Evangelizers Who Pray and Work

Spirit-filled evangelizers are evangelizers who pray and work.  Mystical notions without a solid social and missionary outreach are of no help to evangelization, nor are dissertations or social or pastoral practices which lack a spirituality which can change hearts.  These unilateral and incomplete proposals only reach a few groups and prove incapable of radiating beyond them because they curtail the Gospel.  What is needed is the ability to cultivate an interior space which can give a Christian meaning to commitment and activity.  Without prolonged moments of adoration, of prayerful encounter with the word, of sincere conversation with the Lord, our work easily becomes meaningless; we lose energy as a result of weariness and difficulties, and our fervor dies out.

The Church urgently needs the deep breath of prayer, and to my great joy groups devoted to prayer and intercession, the prayerful reading of God’s word and the perpetual adoration of the Eucharist are growing at every level of ecclesial life.  Even so, we must reject the temptation to offer a privatized and individualistic spirituality which ill accords with the demands of charity, to say nothing of the implications of the incarnation.  There is always the risk that some moments of prayer can become an excuse for not offering one’s life in mission; a privatized lifestyle can lead Christians to take refuge in some false forms of spirituality.

– from Evangelii Gaudium, “The Joy of the Gospel” by Pope Francis