An excerpt from the Preface of Sharing Your Catholic Faith Story: Tools, Tips, and Testimonies, which made its debut April 30 on Amazon.com, JoyAlive.net and CatholicMom.com.
AS A CONVERT, I’ve always loved stories about conversion and renewing our faith. Whenever I’ve heard such stories, the speakers always seem to bubble over with the presence of God. The witness of their lives shines through their stories. I wanted that radiance, that joy!
A unique faith story hides inside each of us, waiting to surprise us as we discover it and to inspire a friend or stranger as we share it. As Catholics, we don’t stand up in church and declare our witness of how Jesus saved us. Rather, we find quiet moments over coffee with a neighbor or coworker to bring up our spirituality casually. Or perhaps we may reveal a little of our relationship with the Lord in a discussion group at Bible study. We let our faith story leak out to those we trust. Like me, you may not always be ready to give a good answer.
My faith story, and yours, is our account of God’s love and mercy in our lives—our personal story of “God-moments” of welcoming Jesus into our life for the first time or the millionth time.
Always, God is writing a love story on my heart, pursuing me, softly wooing me with his love and mercy. I didn’t know he was nearby until I was fifteen and he swept me off my feet at a Protestant Youth Retreat. High in the mountains of New Mexico, his loving presence became as real as the gentle breeze through the towering trees. I hid his love in my heart, holding tight to that God-moment of intimacy, sharing it with no one for decades.
Through the witness of others, I relaxed my hold on my heart’s treasure when I learned that all baptized Christians are anointed to be evangelists. By this time, I had married, given birth to four children, and converted to Catholicism. My few attempts to evangelize through Bible verses and what they taught me suffered from the ups and downs of inconsistency, fear of rejection, and my natural timidity as an introvert. I limited my evangelization to blog posts to anonymous readers. And all the while, the Lord pursued me through prayer and journaling, as I wrote about the heartbreaks and victories in my life that brought healing to my hesitancy.
I began collecting the testimonies of Catholics who had converted, returned to the Church, or experienced a renewal, miracle, or supernatural healing. Some simply recognized the presence of our Lord in a grace-filled moment or an answered prayer.
I also collected teachings of the Church on evangelization and learned that Pope Saint John Paul consistently taught that the most effective method of evangelization is our personal witness. The Lord was evangelizing me through the stories of the God-moments of others.
Then my website took a new direction: collecting faith stories to share, first-person accounts of the special moments of grace when my readers experienced a life-changing surprise.
But wait! I had boxes of journals of spiritual musings: inspiration I’d received from retreats, accounts of answered prayer and God-infused moments in my journey of continual conversion. But who would be interested in my story? In my heart, I heard, “Each of us is an unrepeatable expression of God’s presence in the world, with a unique story.” I knew I couldn’t be the exception, and accepted the idea that someone needed to hear my story.
Was God calling me to evangelize with the story of my initial conversion and so many descriptions of how he manifested his presence in my life? As I prayed for guidance, I kept coming across two verses from the First Letter of Peter on the radio or a website, in a homily or a book. I kept hearing and reading: “Always be ready to give an explanation to anyone who asks you for a reason for your hope, but do it with gentleness and reverence” (1 Peter 3:15-16, NABRE), until I knew it by heart.
What does “always be ready” mean? For me, it meant to look back on my many experiences of God’s love and mercy and be ready to share them. Yes, I had felt the nudging of the Holy Spirit to share an incident in my life with someone who was going through a similar situation. How could I be ready to do this anytime and anywhere? As a writer, I needed to organize something on paper.
Keeping the “always be ready” Scripture before me as my mission, I highlighted events from my journal and formalized them into short articles. My big and little conversion experiences became clearer to me as I relived them and received new insights.
God’s presence and encouragement as I rewrote these mini-stories convinced me to outline a program to help people clarify and organize their faith experiences. Then I could help them share their stories with others. But speaking in front of an audience was a game stopper. I froze. Could the love of the Lord overcome my stage fright? God would have to perform a miracle to get me in front of a live audience.
As I had experienced with the “always be ready” Scripture verse, almost everywhere I went God put me in front of someone from Toastmasters, a group method of learning and practicing public speaking. Was this the way he would heal my fear? Yes, in a year’s time I gained the skills and confidence to get over my initial panic in front of a crowd—but only with his grace.
Through all this, I learned that evangelization is a calling and a ministry, much more than creating a book of my ideas and experiences. That’s because we bring God’s presence to others through our story—and we bring them hope in a world that is losing hope. We encourage others tremendously—and ourselves, because we are doing what we were created to do: proclaim the greatness of the Lord in our lives.
We may think we need a degree in theology to evangelize. We are all called to show God’s love and encouragement as we tell of his actions in our lives and the way his love changed us. Through our story, God inspires others to discover their story of his abundant grace working in their lives.
I created the Sharing Your Catholic Faith Story Ministry to embolden people like me, and perhaps you, who want to evangelize but don’t know where to start. The Holy Spirit guided me through every decision from blogging my journal entries to presenting my first evangelization workshop. On the way to the venue where the workshop would be held, Mount St. Michael School, that voice was back—the voice I’ve heard a few other times. The one who inspired me to write the journal entries over the years directed me to choose blog posts to share, drummed 1 Peter 3:15-16 into my head until I memorized it, and told me to seek out Toastmasters. This time, it said, “You’re not going to Mount St. Michael to give a couple of talks—you’re going to launch a new ministry.”
So I did, surprising everyone—myself most of all!
The talks went well. During the breaks In the workshop, women begin to share their faith stories, confirming the message of the Holy Spirit. I was amazed! Some of them planned to continue sharing in their Bible study and share groups. My DVD, Sharing Your Faith Story, came next and then I was ready to write the book.
We have a commission from the Holy Spirit to evangelize. He is our Guide. We now have a guidebook to give us tools, tips, and testimonies to show us how to do it. In the thirty testimonies, you will find inspiration from mothers and fathers, a religious Sister and a bishop, converts from atheism, New Age, Mormonism, and many Protestant denominations. Stories of how God used the Theology of the Body, Humane Vitae, the Eucharist, Adoration, RCIA, Cursillo, Marriage Enrichment, the Charismatic Renewal, children, retreats, Catholic radio, and family tragedies to bring his presence and healing into broken lives.
Like the Catholics in these stories, I’m not a famous evangelist, but someone like you with a great story. And now I am ready to share with you what I’ve learned about evangelizing through my testimony. Instead of cowering in the corner, self-conscious about being accepted or rejected, I find pure joy in proclaiming God’s blessings. I invite you to dive into that rarest of joys. Come join me and these blessed Catholics who share their stories from hearts of gratitude — and never look back.
Let the adventure begin. Joy awaits!
© 2019 Nancy HC Ward
Sharing Your Catholic Faith Story: Tools, Tips, and Testimonies equips Catholics to evangelize through their faith story and gives them more than thirty stories of conversion, renewal, reversion to Catholicism, or a call to a religious vocation. Available as a book, ebook or DVD on Amazon.com.
Nancy Ward
Nancy Ward, convert, journalist, author, and speaker, writes from Texas about Catholicism, conversion and Christian community at NancyHCWard.com, JOYAlive.net, and other websites and magazines. Through her Sharing Your Catholic Faith Story workshops, retreats and DVD, she shares her conversion story in Catholic parishes and at conferences, equipping others to share their stories. She contributed to the award-winning The Catholic Mom's Prayer Companion, facilitates two Catholic Writers Guild critique groups, serves on the Guild’s Board, and speaks at national writers conferences.