Missionaries of the Gospel

A Missionary of the Gospel (MG) is a person who has encountered the person of Christ, and said yes to His call to live the Gospel to the full, to go forth to bring the Good News to all nations (Mt 28:19)^[1].

We seek to heal the broken hearted, proclaim liberty to the captives and set prisoners free (Is 61:1, Lk 4:18), not so much physically as interiorly. It is not the material needs of people that we focus on, but rather the interior poverty of man.

‘Each member is called to be a contemplative- active missionary, who through being a sincere gift of self (GS 24) strives to help all men and women encounter Christ, and realize (recognizing and bringing to fruition) the dignity of each human person (GS 22) through living out the Gospel. This involves… presenting the Good News through their words and example, and providing the support, formation and experience of community necessary for each person to have a deeper understanding and appreciation of who God is, who man is and is called to be, and how we can all live the Gospel in our daily lives, responding to the privileged call to union with God that we have all received’ MG Provisional Statutes July 2011.

Responding to problems today such as the crisis in faith and ideology, humanity’s blindness to the dignity of every human person^[2], the resistance in our hearts to actively receive the saving power of Christ and the lack of community in the world, MGs strive to help others experience God in their lives and remove the obstacles in their heart to an ever deeper communion with Him and others.

Footnotes

^[1] "For if I preach the Gospel, that gives me no ground for boasting. For necessity is laid upon me. Woe to me if I do not preach the Gospel!" (1 Cor 9: 16). In the name of the whole Church, I sense an urgent duty to repeat this cry of St. Paul. From the beginning of my Pontificate I have chosen to travel to the ends of the earth in order to show this missionary concern. My direct contact with peoples who do not know Christ has convinced me even more of the urgency of missionary activity.’ Redemptoris Missio (7 Dec 1990) 1.

^[2] In a letter to Fr Henri de Lubac (cited in his book ‘At the service of the Church’ p 171-2) he said, ’It seems to me that the debate today is being played out on… [the level of the person]. The evil of our times consists in the first place in a kind of degradation, indeed in a pulverization, of the fundamental uniqueness of each human person… to this disintegration planned at time by atheistic ideologies, we must propose, rather than sterile polemics, a kind of ‘recapitulation’ of the inviolable mystery of the person.’