Two decades into the new evangelization, most of the harvest of souls remains in the field.

How can our efforts to evangelize bear more abundant fruit for the harvest-master?

We could do worse than to take a cue from Thom Rainer, dean of a Southern Baptist seminary, who surveyed more than 2,000 “effective evangelistic churches” — and published their storiesin Surprising Insights from the Unchurched and Proven Ways to Reach Them (Zondervan, 2001). These congregations convert at least one “unchurched” person a year for every 20 members. Rainer asked formerly unchurched people what moved them to make a profession of faith.

Fewer than 15% of respondents were drawn to church by the music, the style of worship, or groups and special ministries. Nor, in the majority of cases, was personal friendship or witness decisive. Rather, 90% of new Christians whom Rainer surveyed had been attracted by the quality of the pastor and his preaching; 88% cited good doctrine as a magnet that drew them to worship.

Rainer's results indicate that adult faith formation programs, especially Sunday School and Bible study, were important in retaining new members. But preaching and doctrine, far more than any group or ministry, caused people to seek Christ in the first place.

Pastors of Rainer's “effective churches” spent an astonishing 22 hours per week, on average, in sermon preparation. Ministers in a control group of congregations with slower growth devoted only four hours a week to their preaching. These pastors were too preoccupied with meetings, marriage preparation, and even opening and closing the church building, to spend much time “in the Word.”

Rainer's “effective pastors,” on the other hand, typically delegated these tasks to lay ministers. This freed them to devote 22 hours a week to Scripture reading, research, meditation, translation, daydreaming, prayer and writing.

The idea of a Catholic priest taking 22 hours to prepare a Sunday homily seems absurd on the face of it, until we translate the book's Protestant vocabulary into Catholic terms. Rainer does not mean that his effective pastors used up 22 hours per week scribbling drafts of sermons. Instead, they spent most of this time “in the Word.” For a Catholic, living “in the Word” could mean adoring the Blessed Sacrament, meditating on Scripture, praying the rosary or reflecting on the lives of the saints.

In short, Rainer is saying that pastors must have an interior life. This is exactly what the best Catholic spiritual writers have pointed out for centuries. Dom Jean-Baptiste Chautard's great book The Soul of the Apostolate pleads for all priests to develop an interior life before attempting any active works. Unfortunately, most of our priests, like the pastors of Rainer's control group, are so overwhelmed with routine duties that their interior life becomes a vague resolution or a distant memory.

Chautard vividly describes the pathological state of constant pastoral activity without inner spiritual nourishment. The busy priest disdains prayer “because it is the only remedy to his morbid state. Rather than live a life of prayer, he will do his best to stupefy himself under an ever-increasing avalanche of badly managed enterprises.”

The Apostles had a similar problem, and the sixth chapter of Acts tells what they did about it. Asked to start a new ministry for widows in the Greek community of Jerusalem, the Apostles responded: “It is not right that we should give up preaching the word of God to serve tables.” They appointed seven laymen to the diaconate to carry out such activities. “We will devote ourselves to prayer and the ministry of the Word,” the Apostles proclaimed.

What happens in modern parishes is frequently the opposite. The priest is so overwhelmed with various commitments that he delegates his liturgical duties to lay people. Instead of a Mass officiated by a priest, parishioners get a Communion service led by a layperson. Confession is “by appointment only.” Benediction is out of the question.

When lay people preside at liturgical functions, priesthood comes to seem increasingly irrelevant. Vocations then decline, creating a vicious cycle.

The apostolic solution is to delegate nearly all routine tasks to lay people or deacons so that the priest is free to celebrate Mass daily, to meditate, to hear Confessions, to have an interior life.

There are two dangers to this approach in the modern setting. First, the priest may become a sort of liturgical functionary without real authority in a parish dominated by lay people. Second, the tasks delegated will include spiritually significant actions such as catechesis or marriage preparation. If the pastor relinquishes control of these fields to lay people, the parish may spin off into unorthodoxy.

But take heart. If these objections are potent now, they posed far more serious problems in the early Church. From Judaizers to neo-Platonists, orthodoxy had as many challengers then as now. The orthodox position on such fundamental matters as the nature of Christ had not even been fully defined, and the priesthood itself was still developing. Yet the Apostles were willing to take the risk of delegating their authority over routine matters to lay people.

The point is not to create a parish government by committee. Instead, the pastor must actively direct the affairs of the parish through chosen assistants who are thoroughly formed in good doctrine and can be counted on to teach the truth. Chautard calls this core group the “shock troops” of a parish. He quotes Pope St. Pius X, who said that to save society “the most necessary thing of all … is for every parish to possess a group of laymen who will be at the same time virtuous, enlightened, resolute and truly apostolic.”

Rainer's study argues persuasively that pastors who live “in the Word” are spiritually strengthened to govern their congregations with authority. They do so primarily from the pulpit, and then through a network of trusted helpers whom they actively supervise. This is the apostolic method. The one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church would do well to learn from it, adapting it to present conditions.

Whatever we may call it — living “in the Word,” true devotion, spiritual exercise, Eucharistic adoration — the interior life of our priests can no longer be disregarded. Those who minister at the altar deserve the “better portion,” but we have too often deprived them of it. For this we are ultimately the poorer.

Scott McDermott writes from

Nashville, Tennessee.