Street Evangelist

SAINT Anthony was a street evangelist. He preached to large crowds, first in churches, but also in public squares and fields. At the beginning of his ministry he preached at the Rimini seashore; at the end, from a tree house at Camposampiero, some 15 miles north of Padua.

Today’s world is hostile to preachers frequenting highways and byways to preach to large crowds. In noisy cities, where large crowds exist, it’s nearly impossible to find enough quiet, open space for preaching. If a preacher decided to use speech amplifiers, he or she would have to obtain city permits. Today most people see street preachers as oddities; in Saint Anthony’s day street preachers were common, and people listened to them out of curiosity or to kill time. Today, nearly everyone seems to be too hurried to stand around listening to someone.

Despite difficulties, modern street preaching is changed, not dead. Its pulpit is the Internet. YouTube and websites explore every religious topic. Internet surfers may stumble across a video, program, or website and decide to tune in.

How do you reach modern people with Christ’s message? First, through prayer. Pray for them because the Holy Spirit, not you, begins the work of conversion. When people identify the need for Christ, they then look for support. St. Anthony frequently prayed in words like these: “Come, O Lord Jesus, and lay your hand upon the soul, and she shall live by the life of grace in the present, and by the life of glory in the future” (Sermons for Sundays and Festivals, Volume III, p. 185; Edizioni Messaggero Padova, translation by Paul Spilsbury).

Different audience

Founded on prayer, Saint Paul’s Street Evangelization is a Catholic ministry started by Steve Dawson, a convert to Catholicism. Dawson had been a member of the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate for over a year when he felt called to leave the Order and embrace a lay vocation. Dawson sparked an evangelization movement that now has over 300 chapters, mostly in the United States. Evangelizers receive training in the New Evangelization, the Art of Christian Listening, Christian Witness, Sharing Your Testimony, Evangelical Apologetics, and Praying with Others before they take to the streets with rosaries, miraculous medals, and flyers on Catholicism. Workshops on Catholic Street Evangelization are offered throughout the United States.

Today’s evangelizers have different challenges than St. Anthony had. In Anthony’s time, nearly everyone purported to believe in God. Most people had a sense of a Higher Being, and knew they didn’t measure up to that Being in wisdom and power. In contrast, a recent study suggests that approximately 20 percent of the United States population “likely do not believe in God.” This correlates with the 33 percent of people who don’t believe that they are sinners. In fact, ten percent of American don’t believe in sin. Although preachers three hundred years ago might focus their sermons on ‘sinners in the hands of an angry God’, such a focus won’t hold listeners today.

The woodland

Saint Anthony neither focused on an angry God nor singled out any sinner by name. He called sin by its name, and showed why each sin was a travesty against God and humanity. His advice to preachers was to recognize sin and to attack it, not sinners.

“It says in the book of Joshua: Go up into the woodland, and cut down room for thyself in the land of the Pherezite and the Rephaim [Jos 17.15]” (Sermons III, pp. 379-80).

The Pherezites (Perizzites) lived in villages in the wooded country at a distance from towns and cities. Genesis 13.7 describes them as a boorish and uncivilized people. In the Hebrew Bible Rephaites (Rephaim) can describe an ancient race of giants or the places where they lived. Anthony’s quote from the book of Joshua introduces the inhabitants of the woodland into which Joshua sent the tribe of Joseph to hew out their inheritance for “the hill country shall be yours, for though it is a forest, you shall clear it and possess it to its farthest borders” [Jos. 17.17-18].

Anthony explains, “This ‘woodland’ is the barren congregation of sinners, cold, dark and full of wild beasts. It is cold from lack of charity, for iniquity hath abounded and charity hath grown cold [Mt. 24.12.]. It is dark from lack of the true light, for men loved darkness rather than light [Jn 3.19]. It is full of the wild beasts of gluttony and lust, of usury and rapine; for The boar out of the wood hath laid it waste [Ps. 79.14]. In this wood is Nimrod the hunter. Both he and the boar stand for the devil” (Sermons III, pp. 379-80).

In this short paragraph, Anthony names six major sins – lack of charity (love), lack of faith (loving the darkness), gluttony, lust, usury (charging exorbitant interest) and rapine (violent seizure of property). How do these sins enter the congregation, which should be like a peaceful woodland? They enter because Satan, whom Anthony personifies as Nimord and a boar, has pillaged the woodland.

Christ is the axe

In the Bible, Nimrod is a great-grandson of Noah and the first of the ‘mighty men,’ the giants to appear on the earth after the Flood. Called “a mighty hunter before the Lord,” Nimrod was powerful and ambitious. He established an extensive kingdom that included Babel and that stretched into Assyria, where he built several cities including Ninevah. Both Babel and Ninevah became places of rebellion against God. Powerful. Ambitious. Gigantic. Rebellious. How easy to equate Nimrod with Satan!

Four legged vermin with hard snouts that uproot bulbs and roots, wild boars destroy native plants, upturn forest floors, wreck cultivated fields, damage or kill trees, and turn wetlands into muddy wallows. How insightful Anthony was to liken Satan to a badly smelling, destructive beast!

Preachers, including street preachers, must recognize who is causing people to sin: Satan. Therefore, they should be angry with the instigator more than with the person who succumbs to temptation. Rather than condemning the sinner, the preacher must encourage him or her to trust in God’s mercy. Christ is the “axe” whom the preacher wields to clear the forest and open it to the Light. Destructive to sin, Christ is vulnerable and gentle with sinners. Pride, the source of all sin, is a “tree of human loftiness” that overarches all humanity. By His Incarnation as a poor human Babe, Christ topples this massive tree, thus clearing a space large enough to build the heavenly city watered by grace.

A non-threatening question

“Go up, then, into this woodland, O preacher,” Anthony exhorts, “and with that axe whose handle is humanity and whose iron head is divinity, cut down room for yourself; for: The axe is laid to the root [Mt 3.10]. The tree of human loftiness, the woodland of a barren and sinful congregation, will be cut down by the axe of the Lord’s Incarnation. When it pays attention to the divine head bowed upon the breast of a poor Virgin, it falls from its own untouched, virgin, state, and there is made a spacious place where the city of the Lord of Hosts may be built, which the waters of a river make glad [Ps 45.5]. This is the change of the right hand of the Most High [Ps 76.11], so that where sin abounded grace may abound still more [Rom 5.20]; (Sermons III, p. 380).

Thus, Saint Paul’s Street Evangelizers engage passersby with a non-threatening question. “Are you Catholic?” They offer to pray with them or for them or their needs. They hand out sacramentals. They invite fallen away Catholics back to Mass, and encourage non-Catholics to explore the Catholic faith. Remaining always gentle and non-threatening, they refuse to be confrontational. Instead, they see their mission as helping people to begin or continue “a journey to God.” Anthony saw that as his mission, too.