Relationship Drives Conversion
This conversation and essay explore the process of evangelization physically and neurologically, exploring the effects of attachments, friendship and the lateralization of the brain in conversion. It emphasized the need for “relational density” in parishes and how authentic community transforms lives and spreads the Gospel.
Links
* Andrew’s Substack [http://becominggift.com/]
* Physically Spiritual Podcast [https://www.youtube.com/@physicallyspiritual]
* Morning Offering [https://morningoffering.substack.com/]
Essay
In the radiance of the Easter season, the Church overflows with grace. It is a season when the Acts of the Apostles comes alive, and the Mass readings recount how the early Christian community spread. With this season, I would like to take a different approach to evangelization, one that attends to what is physically and neurologically happening in the human person as the Gospel takes root.
As noted in the book Divine Renovation [https://www.divinerenovation.org], many Catholic parishes have operated on an implicit assumption: people must first “behave” according to Christian moral standards, so that they can “believe” the doctrines of the faith, and only then “belong” to the community. The expectation has been that newcomers arrive already living a life in conformity with the Faith. Yet the path most people take in personal transformation reverses this sequence. They first “belong” to a group, through those bonds, they come to “believe” in what the group holds, and afterward they begin to “behave” in ways that reflect those beliefs. This process of bringing life into harmony with the Gospels is lifelong. This reversal sequence is not a compromise; it is the natural order of human formation. The Church exists precisely for those who do not yet look, act, or move like Christ. We want people who need Christ to walk through the doors of the Church.
This insight is more than pastoral strategy. It is rooted in the architecture of the human brain. The Christian book The Other Half of Church explores formation in discipleship considering the lateralization of the brain, and it highlights the consequences of an overemphasis on a “left-brain” approach to discipleship when it states:
“When we neglect right-brained development in our discipleship, we ignore the side of the brain that specializes in character formation. Left brain discipleship emphasizes beliefs, doctrines, willpower, and strategies but neglects right brain loving attachments, joy, emotional development, and identity. Ignoring right brain relational development creates Christians who believe in God’s love but have difficulty experiencing it in daily life, especially during distress. In a left-brain community, we are taught Christian doctrine, but the doctrine has difficulty showing up in our instantaneous reactions.” Hendricks & Wilder, The Other Half of Church [https://lifemodelworks.org/resources/read/the-other-half-of-church?gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=23688003344&gbraid=0AAAAADmnoyDHYFQEHfOlIe6r9DP3ayv3k&gclid=CjwKCAjwnZfPBhAGEiwAzg-VzLMSrFz-49jOGggQwTSLWhEJYZ9M08uSqzPSSDyq-PT4KooNp63P6xoCqeAQAvD_BwE]
I think the Catholic Church in the United States has often been guilty of being a “half-brain church.” The Church has swung like a pendulum between extremes. In past decades, the emphasis has been on belonging, sitting around and singing Kumbaya, but without clear doctrinal direction, leaving people empowered yet adrift. In other eras, the Church has stressed orthodoxy and catechesis, emphasized doctrines, yet producing believers who maintain a polished exterior on Sunday while their private lives remain fractured by addiction, sin, and isolation. Hope lies in integration. We must become a whole-brain church, empowered by community with Christ and the parish and directed by His teachings.
The simple principle is this: our bonds are above our ideals, and our ideals are above our skills. Right relationships precede right beliefs, because neurologically humans are behaviorally more powerfully driven by attachment bonds than by instruction. To live the Gospel, especially in moments of stress and difficulty, we need right loving relationships that form us.
This has profound implications for evangelization. The Gospel is not transmitted by a pill or a program; it is transmitted by people. We are the delivery system. What the Church needs today for renewal is “relational density”. This means that the people next to us in the pews are not just acquaintances but true friends, even though the status quo is that oftentimes the people we worship beside are strangers.
There comes a moment in every meaningful relationship when our filter and self-consciousness dissolve. That person who we previously struggled to talk to suddenly becomes someone who we want to spend time with. We are now spontaneously ourselves. It is in the space of unguarded presence that we are no longer acquaintances but that we now belong to one another. This is the space where right-brain transformation occurs, and the Gospel can truly spread into our difficult, hidden places.
Jesus modeled this perfectly. He did not lecture the apostles into sanctity; He lived with them for three years. They ate, walked, failed, and rejoiced together. The apostle John, “the one whom Jesus loved,” illustrates the outcome: his very identity became anchored in Christ’s love. The character formation this wrought in him showed up during Christ’s Passion, giving him the courage to walk with Christ into the High Priest’s Courtyard when the others fled and Peter denied Christ and to stand with Jesus and Mary at the foot of the Cross. The same dynamic is available to us. When parishes become communities of genuine friendship with Christ and one another rather than collections of Sunday acquaintances and strangers, they can become places where the lived witness of the community resonates the Gospel into people’s hearts.
Pope Francis captures this vision or “relational density” in evangelization powerfully in Evangelii Gaudium:
“the Gospel tells us constantly to run the risk of a face-to-face encounter with others, with their physical presence which challenges us, with their pain and their pleas, with their joy which infects us in our close and continuous interaction. True faith in the incarnate Son of God is inseparable from self-giving, from membership in the community, from service, from reconciliation with others. The Son of God, by becoming flesh, summoned us to the revolution of tenderness.” Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium [https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_exhortations/documents/papa-francesco_esortazione-ap_20131124_evangelii-gaudium.html], 88b
Evangelization begins with “becoming a people,” a group that belong to one another. A community whose life renounces the ancient lie of Cain “I do not know. Am I my brother’s keeper?” (Genesis 4:9 [https://bible.usccb.org/bible/genesis/4]) This process starts by knowing “where is your brother” and forging real friendships within the parish, but it needs to lead us to stepping into the lives of those outside the Church and investing time and presence in them. Knowing them and being known by them.
We are called to move beyond surface-level community into the relational density where deeper conversion happens. In doing so, we become a people whose tenderness, whose friendships, and whose embodied witness draw others into the belonging that leads to belief and, finally, to transformed lives. This is the afterglow of Easter made visible: not merely stories we hear from the early Church, but a new springtime that our parishes are invited to participate in.
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