The Catholic Church of Philadelphia is adopting an outwardly missionary pathway toward renewal through evangelization focusing on personal accompaniment.
The archdiocesan Office for the New Evangelization is training Philadelphia-area Catholics to move outside their comfort zone and share the faith using a 10-session program titled “School of Missionary Discipleship” from February through April 2026.
“Go Make Disciples,” a three-session introductory training course in mission discipleship, is already running this month. The next series will run May 30, June 6, and June 13, 2026, from 9:00 a.m. to noon at the Temple Newman Center.
“To build up the Church, we must form our people to be missionary disciples,” Archbishop Nelson J. Pérez said in the pastoral letter he wrote in January 2025 to announce the Trust and Hope campaign.
That broad initiative calls on Catholics to employ a more missionary-centered way of sharing the Catholic faith with others.
“Missionary discipleship, in a sense, is a blending of two very traditional strains within the Church, which is discipleship — the following of Jesus Christ and conforming our lives to Him — and then mission, which has been a part of the Church’s efforts from her beginnings,” said Meghan Cokeley, the director of the Office for the New Evangelization.
She explains that under Pope Francis, the terms mission and discipleship entered a blessed merger, but the concept brings a challenge for Catholics who may find the idea of evangelization scary even as it lies at the center of our faith.
“It’s stretching a lot of practicing Catholics’ current mindset about their baptismal call (but) by virtue of baptism, in fact, you and everyone else is called by Christ to mission,” Cokeley said.
“You’re putting yourself at risk by proposing the Gospel to people, possibly being rejected, possibly being laughed at. It’s been beautiful to see the stretching that all of us experience, but also everyone’s willingness to be stretched.”
The upcoming 10-session course involves each of the two key themes. The first five-week component, discipleship, dives into a person’s own faith journey.
“Part of what we teach everywhere that we talk about missionary discipleship is one’s own personal friendship with Jesus, as defined by the Church. It’s really calling people to go much deeper in their relationship with God. That even includes moral conversion, the changing of our lives,” said Cokeley.
“Once we really start experiencing the depths of Jesus’ love for us, the second piece, which is the mission piece, becomes way more doable because when you’re in love, it’s not hard to tell other people about your beloved.”
The second set of five classes dives into the skills of reaching people, with themes involving intentional accompaniment, sharing the Gospel and sharing your own personal testimony.
“We teach things like proactive listening, how to ask questions when you’re in conversation with someone, that helps the person that you’re talking with share more about where they’re at personally, just so you can get to know them better in order to walk with them,” said Cokeley.
That deep interpersonal aspect, she said, is meant to build the kind of connection that lets people become more open to the invitation of God’s deeper presence in their lives.
“Catholic evangelization is not so much like street corner (encounters) and door knocking. It is primarily through relationship and through the people that are right in front of you that God has put in your life,” Cokeley said.
“The call is to become very intentional about building relationship with that person so that you gain trust, you gain credibility, and then you’re being vigilant for the opportunity to begin to talk about God.”
Cokeley understands that hesitancy also comes when people haven’t practiced a particular skill before, so she builds practice opportunities for students in the course to help build their confidence in interpersonal evangelization.
“We teach them basically the five parts of the core message of the Gospel, and then we make them speak it to each other” – and to do so in under three minutes, she said.
“It’s actually about sharing the depths of his love. You feel so loved and you want them to know how loved they are.”
Many aspects of these lessons are also formulated into the three-part “Go Make Disciples” curriculum, all to help the Catholic Church of Philadelphia fulfill its Missionary Hub plan of evangelizing, particularly to the 83 percent of Catholics who currently don’t attend Mass on a regular basis.
Cokeley considers herself and the work of her office as “the training arm” of the Trust and Hope initiative.
“In fact,” she said, “I have trained some of the hub parish staff already.”
Her intention is to form the laity and parish staff to get them ready and their soil tilled, so that when the hubs come, they know exactly the language the hubs are talking.”
People signing up for the 10-session School of Missionary Discipleship can register through this link. The cost is $100 for all 10 sessions. Each session runs on selected Wednesdays from 8:45 a.m. until 11:45 a.m. at St. David Parish in Willow Grove.
The dates of the sessions include:
– School of Discipleship: Feb. 4, 11, 25; March 11 and 25
– School of Mission: April 8, 15, 29; May 6 and 20
Those interested in the School of Missionary Discipleship can click here for more information, and can use this link to find course topics.
People intending to take part in “Go Make Disciples” can register through this link. The next series will run May 30, June 6, and June 13, 2026, from 9:00 a.m. to noon at the Temple Newman Center.
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