Five tools for sharing your Catholic faith story – Part 2

‘Nancy Ward presents Why Keep a Spiritual Journal?’ at DCCW.  (photo by Martha Richmond}

Editor’s Note: This new two-part series, Five tools for sharing your Catholic faith story takes you from Preparing Your Formal Testimony, all the way through Your Elevator Speech in part 2.These are excerpts from Sharing Your Catholic Faith Story: Tools, Tips, and Testimonies by Nancy HC Ward.

Part 2 of Five tools for sharing your Catholic faith story series

Your Elevator Speech

Remember to invite the Lord to spend time with you as you summarize your story. You’ll know when you are ready to write a thirty-second elevator speech—a concise account you can give on the spot. This introduces the bare bones of your story to friends and strangers who show an interest in you as a Catholic Christian—perhaps someone who steps into an elevator with you or sits down next to you on a subway or airplane. This person may notice your crucifix or a Catholic book you are reading and begin a conversation about Catholicism. That’s your signal to respond with a short summary of your faith story. Your unique story offers them a door they can open if they are interested in knowing more.

A brief telling of your conversion, adult commitment, return to the Church, healing, or answered prayer gets people interested faster than a long epistle. But don’t try to share all of these events at once! Center your elevator speech around one event that sparkles on the river of your story to invite your listeners to wade deeper into it.

I didn’t keep a spiritual journal as a young convert. But having journaled, made my timeline, used it to draft my faith bio, used that to write my formal testimony, and condensed it, I now can prepare a thirty-second elevator speech. I can sum up the essence of my faith story to answer anyone who asks me why I am Catholic. I have my elevator speech ready to stimulate interest in Catholicism in anyone I meet. To quickly test whether that person with me is interested in hearing more, I say:

I grew up in a churchgoing Protestant family. I gave my life to the Lord at a youth retreat when I was fifteen. That God-moment carried me through the sudden loss of my father. I fell in love with a Catholic in college and married him in the Catholic Church. Almost three years later I converted to Catholicism, when I discovered I belong in the Catholic Church. That’s where I can fully develop my relationship with God.

You don’t need to memorize word-for-word the facts of your faith story or your elevator speech. Just spontaneously give the highlights of how you became Catholic, or why you returned to or remain in the Church. Be ready to elaborate, if asked, with details from your faith bio, always keeping focused on one event.

Let’s review the five tools that create your faith story:

1. Spiritual Journal—a record of your experiences in your relationship with God where you interact with him, present your disappointments and victories, questions and frustrations to him, seeking his will for you. Journal time is a sacred time to find God within you and explore who you are in him. Your spiritual journal is an essential evangelization tool in building a timeline of faith, clarifying faith bio events, expanding details of your God-moments, summarizing your story in an elevator speech, and preparing to share your faith.
2. Timeline of Faith Events—bullet points of major events when you knew God was acting in your life. Determine (and mark with an asterisk) your first God-moment, if possible. This is a fluid document, added to in retrospect.
3. Faith Biography—notes with details on the timeline of faith events. Highlight and expand God-moments and surround them with supernatural experiences of the strong presence of God such as healings, miracles, and answered prayer.
4. Formal Testimony—a written witness featuring your Galilee moment, organized as the center of the three components of faith stories.
5. Elevator Speech—a brief outline of relevant events before, during, and after your Galilee moment, and how that encounter with Jesus changed your life.

You can take this structure and build a collection of your faith experiences that come from the wellspring of your relationship with God and reveal a pattern of God’s work in your life. The tools, with the three components and the concept of the Galilee moment, apply to every type of faith story. You can apply what you are learning here to every spiritual experience of a miracle, answered prayer, healing, renewal, or return to the Church. Giving voice to these faith episodes demonstrates to you and others how much nearer to him God has brought you since you began your spiritual journal.

Ask Yourself: How do these tools help me reflect on my relationship with God? How can I implement these tools to learn to share the love and mercy of God by sharing my faith story?