INTERVIEW: Fr. Steve Grunow on 'How to Become a Lockdown Evangelist'

As part of our CV Connect series, Catholic Voices interviewed Fr. Steve Grunow who is CEO of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries, and is a priest of the Archdiocese of Chicago. You can find out more about him and his latest blogs here.

Catholic Voices (CV): How has lockdown been for you? What kind of challenges and opportunities has it thrown up for you?

Well I think the factor that hit me the most was the isolating aspect of it. A lot of my work with Word on Fire, because we're scattered throughout the United States as far as our team, is already digital and screen-based, but it was the sense that our little team in California, which is already kind of at the edge of the world, was even more isolated and alone. So that was more the existential aspect of it. I had worries about my elderly mother in Chicago – was she going to be safe in all this? – and of course she is, so there was that more personal aspect of it. And, you know, the spiritual aspect of it was that I had to cultivate an even deeper appreciation for solitude, nearing the solitude of the Lord Jesus himself, so I kind of went into that spiritual space. There's a loneliness to the Lord Jesus, and if I have that kind of feeling in my interiority I'm bonded with him in his loneliness that he experienced in his incarnation. 

 I was deeply, deeply concerned about the plight of the sick, and they've been very, very close to my prayer. The thought of people being isolated from their families and friends, and potentially dying alone – that just sounds so horrifying, and it has been the experience now of so many poor souls, so my prayer has gone deep into seeking some kind of communion with those who have suffered in that way.

CV: How has Word on Fire been responding to this crisis, seeing it as an opportunity for evangelisation?

When it was first presented to me by the bishop that the churches would be closed throughout the archdiocese of Los Angeles – and then really it was a kind of domino effect around the country – I said to him that people were going to have the perception that Mass itself has been cancelled, that the Mass is not being offered anymore. It was at that moment I said I think we need to bring our little crew together, and we need to begin streaming Mass on a daily basis. Bishop Barron and I offer Mass regularly in the chapel of his residence, but I said we need to show the Church that the Mass is still going on, it is still being offered, that the eternally efficacious merits of Christ the Lord are still being offered for the sake of the world. Let people see it. If they can't participate in it directly, let them see it, let them see that it's still happening: that might be a source of consolation and hope.

And so, I believe it was March 17th – I think it was St Patrick's Day – that we started streaming the Mass from the bishop's chapel here in Santa Barbara. The response has been overwhelming. We now have 200 countries that watch on a daily basis and 5.3 million views of the Masses that have been offered from Bishop Barron's chapel in Santa Barbara. Letters have been pouring in of what a wonderful consolation this has been to people.

It hasn't become a substitute for the Mass; they still have a longing to participate in the Mass of their parish with their community, to receive the Lord Jesus in the sacraments, but I think the intuition that the bishop and I both agreed upon was that people having access to see that the mass was still happening would bring them consolation and hope. And by God's grace it has. 

CV: Presumably Word on Fire, because of its experience in the digital arena, was well-placed to respond to the crisis?

You're absolutely right about that. The thing is I've talked to some of my priest friends who are stationed in parishes around the country, and they're like 'well, I have a lot of time on my hands,' and since this started I have been working, working, working because our platforms have exploded in terms of user participation. It was like the providence of God over so many years of developing these digital platforms put us in the right position at the right time, because all our resources were accessible, whereas the resources of the Church locally at parishes and stuff did literally get locked down. All the things that we have to offer were still available and were available 24-7 all around the world, so praise God for that, that Providence led us in this direction.

It demonstrated to me and to the Word on Fire team that this digital universe, this digital world, needs the presence of the Church, and the Church needs the digital world: it's literally the Roman roads, the parchments, the books – all the means of communication that the Church has used in the past – that's what the digital world is right now. And the Church has to invest itself in it, because the institutional aspect of the Church is always going to be important – the bricks and mortar aspect is always going to be important, – but if that gets compromised in any way, where are we? How do we communicate with our people? The digital world was still accessible, still available, and Word on Fire flourished during this time: it was able to respond to the spiritual needs and longings of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions, around the world. 

CV: So, when you're counselling priest friends or lay people who want to do something with their time to contribute, where is the best place to start in terms of livestreaming Masses or what? Bishop Barron has done all sorts of things, like AMA (AskMeAnything) on Reddit and movie reviews of contemporary films, so there's a real space here for creativity. What would be your advice?

Don't wait for the crisis to happen, would be my first piece of advice for people. Don't wait until something happens to say, 'Okay, now we need to learn how to livestream.' You need to – in a sense – embrace these technological tools so that they're just ready to go and are integrated into the ordinary life of your parish or your apostolate. Bishop Barron is often used as a model for this, but he would say – and I would back it up – that he's a particular charismatic gift for communication that most of us don't have. I don't have it, which is why I'm in the back end, I'm in the 'behind the scenes' of Word on Fire. We all can't be Bishop Barron and we shouldn't all be trying to imitate him – you've got to find your own evangelical voice. That's going to help you along the way and that take some measure of prayer and study and things like that.

Every parish should be able to communicate with its parishioners on a basic level via email. If you can't do that your handicapped. The resources that used to go into a lot of our print materials in our parishes have got to go into our digital tools. Every parish should be able to text message their parishioners. Every parish needs to kind of value having a communications strategy that coincides with whatever pastoral strategies that you have.

The other thing I would kind of advise people is that screen-based learning is not inadequate to the evangelical mission of the Church. It's not the only way we do things but offering people resources digitally for their faith formation, for catechesis, for their spiritual formation, should be in the ordinary purview of our parishes. It can't just be extraordinary anymore, because for more and more people that's the way they learn. It's not only that the digital universe is the manner in which they communicate on a day-by-day basis, it's also the way that they learn, and if the Church hasn't cultivated these tools you're going to be handicapped even if there's not a crisis.

CV: How did you get involved with Word on Fire? You seem to be very comfortable with the digital but for many people this is brand-new territory and brings with it a certain amount of fear.

 It is very fearful for a lot of people, and I just want to paraphrase something that the great spiritual influence on my life, St John of the Cross, said: if something's difficult, it's likely what God wants you to do. So we shouldn't see something as difficult and frightening and say I'm not going to do it; we should say no, that's likely what the Lord wants me to do right now so I'm going to do what I can to do it.

As far as Word on Fire itself, around the time of the Millennium, around the year 2000, there was all this talk and chatter and documents being produced about evangelisation. Evangelisation, the New Evangelisation, we all need to evangelise... and I shared with Bishop Barron my frustration that the Church was having this closed in, ad intra conversation that was leading me to think that they though evangelisation was talking about evangelisation. And we kind of prayed about that, and went back and forth about that, and that led into the development of Word on Fire.

The other great kind of precursor and motivating move was that the late Cardinal George had a meeting with Pope St John Paul II, and the saint asked Cardinal George 'what are you doing to evangelise the culture?' And Cardinal George, who was usually very glib and talkative, had nothing to say, and that really bothered him, so when he returned to Chicago he called Bishop Barron in and said 'I want to give you the task of evangelising the culture'. Bishop Barron was like, 'What does that mean, and what do you want me to do?' And he said, 'I don't quite know, but I'll help you figure it out.' So that little conversation, motivated by John Paul asking Cardinal George a question he couldn't answer, that leads into Word on Fire.

As far as my involvement with Bishop Barron goes, I was his student in the seminary – he thinks I was one of his smartest students, but I completely disagree with that assessment – and then on this issue of evangelization we were just able to kind of partner with one another. Then Cardinal George assigned me to assist Bishop Barron, and one of the things he told me when he assigned me was to keep Bishop Barron 'safe'. I said, 'Safe from what?' and he said, 'Whatever.' So I've been trying to keep Bishop Barron safe for many years, and I place myself at his disposal for whatever gift or talent I have on behalf of evangelisation.

I think what Cardinal George really meant was that as the Lord sent out his disciples in pairs, there was a wisdom to that. You face a lot – Bishop Barron faces a lot of pressure, he faces a lot of trials and sufferings because of what he does, he faces spiritual assaults because of what he does, so having someone – especially another priest – involved is a needed resource given the type of mission the cardinal envisioned that the bishop would have.

More important than the technology is the principles that animate Word on Fire. You can set up all the technology you want in your parish or your apostolate, but if you don't have a principled intentional approach that's backending that technology, it's going to be a disaster.

CV: What are the principles at the heart of the work of Word on Fire.

Bishop Barron has established that Word on Fire has eight animating principles, eight principles that kind of direct our efforts and direct our work across the board.

The first one is what he calls 'unwavering Christocentrism', which means Christ the Lord is at the centre of what we say and what we do, that he's the reference point. That's a necessary corrective. You see it a lot in terms of when Catholic apostolates online go bad, it's because their Christocentric approach hasn't really been put in place. By that I mean you don't lead with a cause, you don't lead with an ideology, you don't lead with a personality, You don't lead with yourself, you've got to lead with the Lord Jesus. And in order to lead with the Lord Jesus you've got to be following him. And in order to bring people to the Lord Jesus, and be able to invite them to know him, you got to know him yourself. The spirituality of Word on Fire is grounded Christocentrically – Christ is the centre of what we say and what we do, and there's no equivocating on that, there's no qualification on that. It's the language that makes some people uncomfortable – it's the personal relationship with Jesus Christ – but you can't really be an evangelist if your relationship with the Lord Jesus is impersonal, that he's kind of like an object in the room or an idea in your mind, or a feeling you kind of vaguely have. You have to give your life over to Christ, give yourself over to knowing him and serving him, and then you can kind of move forward in the mission, and it's especially important if you're going to move into that digital universe.

The next principal that the bishop articulated is 'evangelise the culture', so go out to the culture and evangelise. Don't just sit among yourselves and small groups and talk about what evangelization is – that's a real preliminary move and at a certain point you've got to stop it and you've got to go out and meet the culture. Now part of that principle is something that the late Cardinal George told Bishop Barron, that in terms of the culture you can't evangelize what you don't love, so if all you've got is contempt for the culture, if all you're going to do is identify the culture as being a problem, you're not going to be a good evangelist, because you're just going to appear to people to be a crank, and standoffish. You've got to find what Bishop Barron calls – and what the Fathers of the Church call – the logoi spermatikoi, the 'seeds of the Word', the seeds of the Logos in the culture. So you've got to have that discerning, discriminating vision that's able to find the way that the eternal Logos, the Lord Jesus, has already placed himself in the culture, and then you can point it out. Then you can identify where Christ is in the culture.

Another principle that the bishop has articulated for us is 'commitment to the new media'. Oftentimes in the Church there can kind of be an allergy to what's new; we kind of approach it with apprehension, saying 'I don't know, that's not for us', or 'it's not going to work that way, you can't do it that way,'. There's too much of a disconnect between screen-based and traditional ways of evangelising. That's never been an attitude that's gotten anywhere with Word on Fire. The new media has always been something that we've looked at as an effective way of bearing the Gospel into the culture and bearing the Gospel into people's lives. And after many, many years of doing this we have thousands of conversion stories of people who have met Lord and who were reconciled through the Church through digital means, through digital channels, whether it was a video of Bishop Barron's, it was a commentary of Bishop Barron's disseminated through the digital space that brought them in or brought them back.

That leads me to the next principle which is 'the mystical body of Jesus', a big theme in Bishop Barron's thought is that we rely on the mystical body. By that he means that if you're going to be an evangelist in the digital space it's very very important that you are in communion with the Church, that we're just not commentators on ecclesiastical politics or positioning ourselves in a particular ideological construal of the Faith. We're moving into a space in which we're in communion with the Church, and for me that means that you've got to want to see the Church flourish. In order to see the Church flourish, you've got to look for the good that the Church is actually doing in the world. That to me is the attitude of a digital evangelist who is in communion with the Church.

What follows from that is 'affirmative orthodoxy'. Sometimes I think that what's lacking in a lot of the digital forays of Catholics in the internet, is that we're able to bear the Faith into the digital space as a proposition, as in a propositional format or as in a definition, but really orthodoxy becomes affirmative when you can demonstrate how being a Catholic has made you a better person, how it's changed your life for the better, that it isn't something that's external to yourself, but it's a reality that internally created a transformation. If you can give testimony to that, it affirms the great dogmas, the great doctrines of the Church as being efficacious and effective. People need to see that in a life concretely lived, and so that has to have happened to you and it has to be evident to others who meet you, that this Catholic thing that you're a part of has imparted to you the fullness of life that Christ promised.

The fullness of life manifests itself in our next principle, which is 'lead people with beauty'. The Catholic Church is a beautiful religion. We have a great patrimony of beauty. There's beauty in our worship. There's beauty in our artistic and architectural patrimony. And all that art and all that architecture is telling us Catholic stories. Now in terms of our forays into the digital space, be beautiful in what you do. That's what we've tried to model with Word on Fire. It isn't just putting the technology up and just doing that, and then that's it, but ask yourself the more aesthetic questions: how does it look? How does it sound? How does the Faith present itself in this format, and does it do so in a way that's attractive or a way that's silly or repellent? That's leading with beauty.

Finally, the two last principles. The next one after 'leading with beauty' is 'a collaborative apostolate'. Bishop Barron and Cardinal George with him wanted to see in Word on Fire a vision of the Second Vatican Council fulfilled, which is that laity and clergy would work together, not in a way in which they're antagonising one another or grasping at one another's purviews or plans or projects, but they would work together. So, if you want to do this work in the digital space, make sure you're working with your clergy, and if you're clergy, make sure you're working with the laity on this. Don't work against one another, or set yourself in kind of an antagonism – this breaks the Church apart, and it makes the Church look divided and unworthy as people look in from the outside.

The last principle is the most important: 'be grounded in the Eucharist'. Integral to Bishop Barron's prayer life is the daily holy hour. It's an hour of prayerful adoration before the Lord. I've seen him at prayer before the Blessed Sacrament; it shames me, his relationship with the Lord in the Blessed Sacrament. The Mass and the Blessed Sacrament have to be at the centre of your life in what you do, and you have to bring that spiritual power, that spiritual grace that comes from communion with the Lord in the Blessed Sacrament into everything that you say and everything you do, because if you don't then the proper end of your evangelization work is not going to be realised. And the proper end of all our evangelization work is charity. It's charity – it's love. To evangelise is really an act of love. It isn't just an act of defiance against a culture that's gone cold to the Gospel. It isn't just kind of a way of insinuating yourself into the structures of the culture so you can become relevant. It's a way of loving others. Because that's what happens when you bring the Lord Jesus to people, that's what should be happening when we bring people into the Church.

So, those eight principles are the animating principles of Word on Fire, and I don't think they're just our principles. In a sense they're a gift to the Church: they're what works for us. So when you see everything that Word on Fire produces, everything that Word on Fire does – behind all that are those eight principles. Everyone's apostolate is different, and they might have different principles that animate them, but I invite everyone who's joined this webinar to kind of seriously consider the eight principles that animate Word on Fire. We've got a pretty good track record!

CV: One of the areas of growth for Word on Fire at the moment is the Word on Fire Institute, what is the WOFI?

Well, Bishop Barron has always thought of Word on Fire as becoming a movement. The project of evangelization – of the new evangelization – couldn't be done just by one member of the clergy, but it would have to be a coming together of many people who are willing to offer their gifts, their talents, their time on behalf of the mission to bring the Gospel to all the nations. And so one of the things that in conversation with him I said was that if we we’re going to do that we have to be able to offer people effective spiritual and intellectual formation. Because without that spiritual and intellectual formation, it just kind of flies apart, it becomes idiosyncratic, and quite frankly it gets a little bit weird.

So, the institute was always something that Bishop Barron had envisaged, and we're finally at the point where we could launch it – we had adequate resources – and that's its purpose. Its purpose is to provide the necessary spiritual and intellectual formation for lay people, clergy, and religious who are engaged in the Church's project of evangelisation, or wish to be, who feel a particular calling to be engaged in that evangelization. Now that spiritual and intellectual formation is informed by the founder of Word on Fire Bishop Barron, so he's kind of giving direction to the institute and saying these are the tools, spiritual and intellectual, that people will need to under-gird their efforts as ambassadors for Christ, as evangelists.

CV: Britain is a much more secular culture than America, so does that make identifying Christ in the culture different?

If you're going to be a New Evangelist, if you're going to be an evangelist in a post-modern, secularist setting and culture, you have to have interests that are outside of the ad intra concerns of the Church. You can't just be kind of an ecclesiastical policy wonk, or concerned about the minute details of liturgical practice, or just talk about the Bible all the time. That has to in a sense be filtered through other interests that are going to enable you to engage with cultural realities. If there's too much withdrawal from the culture, especially secular culture, then the culture gets what it wants, which is for Christianity to go away, and we don't want Christianity to go away. But in order for that to happen, we have to go out into the culture, which means at times going to places that the culture has established the norms for.

That's why I'm saying you've got to have some interests outside the ecclesiastical universe: where do people go, what are they interested in, are any of those things of interest to you? If they're not immoral or illegal maybe give some of them a try, and see if in going into those spaces you can actually become a route of access for someone eventually to come to know the Lord, and to have a relationship with him in the Church.

If we just stay inside our church doors we might have a feeling of solidarity and togetherness, a strength that comes from narrowness, but the mission of the Church won't advance: the Church is for the world, it's meant to be a route of access established by Christ so that people can know who God is. If the Church just hunkers down all the time – there are times for the Church to do that, but if that's all we do, then we're not doing our mission. And if we're not doing our mission, we're not being faithful.

CV: How do we best engage those outside of the Church in our evangelistic efforts?

You've got to be able to have a conversation with people that is non-religious in a sense, and that's kind of what Bishop Barron does. He uses the cultural forms of the non-religious as a route of access, as a way in to establishing a dialogue about something. That's got to rise from us naturally – you can't force it – and thus one of the principles of Word on Fire is that you can't evangelise with what you don't love. If you hate the culture and think everything is wrong with it, you're going to fail as an evangelist. So Bishop Barron looks for certain things about the culture that he really loves. He loves Bob Dylan – you can't get him to stop talking about Bob Dylan – and this is wonderful because it's actually active in a very effective way as a route of access to bring people into the Church. There's got to be some points of contact that you have with the culture that you're able to utilise as a means of encounter, as a means of becoming friends with people who aren't Catholic, who aren't Christian.

In terms of the current crisis, what's coming to my mind right now is that when this all started, and Bishop Barron was talking to me about it, he said to me, 'The pressing question for us right now, and it's a question that the Lord wants us all to answer, is "Who is my neighbour? Who is the one who needs me?" Because that's where the demand of love is at this moment.' Now, your neighbour is not just those people with whom you have common interests. Your neighbour is not just people who are in your circle of friends and family. Your neighbours are people who live at times in the periphery of those relationships, but who are nonetheless there.

And what came to the bishop's mind immediately was, 'How well do the people in our parishes know the elderly? And the disabled? And families that might need particular care in this moment of crisis? How well do we even know them, because we're no longer in a position to wait for them to come to our doors. And in fact they can't, so we have to know them in order to find them, and to serve them, because that's where the presence of Jesus is at this moment.'

And I thought right on, bishop – that's it. Being a member of a parish isn't being a member of a faith-based social club. It's being a route of access in that particular territory for everybody who needs the life and presence of Jesus in their life, and even if they're not necessarily interested in the Faith or interested in becoming Catholic, they need the love of Christ, and we're in a particular moment of crisis where we're, well, 'do we even know who those people are?' If we don't, we're going to be handicapped in terms of our ability to respond.

CV: What can people do now concretely during lockdown, during this current crisis, in order to prepare to be digital evangelists?

Pray. If you don't have a prayer life and you want to be a digital evangelist, you're going to be a disaster, so you have to cultivate a relationship with the Lord Jesus, like now. If you've got a missionary sensibility that this is something for you, a lot of the strength and purpose and will that's going to be necessary for an evangelical mission is going to come from a robust prayer life. So, you've got the time right now...

Bishop Barron is very, very insistent that before you go to the digital space you've got to go into the library space. So you've got to have the necessary intellectual formation. You've got to know the Faith before you can share it, so if you've got the time, this is the time for the spiritual formation that comes from prayer and the intellectual formation that comes from study. I'm kind of more of a pragmatic soul, so I'd say, 'What's your strategy?' You don't go into anything, particularly digital evangelisation without a strategy, so just as I articulated eight principles, what are your principles and how are they congruent with what the Church wants, what the Church needs, what your parish wants, or what your parish needs? So, what your strategy is would be an important thing to be really thinking about and praying about. And you want that strategy illuminated by the grace of the Holy Spirit, which means that whatever you're going to do, whatever you're going to propose to do, you've got to put it in the Holy Spirit's purview or it's not going to work.

The other thing, I would say, is that one of the particular gifts you have to pray for is humility, because one of the things that just throws Catholic apostolates off, throws digital evangelisation off, is pride. People become prideful, and from that pride comes ulterior motives, from that pride comes a darkness of the soul, from that pride comes a spirit of antagonism and accusation, and so the best examples in the digital space are people who are acting out of humility, which means that I think they've incarnated in their own lives three great principles that Bishop Barron has put at the centre of the Word on Fire spirituality.

That is, you have to find the centre and the centre is always Jesus Christ, it's not yourself. Evangelisation is not a self-centred project; it's about the centrality of Jesus.

The second thing is that you've got to know you're a sinner. We're all sinners, and we don't say that out of any kind of a guilt complex or any kind of neurosis or anything. We all know what we've done, and what we've failed to do, and you have to come to terms with that. If you're going to move forward in the spiritual life then you certainly have to have the humility to admit it if you're going to put yourself forward as a witness to the Faith.

The third thing that you have to realise and you really have to come to terms with, that's why I said humility, is that it's not about you. The mission is not about you. It's about learning to love the people who Christ loves, and you don't get to choose the people who Christ loves: he chooses them, and he places them in your life, and he does so for his own reasons, so you're not going to be able to effectively engage with those people who Christ loves if you think it's all about you. Because it's not.

So keep those three principles in mind during this period of prayer and study and reflection and strategising. Find the centre – it's Jesus. Know that you're a sinner – that's not a terrible thing to admit about yourself, it's a truth that we all have to admit. And realise that your life's not about you.