Bishop Robert Barron writes that we are a missionary church. “The Lord sends us to spread his word and do his work. The Christian Gospel is not something we are meant to cling to for our own benefit. Rather, it is like a seed that we are meant to give away. He sends them two by two. We do this work together with others in the community. Ministers need people to support, pray for, talk to, and challenge them.” The most demanding missionary territory in the world today is secular culture. It’s here where our churches are emptying and greying, our seminaries and religious houses no longer receive a regular flow of new life, and our preaching is often ineffective. Fr. Rolheiser asks if we can embrace the verse, “Sing to the Lord a new song! How might we do that in terms of trying to make Christ credible today inside the secular world? What’s our old song? What’s missing in what we are presently doing? What can we do that’s new? Haven’t we already tried almost everything imaginable? There are, after all, only so many ways of doing ministry, of trying to preach, of reaching out to those who do not come to church with us. What more can we do? What more are you willing to do? Witnessing Christ today requires precisely that we build communities wide enough to hold our differences. What we need is not a new technique, but a new sanctity; not a cooler dress, but a more inclusive embrace; not some updating of the gospel to make it more acceptable to the world, but a more courageous radiating of its wide compassion; not some new secret that catches peoples’ curiosity, but a way of following Christ that can hold more of the tensions of our world in proper balance so that everyone, irrespective of temperament and ideology, will find themselves better understood and embraced by what we hold most dear, the truth that God loves them and the knowledge that this love changes lives and the world.”