Secondary Catholic Teacher Formation with Word on Fire Institute: Evangelization in the Classroom
Bishop Robert Barron, founder of Word on Fire, emphasizes the importance of evangelization for Catholic educators. During his talk to educators from the Archdiocese of Vancouver Evangelizing is Priority One: Bishop Barron Speaks to Catholic Educators (February 23, 2021), he “highlights the need to share the distinctiveness and demands of Christianity, proclaim the resurrection and lordship of Jesus, to be active evangelizers.” As Catholic educators, our classrooms should be centers of evangelization where teachers model our Catholic faith. To do so, we need to ensure that our teachers are modelling Catholic practices. Therefore we need to create opportunities for Catholic Teacher Formation for our Catholic teachers today.
Catholic Teacher Formation is important because unlike Catholic schools in the past, many teachers in Catholic schools have not discerned nor received Catholic formation as the religious brothers and sisters did historically in American Catholic schools. Therefore, a challenge for many Catholic teachers, even with the best intentions, is the absence of practicing and modelling the Catholic faith in their classrooms. Father Stephen Grunow shared this concern in the Autumn 2023 issue of Evangelization & Culture: “Education in the Church’s faith falters and fails if it is not rooted in an invitation to accept a unique way of life. If the teacher does not embody this way of life in Christ-like behaviors, then the risk is that the doctrines might be presented correctly, but the meaning and mysticism of those doctrines will be thwarted.” Catholic Teacher Formation must be grounded in evangelization, but how do we define evangelization?
Bishop Barron defines Evangelization with the Eight Principles of Word in Centered: The Spirituality of Word on Fire. The Eight Principles is a foundational tool to help evangelists better understand the spiritual and theological ethos of authentic evangelization. These principles are:
1. Unwavering Christocentrism;
2. Evangelization of the culture;
3. Special commitment to the new media;
4. Rooted in the Mystical Body;
5. Leading with beauty;
6. Affirmative orthodoxy;
7. Collaborative apostolate; and
8. Grounding in the Eucharist.
These pillars are the foundation of every initiative at Word on Fire and shapes its evangelists desiring to better reach the modern world. The Eight Pillars can serve as the foundation for Catholic Teacher Formation in the development and prioritization of evangelization for Catholic teachers. So how can Catholic educators encounter the Eight Pillars to be better evangelizers and embody these principles in the classroom?
Word on Fire Ministry has expanded its educational outreach with newly formed interactive, online Communities to form leaders to evangelize the culture. The Secondary Educators’ Formation Community is one such community and introduces Catholic educators to experts who have developed faith-based resources to assist educators in Catholic teacher formation. Experts give live lectures that provide strategies and resources Catholic teachers can implement in their classrooms to grow in their Catholic faith and be a model and light to their students in Catholic doctrine and formation. This Community affords the opportunity to meet other educators on theirfaith journey, to hear and learn from one another, and to dive into discussion with depth and clarity-all informed by the Word on Fire ethos.
The goal of the Secondary Educator’s Formation Community is to inspire and empower Catholiceducators to be evangelists of the Catholic faith to their students. One essential component of Catholic Teacher Formation should be rooted in the life and work of the saints and most notably for this community of educators, St. Thomas Aquinas and his tireless efforts to evangelize to his students. St. Thomas’s vast library of writings was his desire to clarify difficult or sometimes heretical doctrines to his beloved students. Catholic teachers today must also practice and preach sound Catholic doctrine in their classrooms and communities as St. Thomas Aquinas dedicated his life to almost eight hundred years ago.