Hudson inspired by Australian approach to evangelisation

Westminster Auxiliary Bishop, Nicholas Hudson, says the recent Proclaim 2016 national conference on evangelisation in Sydney has encouraged him to propose another similar event in England and Wales.

Bishop Hudson, writing for the Australian Catholic Bishops’ Conference media blog, said the conference showed that people in Australia had been getting on with developing evangelisation at the diocesan, deanery and parish level and in their individual lives.

“There is something developing here that gives me real heart for back home. It gives me encouragement to work on the idea, which I’ve suggested to the Bishops of England and Wales, that we should start to think in terms of a follow-up National Proclaim Conference because I see the benefits of it here,” he said.

“There seems to be a greater facility with finding the words to describe what they’re doing in terms of evangelisation,” he said about the event hosted by the Diocese of Broken Bay in partnership with the Australian Bishops Commission for Evangelisation.

The first and only Proclaim conference in England and Wales was held in June 2015. The Church’s National Mission Bishop, Mark O’Toole, described it as a “wonderful moment” of encouragement for diocesan evangelisation teams. Its success, he added, was down to the building of evangelical teams at a local level. Plans for a second conference are “not yet in place”, said a Bishops’ Conference spokeswoman. “The bishops are currently deliberating over the best way to build on the success of Proclaim 15.”