Making Disciples: Build Towards Encounter
- Tanner Kalina
- 6 minutes ago
- 6 min read
Part Eight: Once the person being accompanied has accepted the Kerygma, the saving news of the Gospel, they need to meet Jesus.
Editor's Note: This column is part of a yearlong series on evangelization, breaking down what often feels like a tall order into real, practical, actionable steps towards intentional accompaniment.
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“Missionary zeal is born from an encounter with Christ. We desire to share with others what we have received.” Pope Leo XIV, SEEK26
"Christian faith is either an encounter with him alive, or it does not exist." Pope Francis, Desiderio Desideravi, 10
"Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction." Pope Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 1
“The most beautiful and stirring adventure that can happen to you is the personal meeting with Jesus, who is the only one who gives real meaning to our life.” Pope St. John Paul II, Address to Representatives of the Italian Military
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The Church in recent decades has fought to remind the world that Catholicism is anything but a “set of rules” or another “intellectual system.” Rather, it’s the means that Jesus established by which we can encounter him most intimately.
Encounter is the heart of the matter!
Our Catholic faith allows us to personally meet Jesus here and now, to experience him, to grow in friendship with him.
Put simply, our Catholic faith allows us to truly become his disciples — to sit at his feet, learn from him and take on his character.
Encounter has become a buzzword in recent years because of the Church's emphatic use of it, but buzzwords risk losing their intended meaning when we hear them so often.
At the risk of sounding redundant, it’s important to know what we’re talking about when we talk about an “encounter.”
An encounter is an awakening to one’s sense of God.
Pope St. John Paul II frequently spoke of a “sense of God” — a sense of God’s reality and proximity. When we encounter God, we become aware that he’s indeed real and, even more staggering, that he’s close to us.
In the beginning of John’s Gospel, the beloved disciple recounts how it was about four o’clock in the afternoon when he went to see where Jesus was staying (see John 1:39). Recounting the exact time of day may seem a bit random or extraneous, but when we look at John’s careful detail through the lens of encounter, it makes total sense. John awoke to God’s presence in his life! He encountered him! The Messiah was in his midst! It was such a life-changing moment for John — how could he avoid recounting those details?
Encounters change us.
Encounters bring us face-to-face with reality.
Encounters align our God-concept with our God-image and verify our religious sense.
In short, encounters are moments when the faith not only lives in the head but begins to live in the heart as well.
We need these moments.
It’s impossible to be a disciple of a rabbi if you don’t have a sense that that rabbi is within your vicinity or even real, for that matter. Put simply, there’s no real discipleship without real encounters.
The crux of the work when it comes to intentional accompaniment, therefore, is in helping someone encounter Christ.
After the person we’re intentionally accompanying has accepted the Kerygma and expressed a desire to make Jesus the center of their life, we should build them toward encountering Christ in a personal way.
This requires helping that person develop the four spiritual practices every disciple of Christ commits themself to. In Acts 2:42, Scripture tells us that the earliest disciples of Jesus “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.”
In other words, disciples can encounter Jesus:
through the Church’s teaching
through virtuous friendships
through the sacraments
through prayer
Now, obviously, disciples of Jesus can encounter him by simply going to the grocery store or responding to an email (and they should encounter him in the mundane), but these four habits stretch the heart to encounter him in deeper, more profound ways. As Pope Benedict XVI wrote in Spe Salvi, “Man was created for greatness — for God himself; he was created to be filled by God. But his heart is too small for the greatness to which it is destined. It must be stretched” (33).
As you intentionally accompany someone, you should be meeting with them regularly. And in those meetings, you should be talking through each of these spiritual practices, helping your friend find ways to foster each of them in their life:
This will inevitably include discussions around basic Church teachings, as your friend will likely wrestle with various truths of the faith. You don’t need to be a theologian, and you don’t need to have all the answers. You just need to find the answers (the Catechism, a YouTube video, etc.) and point your friend to them.
As you meet with your friend, you will also need to continue nurturing a deep friendship with them. They can encounter God through you! They already trust you to the point of accepting your invitation to make Christ the center of their life(!), so continue being bold in your friendship with them!
The sacraments are guaranteed encounters with Christ. If your friend hasn’t been baptized or confirmed yet, encourage them to take the next step in their faith journey by signing up for the Order of Christian Initiation for Adults (OCIA) at their nearest parish. If they have already been baptized and confirmed but haven’t been to Confession in a while, encourage them to return to Reconciliation. And if your friend goes to Confession regularly, encourage them to attend daily Mass or to spend time in Adoration with you. Help the person you accompany encounter God in ever deeper, ever more profound ways.
Finally, as you meet with your friend, encourage them to either develop or deepen their prayer life. The single most important question you can ask your friend is “How’s your prayer life?” If that’s all you do when you get together, you’re doing well. Even if it’s just a brief check-in before talking about the news or the Broncos or whatever else.
You don’t need to hash all of these things out with your friend in one meeting. In fact, you should spend time with each of these practices. Spiritual practices take time to develop, and a life-changing encounter is oftentimes the fruit of persistence and faithfulness.
Note: A life-changing encounter doesn’t need to be a big, dramatic thing. I think of Elijah hearing God amidst the silence — not in the mighty wind, earthquake or fire (see 1 Kings 19:11-13). The strongest relationships with God are often built on the smallest encounters.
The word “encounter” comes from the Latin words in (into) and contra (against), ultimately suggesting “the meeting of adversaries.” When we encounter God and awaken to our sense of him, we also awaken to our sense of his greatness and our littleness.
Encounters are beautiful and essential, but they can also be challenging because they make us aware of our need to change.
As you lead your friend into an encounter with Christ, they will come face-to-face with their need to spiritually mature. How you help them do so will be the topic of my next column!
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Making Disciples is an ambitious, yearlong series of columns meant to equip readers with the formation, both theological and practical, to go and make disciples as Jesus himself commanded in Matthew 28. Through these columns, we hope Denver Catholic readers will join us in preaching the Gospel, so that in Jesus Christ all might be rescued and have abundant life, for the glory of the Father.
