There have been many articles written on how to do apologetics. This is a good thing. We need more people doing apologetics. We need more Catholic apologetics done in more ways on more topics by more people in more circumstances.
Though most people will be able to pursue it only as a noble avocation, a few will feel called to pursue apologetics full-time. Thus far there has been little written to help such individuals make the transition from part-time to full-time apologetics. That is what I mean to do here.
Striking Out on your Own
The most fundamental question is whether to go it alone or join an apologetics organization. One of the big advantages of starting your own apostolate is that you can do it any time you like. There is no waiting for a position to come open or to be created at an existing apostolate. Another is that, because you aren’t applying to someone else, there is nobody to turn down your job application. A further advantage is that you can do apologetics wherever you are. You don’t have to move to be with one of the established apostolates.
A lesser advantage—which in fact can turn into a disadvantage—is that you get to do things entirely your own way. If you think that you have a dazzling new way to do apologetics, you can! If you are your own boss, you can approve whatever innovative plans you have with no chance of you turning yourself down. This is a mixed blessing. There are usually reasons that established apostolates do apologetics in the manner they do. Stray too far from the beaten path and you are likely to find yourself mired in a bog, doing neither the Church nor yourself any good.
Apologetics is like any other field: There’s safety in numbers. When you work as part of a group of professionals, they can give you guidance that will help keep you from making grave—sometimes career-ending—mistakes. People just starting out in apologetics need this guidance most.
Another problem is that, besides your own writing and speaking, you also will have to do your own editing, typesetting, proofreading, graphic design, audio-recording, tape and CD duplication, event booking, travel arrangements, MIS, web design, advertising, customer service, purchasing, warehousing, shipping, fundraising, accounting, tax preparation, and a host of other tasks.
You may find in the midst of all this activity that you have very little time left for doing actual apologetics. Or, if you do focus on apologetics, you may find yourself unable to keep up with the business side. Worse yet, your family life may suffer if you run too hard to keep up with both the apostolic and business sides of your apostolate. God does not want anyone to pursue ministry to the detriment of their families.
No one has the skills needed to do all of the tasks listed above. To be effective on a large scale, a ministry depends on people who are specialists in the different areas who have been trained or have trained themselves in the skills needed to do professional work in all of these areas, just as you have sought training in apologetics.
In apologetics, as in every other field, all of a ministry’s employees contribute to its success. Take away one person’s time and talents and the whole suffers. The apostolate can’t do as much as it could otherwise.
If you are independently wealthy, you may be able to afford to hire others, though that of itself is not a recipe for success. A person who has acquired the skills needed for success in one field may find that those skills are not as transferable for success in apologetics as he might suppose, and the money may run out.
This brings us to one of the greatest disadvantages of starting your own apostolate: Financially, you will be on your own. Unless you are independently wealthy you will not be able to afford to hire the kind of people needed to run a large-scale ministry.
The obvious alternative is to start small and grow from there. This is doable, but it means a long period of financial uncertainty and hardship. It takes years to grow to the point that it becomes financially stable, and there is a question of just how many the present environment can sustain.
The number of Catholics supporting the apologetics movement is finite, and even though the number hopefully will grow as the number of workers in the field increases, there may be a point at which the field cannot sustain new ones. Even below that threshold (which is where I believe us to be today), the success rate of new start-up ventures is probably at least as problematic as that of new businesses in general: It ain’t good.
In view of this, the wisest way to begin may be not to put all your eggs in one basket at the outset. Catholic Answers founder Karl Keating did not immediately plunge into full-time apologetics but started it as a part-time venture. It remained part-time until, after several years, it had grown to the point that it was reasonable to make the shift to doing full-time work in the field. Even then it was very hard-going for a good number of years.
Joining Up
The advantages and disadvantages of joining an established apostolate are basically a mirror image of those to going it alone.
You cannot do it whenever you please. Apologetics ministries have financial limitations that prevent them from hiring everyone they might like. You may have to wait for a position to open up or be created before you can join the staff. It also isn’t guaranteed that you will get in. Applying for a job at a ministry is like applying for a job anywhere else: Your prospective employer may decide not to make a job offer.
You also may have to move to be where your employer is. There have been some apostolates that have experimented with completely decentralized, telecommuting strategies, but these have not fared so well, and most employees are likely to remain centrally based for the foreseeable future.
You also won’t be able to do whatever you have a mind to do. Because of their limited resources, ministries must choose what to devote those resources to and when to allocate them. Your idea for a new way to do apologetics may not be approved, you may have to wait for it to be implemented, or it may be implemented in a slightly different fashion than you envisioned.
The flipside of this seeming disadvantage is that with more heads thinking through a problem, you are likely to be spared costly mistakes that you otherwise might make. You also will benefit from the wisdom and experience of others.
By joining an established apostolate you also don’t have to build from scratch everything you need to do apologetics on a larger scale. Presumably, there will be people on staff who possess the skills that you lack. As they make their contributions to the success of the apostolate, your own contribution will be made all the more effective, since you won’t be trying to do everything yourself. Without theirhelp, your own contribution would not go far.
If the ministry you join is financially stable, you also will be spared the years of uncertainty and hardship that beginning your own would involve. Working in the nonprofit sector is inherently dicey, but being part of a financially sound ministry at least can provide the comfort of knowing that you will be able to buy food and pay for housing next month.
You’ll also be clearing one of the biggest hurdles that new ventures face: the high failure rate of new start-ups.
Skills and Track Record
I have never started my own apostolate, so I am shorter on practical advice about how to do that than others might be. But I do know something about joining one. I also have experience in evaluating applicants for positions. So let me share with you what advice I can on that subject. Most of it also will apply to those who want to start their own apostolates.
There are two important things that you need to have when seeking a job as an apologist: skills and a track record. In many fields, people acquire skills at college and then a track record after they leave college. That is not the way it works in apologetics. The acquisition of skills and the building of a track record almost invariably accompany one another.
In the Catholic world, nobody offers degrees in apologetics. They may offer degrees in related fields, such as theology, religious studies, or philosophy, but they don’t offer apologetics degrees. Even if they did, the degrees probably would not be worth much to existing apostolates, because the degrees would be oriented to “academic apologetics” rather than the “practical apologetics” that dominates ministry work.
Academic apologetics—or something close to it—is taught in many contemporary philosophy programs. In the last thirty years there has been a renaissance of Christian philosophy even in secular schools, and the resulting Christian philosophers have focused their skills on defending their religion and worldview against the attacks mounted on it in academia.
But knowing how to write academic treatises on apologetics—however useful this skill is in the academic world—will not be of much help. In the nonprofit world, you must be able to communicate in a way that normal people understand and respond to. The ten-dollar words you learned in college will annoy rather than enlighten the people you are trying to serve.
You also will have to be responsive to their needs rather than to an academician’s idea of their needs. As a rule, you will need to spend far more time talking with people about practical matters (such as whether they need an annulment before they can join the Church, or whether they can attend their cousin’s iffy marriage, or how to deal with their parish’s resident liturgical abuser) than you will spend talking about Aquinas’s Five Ways.
There is a disconnect between what is taught academically and what you actually need to know in practical apologetics. Here at Catholic Answers, whenever we bring people into the apologetics department who do not have extensive experience in the field, they are surprised at the steepness of the learning curve and at how different the questions they get are from what they expected.
In contemporary Catholic apologetics, most skill is gained by experience. As a result, you do not need a degree to work in the field. A degree may help you acquire certain skills, but it cannot replace actual experience. By the time you are ready to work in the field professionally, you will have a track record that you can point to. It doesn’t matter where you acquire this, but you need to acquire it somewhere.
If you want to give talks, start giving talks. If you want to write, start writing. If you want to do both, start doing both. It doesn’t matter how small the scale is at first.
An indispensable part of this process is to get feedback on what you are doing. Don’t just talk to the mirror or write essays you never show anybody. (Do those, but don’t do just those.) You must subject yourself to the criticism of others—not only because it will improve the quality of the work you’re doing but also because you will need to develop skin thick enough to withstand criticism without taking it personally.
You can give yourself a leg up by studying up on the particular skills you want. If you want to speak, take a public speaking course in the evenings at your local community college. If you want to write, read Strunk and White’s Elements of Style and take a composition course (not a creative writing course).
For all apologists, I strongly recommend reading the following works in their entirety: the Bible, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, Catholicism and Fundamentalism, How Not to Share Your Faith, and Mass Confusion. These works will give you a knowledge base that will be indispensable when working professionally in the field. You should read many more than these, but these represent the core of what you will need.
Last and not least: Get experience doing interactive apologetics with people online. In online discussion forums you will meet and be able to interact apologetically with people from a wider variety of persuasions and have more extended discussions with them than would be possible in daily life. As you do this, notice what the other Catholics participating in the discussions are doing and see what you can learn from the good and bad examples they offer.
As you grow in skill, start dipping into the professional world in small ways: Start giving talks for money at parishes. Start writing articles for money for Catholic newspapers and magazines. The money is important not for its own sake but for what it tells you. People will pay for what they perceive to have value, and if people aren’t willing to pay money for what you’re producing, it is an important sign that something is wrong. You need to find out what it is.
By the way, don’t start your writing career by trying to write a book. Start with articles. You don’t want to invest the time in writing a book if you haven’t been successful with articles first. Articles teach you the skills you need for a book. The chance of rejection letters is too high without them.
An apostolate thinking about hiring you needs to have some way of knowing that you can do the work. College degrees are some help—but not that much, for the reasons we have discussed. But if you have a resume with a long string of paid talks or paid articles, that provides you with a much stronger recommendation.
It also doesn’t hurt if the apostolate already knows you by name before you apply. If you’ve given talks at the same events that their speakers have attended, or if you’ve published articles in their newspaper or magazine, or even if you’ve posted frequently on their message board, it helps make them aware of you and the skills you possess.
None of these things is a guarantee that you’ll get a job with them, but the more assets you can accumulate, the greater the chances are.