How to share your faith with non-Catholics? Trent Horn offers practical advice on engaging with friends and colleagues who have a superficial understanding of Christianity. Learn how to challenge complacency and encourage deeper exploration of Catholic teachings. Discover effective ways to present the truth of the Church while maintaining a spirit of love and respect.
Transcript:
I’m a recent revert to the Catholic church and I have a real zeal for the church now. I’m reading as much as I can and going to Mass daily and all that. And I live in the Bible belt. And there’s a lot of people that I work with that are just nominal Christians. They don’t like dogma, they don’t like doctrine and they just, I guess the word you could say is domesticated Christ, and they believe in their Christ. But anytime I try to bring up the truths of the Catholic church, they squash it away. And I guess my question is how can I get them to start looking into it? Because they seem like they just don’t care and they’re good people. I love them to death, but they just don’t seem to care.
Yeah, no, I understand. That’s difficult. Part of that, I mean it’s probably the toughest questions I have to confront are questions related to apathy. How do you get people to care? If someone says, well, it doesn’t matter, as long as you believe in Jesus, it’s okay. You can point to them in the words of Jesus who said, if you love me, you’ll keep my commandments. Well, what are Jesus’s commandments? So you can always invite them maybe to a Catholic Bible study or a talk at your parish on Jesus. And the sacraments, I like pointing who’ll say, well look, what did Jesus say about himself? Take and eat. This is my body. Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you have no life within you. He gives power and authority to the apostles to forgive sins. He established a church. Alright, well, if Jesus gave us a church, he refers to it as the church.
His church, not a million churches, which 1:00 AM I supposed to belong to? They’re teaching different doctrines. I’m supposed to submit to the authority of the leaders of that church. The letter to the Hebrews says, to submit to the elders who have authority over you. Well, who should I choose in that regard? I would just challenge him to say, you say you believe in Jesus, but how many of Jesus’s teachings are you following? And it’s not just Jesus. What about the apostles he called? What about everything else we see in the New Testament? So I think that really pointing them towards the obligation that we have, especially receiving Jesus in the Eucharist. Jesus gave the apostles the ability to forgive sins and just really bring it back to should we find the church that Jesus established? And they might say, well, the church is just everybody who believes in Jesus.
We might say, well, how is that a church? Can it, what can that church do? Can it correct me? Well, no, because you Christians might think what I’m doing is fine. And another Christian might say, oh, it’s bad doctrine. It’s good doctrine. I think maybe pointing people towards that, to shake them from their complacency and ask them, look, you agree, there’s people who say they believe in Jesus like Jehovah’s Witnesses or Mormons, but you would say that they don’t because they get Jesus’s nature wrong. Well, what about people who get Jesus’s church wrong or salvation wrong or think you can’t lose your salvation if there are also an error? What do you do there? We’re supposed to follow everything that Jesus teaches. So that might be where I would start. Lewis, I’d also like to help you on your quest here. I’d like you to stay on the line. I’d love to send you two copies of my book, why We’re Catholic, one for you, and maybe one to give out to a friend you’re having a conversation with to keep the dialogue going.