Audience of One

"He testified with many other arguments, and was exhorting them, 'Save yourselves from this corrupt generation.' Those who accepted his message were baptized, and about three thousand persons were added that day."

Acts 2:40-41

Three Thousand People

Several years ago, I discovered the beauty of the Easter Vigil: full of fire, darkness, candles, the Exsultet, the unfolding of salvation history, the intensity of light, followed by the deep beauty of the sacraments bestowed upon those being initiated into the Church.

But take a moment and imagine that 3,000 people presented themselves for baptism at your parish. Could your walls even support that many? How incredible a scene this must have been for St. Peter and the early disciples. I can only imagine the mixture of exhaustion and exhilaration they must have felt when the last person was baptized.

We live in a society very concerned by numbers, where popularity and success are driven by likes, followers, shares, and views.

Even our Catholic Church is certainly not an exception to this rule. Almost every issue of The Pillar leading up to Easter was littered with a diocese, my own included, reporting its record-breaking Easter Vigil numbers.

I was joyful to see so many people coming into the Church, but at the same time, I felt this uncomfortable sense of comparison and diocesan one-upmanship creeping into the conversation.

A Few Names

"You have not called me to be successful. You have called me to be faithful."

Mother Teresa

Let us return to Paul for just a moment, my faithful reader.

By sheer numbers, Paul was not successful in Athens. After arguing in the temple, street preaching in the marketplace, and orating in the Areopagus, Scripture says:

"Some scoffed, but others said, 'We will hear you again about this.' But some of them joined him and became believers, including Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris, and others with them."

This seems a far cry from Peter bringing in 3,000 people to be baptized. Paul preached in wide-open spaces, but instead of it being too many to record, this passage gives us just two names. And yet this was the seed planted on fertile soil that launched Christianity in Europe.

What Are These Accounts For?

Over the past couple of weeks, I added support to AskMyParish for ingesting social media content from Facebook, Twitter/X, and Instagram from each parish so that it can be questioned by the chat interface.

It is a useful feature from a communication perspective because it operates on a different cadence compared to a weekly bulletin or an on-demand Flocknote. It is a way for parishes to emphasize that God is not just showing up in a building on Sunday. He is continually calling, guiding, and prompting in our daily lives.

Likewise, these social media accounts are all focused on gaining popularity through numbers. The danger with numbers is not that they exist. The danger is that numbers can slowly stop looking like people.

For our individual parishes, we need to be very careful about how we define the end goal for these accounts: is it to have more followers than our neighboring parish, or is it to act as an invitation into the daily life of the Church? Is it to say, "I have found 3,000 people," or is it to say, "I have found the 3 people God wanted me to find?"

Or as Pope Leo XIV told digital missionaries in St. Peter's, the work is "not simply a matter of generating content, but of creating an encounter of hearts."

A Quiet Room

On Good Friday, our parish moves the Blessed Sacrament from the main tabernacle into a different room that is converted into a quiet adoration space. I have grown to really love those moments of solitude with our Lord.

Because at the end of the day, it is not about the numbers.

It is about an audience of One.

Love,