We made it really, really hard for somebody to make their way into what we hoped would be a good evening. Don't even have signs. Now let's take North Point Community Church, which is not far from where I lived for the last 17 years. Andy Stanley's the pastor. So North Point Community Church, again, they got plenty of gaps. We can talk about that all day long. I just want to point out one thing. You go, you're in the middle of an industrial or commercial area. You're going down the road and as you get to the entrance to North Point Community Church, there's not only a big sign that says North Point Community Church, there's a people out there waving, saying North Point and they're wearing North Point Community Church things. You know, pretty well where to go. You go down the road and lo and behold, it's like Six Flags, man. They're like 85 parking lots. Now Goofy and Pluto and Mickey and you come up and there's volunteers out there and they're directing you to keep the traffic flow going. So that you go to the neatest, nearest, most convenient parking space. You get out of the car and there's signs that say church or sanctuary as they would probably describe it. They, you and I wouldn't describe it the same way, but they say sanctuary is that way. So you know where to go. As you get close to the building, there's people there that say welcome to North Point Community Church. Here's a simple program and it's not eight pages in six point font. It's basically here's two or three things we want you to know on the backside. Here's some sermon notes. And when you go in, somebody else will greet you and point out where the bathroom is and if you'd like a cup of coffee, it's over there. In other words, we're glad you're here. Welcome. We want to make it as simple to go to church and we want you to feel welcome because as Christians, we have a call and a virtue of hospitality. And I think we as Catholics, we have a wonderful thing to offer the world. We've got truth. We've got holiness. We have beauty. And I would hope that we would see it as a family reunion when somebody comes. Even if it's a cousin, we haven't ever met in our lives. They're coming to the family reunion. They're hoping to find family. They're hoping to find home. They're hoping to find belonging. They're hoping to find community. They're hoping to find their place. I would hope that we would find ways to welcome them. That's number two, number three. Number three is the most important one of all. Number three is the most important one of all. Helpfulness. Helpfulness. At Dynamic Catholic, Matthew and I talk about this a lot. When the average person goes to Mass, you may have heard us talk about our research and we did three or four years worth of research and we found that 7% of Catholics give 80% of the money to the parish and 7% of Catholics give 80% of the volunteer hours to a parish. That's not an opinion. That's data. Not data that I like, but it's data. Those 7% are at Mass every week. There's another 10% of Catholics who are also at Mass every week. 17% of Catholics in America go to Mass every single Sunday. Seven of that 17 are actively engaged. 10 are totally disengaged. They're there for all kinds of reasons. My grandma made me go to Mass when I was a kid so I still go. My wife tells me I gotta go, so I go. My kids need to go to Mass because that's what I did when I was a kid. They need to go to Mass and be bored too. So I take my kids and we sit here and we're bored and we go home. When one of those 10%ers goes into Mass, they're not thinking, boy, I hope I get a good explanation of the Christology in the Gospel of John today. They're thinking about one of 10 things. They're thinking about their marriage, they're thinking about their kids, they're thinking about their health, they're thinking about their job, and they're thinking about their addictions. Or they're thinking about their friend's job, their friend's marriage, their friend's kids, their friend's addictions, or their friend's health. That's what they're thinking about. You with me? So they're coming in with a set of expectations going, I hope that I can find something today that God's gonna speak to me that's gonna bring some strength and power to my life. And one of the reasons that they're disengaged is that they're not able to connect their marriage, their addiction, their health, their kids, or their job, or their friends with what's happening in Mass. Contrast that, if you go to Saddleback Church, Rick Warren, most of you know Rick. Rick has become a very, very, very good friend of Catholicism in Lake Forest, Orange County, California. Saddleback Church, a very different place, hear me, an extremely different place from North Point Community Church, which is extremely different from Lakewood Church and Joloisting. So Rick Warren, who has become a very, very, very good friend of Catholicism, and particularly in Orange County and the state of California. Rick leads Saddleback Church, he's been there since roughly 1980, if my memory's right. When you go up to Saddleback Church, you'll notice two things. You go up and there's a big portico outside Saddleback Church, and there's all these booths and kiosks set up, and there's clear signage that says alcoholics anonymous, that says narcotics anonymous, that says kids recreation, that says marriage enrichment, that says grief share, that says rainbows for kids. And so all the different possible needs and hopes that folks have, as soon as they show up on the campus, there are people there welcoming them, wanting to share with them. You need help with an addiction, so did I. Here's how this church helped me, and here's a way that we can help you. You're looking for a place for your kids to play soccer? I used to be that way. Here's what we offer, and here's how you can be a part of that. They're trying to be helpful, why? Stay with me. Because they want to scratch where you itch. They want to scratch where you itch, why? Because when they scratch where you itch, they earn trust and they earn credibility so they can then help you discover the grace and the love of God. By meeting you where you are, rather than where they hope you will be, they earn the privilege of ushering you to where they hope you will be. You with me? Because Rick Warren, great line, says most unchurched people are seeking relief more than truth. We have truth, and it's a wonderful thing. That's why I'm here, church. But I think it would help us to understand that the average megachurch, and Saddleback in particular, is brilliant at trying to figure out how can we meet people where they are, and that will give us the platform to help them discover the grace and the love and the mercy and the truth of God. And then, even more amazing, think about this for your parish. If you go to Saddleback and you have a, you say, you know what? I like to take the next step forward in faith. What do I do? I don't know much about this Christianity thing. Or maybe I grew up Catholic and I don't understand this whole Saddleback thing. What do I do? In the bulletin, very clearly it says, here's our recommended next step. You don't have to do it, but here's the one thing that we suggest that you do. Not here's 43 things. We hope you pick one. And if you like this one, it's a Bible study on the Gospel of John. Contact Joe Parker. Don't give an email. Don't give a phone number. How many times do we do that? Everybody knows who Joe is. Well, no, actually I don't. I'm the first time here. I have no idea who Joe is, but I'd like to learn more. So Saddleback says, here's a recommended next step. Now there's a bunch of other stuff, but here's the thing that we suggest that you do. And when you go to that recommended next step, guess what happens? They say, here's a plan that we have that we've worked out that helps people discover the grace of Jesus Christ. Here's the plan. You don't have to do it, but this is the recommended one that you have. There's a clarity and a helpfulness there, but they earn the right to share that with you. So when we were in New Haven, let's wrap this up and we'll go to Q and A. So very quickly, the three things that mega churches could learn from us. Truth, holiness, and beauty. The three things that perhaps we would be strengthened by learning from mega churches. Simplicity, clarity, hospitality, and helpfulness. So when we were in New Haven, Father Steve became our friend. I knew nothing about Catholicism, and I'll share some more about that tomorrow. You might argue that I still know nothing about Catholicism. And you could make a pretty good case. But I knew nothing about Catholicism. And Father Steve, I'll just call Steve because he's such a dear friend of our family now. Steve became our deepest, dearest friend as I was in the hospital having my colon removed, as my wife was in the hospital for her miscarriages. Steve just loved us. Steve wasn't trying to make us Catholic. Steve wasn't trying to get another notch in his belt as a Dominican. I got two more Protestants today, boom. He just loved us. He became our best friend. And over the course of the years, I mean, maybe you might say that Steve was patient. You might say that I'm just stupid. You might be right on both fronts. But over 15 years, as Steve and I, and our friendship bloomed, I began to discover all kinds of things about Catholicism that I never knew. And I began to ask questions. And I began to explore. And eventually on January 6th, 2008, I came home into the church. But it started back in 1991, when he and I became friends and he started loving us. And through that love, hear me, through that love, he earned the platform and the privilege of being able to share with us the truth and the holiness and the beauty of the Catholic faith has changed my life from the inside out and I wouldn't trade anything for it. He was helpful. And his parishes, when we're helpful to people, remarkable things happen. When we come at him with truth, before we help him and show that we love him, their defense guards go up like Dr. Shree was saying last night. But you wanna help somebody discover the beauty of the faith? First of all, don't expect it to happen in a day. And second of all, do expect it to start with love. Amen?