The term ‘evangelization’, before the Second Vatican Council was not very frequently used. In the early centuries of Christianity it meant the first announcement of Christ, who died and rose from the dead, to those who have not heard about him. This means that the one who has already received the first announcement of Christ [evangelization] now receives Catechesis. Soon after, the term fell into disuse and was replaced by ‘missions’ and ‘propagation of the faith’, as we shall see later.
Some years ago, perhaps even today in the minds of some, the word, ‘mission’ might evoke images of the missions in Asia and Africa, where missionaries from Europe and America went in order ‘to save the souls of the people’, converting them to the Christian faith and establishing the Church as an institution that can provide the sacraments of salvation to the scattered communities of Christians.
This missionary movement from Europe and America to Africa and Asia, we must note, was contemporaneous with the phenomenon of colonialism, both economic and political. Before the Council therefore, ‘missions’ referred to those countries or peoples that were not yet Christian. The object of missionary activity then, was to establish the Church –plantatio ecclesiae.
The modern rediscovery of the term [evangelization] originated in Protestant circles. For instance, at the first Union Missionary Convention held in New York in 1954, Alexander Duff enumerated what adds up to a description of evangelization. He said:
…the chief means of divine appointment for the evangelization of the world are the faithful teaching and preaching of the pure Gospel of salvation… accompanied with prayer and saintly applied by the grace of the Holy Spirit… as well as any other instrumentalities fitted to bring the word of God home to men’s souls together with any processes which experience may have sanctioned as most efficient in raising up everywhere indigenous ministers and teachers of the living Gospel.
Robert E. Speer of the Presbyterian Church also said that, “…the aim of missions is the evangelization of the world, or to preach the Gospel to the world… to make Jesus known to the world.” In his own intervention, John R. Mott went further to say that evangelization, …means to give every person an adequate opportunity to know Jesus Christ as personal savior and Lord… The evangelization of the world in this generation should not be regarded as an end in itself. The Church will not have fulfilled her task when the Gospel has been preached to all men. Such evangelization must be followed by baptism of the converts, by their organization into Churches, by building them up in knowledge, faith and characters, training them for service. This great objective should be always kept in mind, namely: the planting and developing in all non-Christian lands of self-supporting, self-directing and self-propagating Churches.
From these statements, we gather that evangelization was understood as the proclamation of salvation in Jesus Christ to non-Christians, to convert them and to establish a local Church.
Despite the rediscovery of the term in Protestant circles, Catholics rarely used it. It suggested a heavy emphasis on the ministry of the word. Rather, Catholics were more at home with ‘converts’, yet to evangelize is central to the Catholic Church and her tradition. SS. Patrick and Augustine were evangelist, among others; and the whole teaching of the Catholic Church spanning 2000 years is oriented towards evangelization.
