Posted by The WORD in other words (2018) by Fr Roland Aquino SVD – Saint Jude Catholic School, Manila
Thursday 2nd Week of Easter
A protestant pastor once told me that the easiest way to create a church or to attract religious followers is to provide cutting-edge opportunities for people to experience God’s miracles and to focus on the people’s need to be touched by God’s healing power. This is rather quite true when one attempts to understand it from a marketing management perspective. The church has to make some“marketing strategy”, in some sense, to keep “customers” attracted to the faith.
In today’s gospel, Jesus was consistent in his bid to inspire his listeners with talks on heavenly things. He kept his audience drawn to the promise of eternal life by His testimony: “The Father loves the Son and has given everything over to Him. Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life….” (John 3,35-36) The peoples’ privileged encounters with Jesus had always been occasions for some unique religious experience and his testimony had given them a divine touch which led them to spiritual conversion.
Popular devotion among shrines and churches in the Philippines has, over the years, built a strong attraction among Filipinos to the Catholic faith. The many records of miracles and other supernatural events through which God’s intervention and healing touch are experienced have, in a way, created a more dynamic church that continuously draws people to God through religious conversion.
Like Jesus, the church can always take advantage of such privileged encounters a for authentic proclamation of the Good News thorough dynamic preaching and personal testimonies based on people’s religious experience. In this way, the church will never lose its way to keep attracting its “faith-seeking” customers.
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