Stewardship integrating evangelistic emphasis

In the Old Testament, the Prophet Ezekiel found himself in a wasteland littered with the desiccated remains of long-perished Israelites, recounted Catholic Diocese of Wichita Vicar for Evangelization, Discipleship, and Stewardship Fr. Jarrod Lies. As Ezekiel obeyed the divine command to prophesy, the bones reassembled and were covered with sinew and flesh, after which he prophesied again and God breathed life into a multitude.

Fr. Lies went on to describe how and why he had been collaborating with Office of Stewardship Director Audrey Ronnfeldt and Office of Leadership in Missionary Discipleship Ryan Purcell to engage with pastors and parish leaders throughout the diocese in – essentially – bone prep.

“No human body can exist without a skeleton; no parish can exist well without a leadership structure,” he said. “A healthy body can receive the Spirit that we seek to breathe into the parish the life to which God has called us.” 

Fr. Lies offered those remarks during the opening session of the diocese’s 2026 Evangelization + Discipleship + Stewardship Conference. During his talk that closed the conference’s first day, Bishop Carl A. Kemme indicated that the pastoral plan called for renewing the Stewardship Way of Life that had become the diocese’s trademark. He expressed hope that, much as it was known for stewardship, it also would soon be known for evangelization.

“We are not replacing stewardship, but we are broadening it,” the bishop described, explaining that he hoped the Diocese of Wichita would earn a reputation “as an evangelizing diocese that calls disciples of Jesus into a new way of living in this broken world, to become fully alive in Christ.”

And the source of that evangelization would also be its objective: the Sacred Heart of Jesus. “The love contained in that heart has the power to ignite in you and me a renewed passion for the faith, for the life that we are called and privileged to live,” Bishop Kemme said. 

Near the conclusion of his second talk on the conference’s second day, Fr. Thomas Dailey, OSFS, noted that God’s divine generosity offered humanity a way to escape the pitfalls of loving badly. “We can redirect our lives … because we know that Jesus Christ  – true God, eternal and almighty – has loved us even so far as to will to suffer death for us,” he said. “And with that knowledge, we can learn to repay our Lord’s love … according to the inspirations and promptings of the divine Savior of our souls.”

Moreover, he added, “In some way, that’s the graceful impetus for this conference and for all the work that will follow after this weekend.” 

The Church’s mission, Fr. Dailey said, “is to proclaim the super-abundant life and generous love that our benevolent God has shown and continues to show the world around us, even if the world doesn’t understand.”

Danny Krug, who heads the diocese’s Office of Hispanic Ministry, provided concurrent Spanish language translations of the conference’s keynote presentations and plenary sessions and also conducted break-out sessions in Spanish. As she looked back at the conference, Krug emphasized that each aspect of its threefold focus flowed from God’s benevolent initiative. 

“Evangelization, discipleship, and stewardship are not about when we do this, or where or what we say, but the realization of the love that brought us salvation – we live it all the time and everywhere,” she said. “It starts with me. It starts with each one of us. As sons and daughters of God, we have to work united in mission to bring our neighbor to Jesus’ beautiful heart.

“This conference made me realize that we – our diocese – don’t just need a mere change of how we do evangelization, discipleship, and stewardship, but to go deeper and deeper into the heart of Jesus, so as to fall in love and bring others to his love,” she added. “God is hope, eternal life, and perfect love.”

Invitational friendship

Bishop Kemme held that the love of the Sacred Heart is perhaps best exemplified in the Holy Mass. “Where do we find God’s love most excellently on display and available to us?” he posed. “The Mass is the offering of Christ – body, blood, soul, and divinity, the most perfect sacrifice – to the Father, out of love for us.”

Joining in the divine liturgy on Sunday provides the faithful with grace on which to rely throughout the rest of the week “to rejuvenate ourselves spiritually, so that we can go back into the battle on Monday, battle against evil, against sin, against the darkness of our times, and to live out our faith as ardent and faithful disciples,” the bishop said. “The Sunday celebration of the Mass has the greatest potential, the greatest possibility of renewing us in the effort to be evangelizing disciples. We simply must be there and desire others to be there as well.”

During a plenary session the next morning, Purcell cited an analogy used by the former head of the Diocese of Joilet, Illinois, Bishop R. Daniel Conlon, who emphasized the value of invitational friendship. As an ardent Cincinnati Reds fan, Bishop Conlon had noted that efforts to spread his passion for Reds baseball never began by instructing nonfans about the intricacies of the infield fly rule, but by bringing a friend to experience a game at the ballpark. 

“You don’t have to go into the deep end,” Purcell said. 

“There is a privilege to being invited,” Fr. Lies said. “A person who is not personally invited may feel like they are not personally wanted. When you invite a person – personally – they feel a privilege and an honor. Whenever you say ‘We want you to come,’ you are telling them ‘You’re worthwhile.’ People are waiting to hear that.”

Invitations should not be limited to evangelization, Fr. Lies said. As the Diocese of Wichita set about 40 years ago to officially institute the Stewardship of Way of Life during the tenure of Bishop Eugene Gerber, Fr. Lies noted, Bishop Gerber was confident that inviting people into stewardship would draw them into discipleship. Fr. Lies said his pastoral experience included seeing people drawn into deeper faith and parish participation simply because they were asked to apply some of their skills, expertise, or labor for projects around the parish. 

Ronnfeldt buttressed that point by citing an example from her own life. Decades ago, she recounted, she had lapsed from any sort of discipleship after being away from the Church for 25 years, but she felt drawn to volunteer for Habitat for Humanity. “While we were building that house, these people were around me, they walked with me, and they invited me to join their church.”

That humble invitation was a critical turning point in Ronnfeldt’s life. “If someone has disciples all around them,” she added, “it can help them take that next step.”

Attendee Sidelis Rosario, mission leader from Wichita’s Our Lady of Perpetual Help Parish, affirmed the conference organizers’ effort to incorporate the diocese’s Spanish-speaking faithful into the event. “A pastoral and mission collaboration among the ministry leaders and the pastor is essential to the success of the mission,” she said. “When laity leaders come to this type of presentation without their pastor, it is difficult for them to put into practice what they learned. Thank you for the formation but most especially for making us (Hispanics) feel welcome.”

As member of the diocesan curia, Krug lauded those same organizers for providing pastoral tools to the leaders and pastors of the diocese’s parishes to help them carry out their mission. “It will be successful if we work together in mission,” she said. “As Fr. Lies mentioned, stewardship has been so successful because the first steps struck a tone of solidarity, not providing a product.”

Not logistical, but personal

As a scholar whose work has focused on the Sacred Heart, Fr. Dailey acknowledged that he might initially seem a poor fit for a conference emphasizing stewardship. “What does a religious devotion have to do with resource management?” he asked. 

But stewardship is intimately connected to generosity inspired by and modeled on the Sacred Heart of Jesus, he said. To that effect, Fr. Dailey cited an adage popularized by President Theodore Roosevelt: “People will not care how much you know until they know how much you care.”

Fr. Dailey pointed to that day’s gospel account of Jesus multiplying loaves and fish not merely to physically nourish the crowd. “Feeding their real hunger is not a matter of logistics; it’s personal,” he said. “Jesus … performs that miracle because he cares about them. His compassion, we might say, renders him responsible for that, and that’s why he tries to draw his disciples into the process. Notice he first says, ‘You give them something to eat.’ The teacher wants them to learn, not just to come up with a solution … Jesus wants them to learn, instead, to truly care for others, as he does.”

Fr. Dailey’s remarks also included some excerpts from – and reflections on – St. Margaret Mary’s accounts of her encounters with Jesus, which began in December 1673. During that first vision, the 26-year-old Sister of the Visitation of Holy Mary in a remote French cloister sensibly experienced Christ’s divine love and saw the Lord disclose to her the image of his Sacred Heart aflame with ardent charity for his beloved people.

“Not surprisingly, the other nuns thought this sickly youngster was out of her mind, but she insisted,” Fr. Dailey said. “So the Mother Superior put her under obedience to write down the details. The rest, as they say, is history: the history of Margaret Mary becoming a saint, and the history of what is now a universal devotion in the church.”

Jesus shows us that real love is ecstatic, he described. “It goes out of itself, not able to hold back,” Fr. Dailey said. “It must pour itself out and manifest itself so as to enrich them.”

His talk on the second day considered human beings’ fallen inclination to love good things badly, and indicated that part of the Christian life is learning how to love good things correctly.

God’s self-emptying love is all the more remarkable given humanity’s general failure to appreciate it, Fr. Dailey remarked. “As Jesus says to Margaret Mary, ‘In return for what I have done, I receive from the greater part of human beings only ingratitude by their irreverence and sacrilege, by the coldness and contempt they have for me in this sacrament of love,’” he read. 

Such indifference has not exactly vanished in the 21st century, Fr. Dailey observed. “You’ve probably all heard about the growth of the nones,” he said. “In this respect, a lack of gratitude toward the Sacred Heart is not surprising, because they simply remain unaware, unconcerned, even uninterested in what God has done and what faith in God has to offer.”

Such indifference tends to prompt people to ignore others’ plights as they pursue their own needs and interests. “For we who are Christians, a different goal beckons us,” Fr. Dailey said. “We are called to love as God loves, to resist the worldly ways … and instead, to embrace the godly ways by which we can flourish in a new life.”

Spiritual stretching

Bishop Kemme’s remarks reflected on how he was nearing a dozen years as the diocese’s spiritual father. “May 1 will be the twelfth anniversary,” he said. “I don’t have words, really, to express how much my life here – my ministry with and for you – has changed me.”

The bishop described himself as a different man from the one who 12 years ago became the diocese’s bishop. “Every day I thank God for calling me to be not necessarily a bishop, but to be your bishop and to be here in this local Church,” he said. 

“As anyone can well imagine, the process of change and growth has not always been easy,” Bishop Kemme continued. “I liken it to being stretched.”

The stretching is not always comfortable, he acknowledged. “This experience … has stretched me far beyond what I could have ever done on my own. But it has all been good, truly good, very good, because I think differently than I did just 12 years ago. I lead differently, I live differently, and most of most especially, I pray differently.”

The diocese’s faithful may have been hoping for a bishop at the time, Bishop Kemme continued, but he expressed confidence that “You may have been waiting for me … but I needed you more than you ever needed me, and I give thanks for that.”

He affirmed conference attendees as representatives of the diocese’s trusting generosity. “You have taught me … how to be a true steward … how to live stewardship.”