Once, when pressed for his catechetical method for bringing individuals into the Church, my friend Lawain McNeil responded: “coffee.” Coffee is his method, and by this he means that the person and understanding the person in charity indicates the best way forward in accompaniment. He does this over coffee. So coffee is the method.

For one, I thought his response was hilarious, so it has stuck with me. But, it stuck with me mostly because I think it’s right and it resonates with my experience. Contrived plans usually fail and they often tend to reduce people to projects. There’s a lot of steamrollering involved when you do this, and the collateral damage can be nasty. Coffee is the better method.

In a similar vein, Msgr. Frank Lane once told me that I can go into any course with the best syllabus and curricular plan, but that’s all those are. The classroom is going to take on a life of its own, and real teaching is dialogical, not monological. In other words, he was telling me that I may not want to have such a rigid plan, but receive the students and respond to them as real people.

Finally, I turn to Joseph Ratzinger to close this out:

After the end of the apostolic age the early Church had as yet developed only relatively little in the way of a direct missionary activity as a Church, that it did not have any particular strategy for proclaiming the faith to the heathen, and that nevertheless this became the age of the greatest missionary success. The conversion of the ancient world to Christianity was not the result of any planned activity on the part of the Church but the fruit of the proof of the faith as it became visible in the life of Christians and of the community of the Church…The Church’s community of life invited people to share in this life in which was revealed the truth from which this kind of life arose. On the other hand the apostasy of the modern age rests on the disappearance of the verification of faith in the life of Christians…The new evangelization we need so urgently today is not to be attained with cleverly thought out ideas, however cunningly these are elaborated: the catastrophic failure of modern catechesis is all too obvious. It is only the interaction of a truth conclusive in itself with its proof in the life of this truth that can enable that particular evidence of the faith to be illuminated that the human heart awaits: it is only through this door that the Holy Spirit enters the world.¹

Our method is coffee. It is dialogical and relational. One step at a time, God reveals enough light to see the next step on the journey. This is the way of faith; it is the way of Christian friendship, which is more effective than any programmed approach to evangelization, even if it’s messier and more unpredictable. Oh, and you can’t scale it, sorry. You can’t mass produce it. All you can do is enjoy it. It is a cup of coffee after all.

1. Ratzinger, The Yes of Jesus Christ, 34–35. ↩︎