How can we spread the Gospel?

Blessed Charles de Foucauld and many influenced by him have been insistent on “poor means” or “weak means”. We don’t need money, technology, and so on to bring the Gospel. In fact, Jesus himself is the Gospel. Jesus didn’t have these things. The Gospel is marked in part by poverty, both spiritual and material. If a spirit of poverty is what we want to preach in words or deeds, then we must choose proportional means to get to such preaching in words or deeds.

The means and the ends must be proportional. Otherwise, something is distorted. The Gospel has in it poverty of spirit; the Gospel is strong in human weakness.

Brother Charles said that

the weakness of the means employed by man is a cause of strength.

Father René Voillaume says to this,

No doubt; but on one condition: the weakness of human means must be the result of real union with Christ, poor, humble, and crucified, so that the strength of his grace can use this weakness as an instrument of supernatural power. We must not deceive ourselves: an apostolate based on the means indicated in the Gospel is inconceivable unless the apostle has been totally penetrated by the spirit and counsels of the Gospel.

Weakness, if it is only human, is nothing. Weakness is only beneficial when such a weakness is a hole that God fills. A hole in itself is only a hole. A hole that God fills is, however small and pitiful a thing in itself, stronger than anything merely human. A small hole filled by the Infinite is still far more than a human effort.

It is abundantly true that the poverty or weakness of the means is strength. But if we don’t first seek to conform our heart and will to those of Jesus, and to let him complete such a work in us, we will have nothing that is human and nothing that is divine. As always, the most important thing is love and the active and passive purification it requires: to love and let ourselves be loved.