Welcome
LayEvangelist.com is a project for the renewal of Catholic life in America. My mission is to promote the new evangelization through preaching, teaching, and spiritual formation using whatever means necessary to accomplish this.
My goal is the conversion of the entire Western, post-Christian world to Jesus Christ and His Church. There is no room in this day and age to dream small, and no time either! The new evangelization is calling loudly, and so with faith, hope, and love, let us start this sacred adventure now.
What is the new evangelization?
Pope Paul VI said the Church "exists to evangelize." Pope John Paul challenged ordinary lay persons in the Third Millenium to live missionary lives every day. Our current Pope Benedict created the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of the New Evangelization to seriously foster its progress. Where the voice of faith is pushed from this increasingly secular world, the new evangelization begins its work.
Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen once declared loudly, "Christendom is dead. Long live Christianity!"
Those whom we evangelize are not the foreign missions, nor the well discipled, but rather this post-Christian, largely secular, somewhat Christian mass of semi-believers who are not properly evangelized and so they find no desire to be thoroughly catechized. They are culturally Catholic, but have never encountered Christ personally, nor have they ever been invited to make explicit the faith of their infant Baptism. The new evangelization belongs to such as these! And it is to these that my work is dedicated.
So it is the same Gospel, the same Church, the same Jesus, but a new situation that calls for new methods and means to get that message across.
Creative Commons and your ministry
And for my favorite part, feel free to share any of this content in any format that you decide. We believe in the Creative Commons License (see the footer below) and hate super-restrictive Copyright nonsense. You should not be labeled a criminal just because you want to spread the Gospel. I think you will like it so much, you will want His message spread far and wide. We will have paid content on here soon, but even that will be covered by the Creative Commons License! After all, the Gospel is His, and not mine. Enjoy it!
Video of Me
Here's a talk I gave at St. John Neumann in Austin. I tell the tale of my how my fears/stupidity ruined my relationship with my girlfriend, how that suffering changed my life, and how I eventually won her back. (Note: the awesome audio drops out in the last 15% of the video because the battery died in the lavalier. You'll need to crank it up from then on, sadly.)
Michael Gormley speaks on "Counting Our Blessings" (11-14-10) from St. John Neumann Catholic Church on Vimeo.
