The Making Disciples Today Blog has reflections to help you grow in your journey of missionary discipleship, reviews on recommended Catholic evangelization resources, and practical insight on how to evangelize in your daily life.
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- Written by: Kristin Bird
What a week in London revealed about formation, trust, and the Holy Spirit
I've been back from London for two weeks now. I keep waiting to feel ready to summarize it. I'm not sure that's coming.
What I can do is tell you what I keep returning to.
We Experienced Something We Didn't Have a Name For
In late April, my college-aged daughter Elizabeth and I joined about 400 Catholic and Protestant leaders from around the world for the Alpha Leadership Tour – a week visiting churches in London and Oxford where the Gospel is bearing visible missionary fruit. It ended with two days at the Leadership Conference at Royal Albert Hall, where 6,000 leaders from nearly every continent gathered to worship, learn, and ask hard questions together.
I've been to conferences. I've been to formation events. I've been to gatherings designed to inspire and equip.
This was different. And it took me most of the week to understand why.
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- Written by: Kristin Bird
A woman I'll call Maria had been serving in her parish for eleven years.
She coordinated volunteers, ran the food pantry, organized the Christmas toy drive, and filled whatever gap appeared. She was dependable, faithful, and exhausted. When I asked her what she loved about her work, she paused longer than I expected.
"I don't know," she finally said. "I just do what needs to be done."
And in that moment, she knew that wasn't the same thing as being called.
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- Written by: Kristin Bird
After Everything Settles
The Triduum ends the same way it always does. You move from the intensity of those days—the silence, the cross, the waiting—into a liturgy that feels almost disorienting in its brightness. Music returns. The lights come up. People who haven’t been there in weeks are suddenly back in the pews. And for a moment, it feels like something has shifted.
Then Monday comes.
The emails are still there. The same conversations pick back up. The same limitations, the same people, the same patterns.
If anything, there’s a drop-off – even a cynicism – that no one names. Attendance dips. Energy settles. What felt sharp and real just a few days earlier starts to fade into something more familiar.
Which is where the question sits, whether we ask it or not: What difference has Easter made?
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- Written by: Kristin Bird
A pastor once walked out of a parish pastoral council meeting visibly unsettled.
Voices had been raised. People had disagreed openly. The conversation had grown intense in a way that made the room uncomfortable.
Afterward he pulled me aside and asked me whether the meeting had "gone badly.”
But what had actually happened was something very different.
For the first time, the council had begun wrestling honestly with mission. They were asking real questions about discipleship. They were naming programs that had been running for years but no one could clearly point to them bearing fruit in evangelization. They were noticing the gap between what the parish said it valued and what was actually shaping parish life.
