Why is it that so many renewal movements come and go? Hopefully, like spawning fish, they leave something behind that will become new life. But that can be just more of the same.

All renewal involves a deeper relationship with Christ, but must issue in mission in its full sense: the leaven of the gospel transforming the dough of all that makes up human life – personal life, social and economic relationships, the human family, our planetary home….

Or, as Pope St John Paul II put it: “the human person is the primary route the Church must take in fulfilling its mission: the primary and fundamental way of the Church, the way traced out by Christ himself” (Redemptor Hominis 14)

Renewal movements which look no further than ‘conversions’ and building up the Church itself produce only the fire of fireworks – a great outburst, which fizzles out.

Fire in the undergrowth of human cultures is harder to put out!

Tomas Halik has puts it so well:

“Mission is not to be confused with proselytism, the mere effort to increase the number of church members.

“Evangelisation is the process of incarnating the Gospel, the Word of God, into a living culture – into the way people live and think.

“Evangelisation is about inculturation;… Where churches neglect honest dialogue with contemporary culture, this leads to the ex-culturation of faith, and thus to the secularisation of society.”

• Peter Cullinane is Bishop Emeritus, Diocese of Palmerston North, New Zealand.