By: By Jennifer Willems

When it comes to winning souls for Christ, witness is much more effective than a war of words, according to lay evangelist Johnnette Benkovic.

“The idea is not to convince someone. You may know the best thing for them is faith, but you have to respect where that person is,” she told those who gathered last Friday night for a discussion about “The New Evangelization in a Secular Culture.” Held at the Spalding Pastoral Center in Peoria, it was one of three events at which she spoke June 15-16.

“We don’t want to win an argument. It has to come from the heart,” said Benkovic, founder and president of Living His Life Abundantly International, a Catholic evangelization apostolate with outreaches in television, radio, print and Internet communications. She is also the host of “The Abundant Life” and “Women of Grace” on EWTN.

She recommended that people who seek to evangelize be ready to offer a witness — their story of who they were, what Jesus did in their lives and who they are now.

“No one can argue with your witness,” Benkovic explained, encouraging them to have those stories ready to share. “I also ask, ‘Can I pray with you?’ Rarely has anyone said no.”

While it’s true that these are uncertain times for religious freedom and, as Pope Benedict XVI has said, God seems to be disappearing from the human horizon with increasingly destructive effects, Benkovic reminded them that God is still in control.

“God never permits anything to occur for which he doesn’t have unprecedented grace,” she said. “I think what we’re going to see happen is that the words spoken and witness given will carry with it a capacity for change that will be almost instantaneous,” she told her listeners. “When time is short, heaven shows up.”

Benkovic said God is making hearts ready to receive him by letting the consequences of our actions occur — we have free will — so that people can see that what’s happening isn’t good.

“I think the new evangelization will be quick,” she said. “We’ve got to get out there.”

NO ACCIDENT
It is not by chance or random accident that God determined that we should have life at this moment in history, Benkovic said.

“He is looking to you and he’s looking to me. He’s asking us if we are willing to be all in, to give our fiat,” she said. “It is my firm conviction that if our response is not a firm fiat, is not yes, God’s plan will be turned away. The grace we would have received, the joy, the certainty of God’s presence, the deepening of the divine life itself . . . will be missed by us.”

Benkovic praised Bishop Daniel R. Jenky, CSC, as “a courageous man, a true shepherd of the church, who is willing to state the truth” and said everyone in the Diocese of Peoria shares that charism. As his experience demonstrates, that doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy, she said.

“And yet God holds it out there for us and he entices us toward it and puts a desire in your heart to do magnanimous things for God,” Benkovic said. “The new evangelization is not pious programs but people willing to lay down their lives for the truth.”

If God offers you that opportunity agree quickly, she said, and “pray, pray, pray.”