Discipleship is a buzzword for Evangelicals, but what does it really look like to be one of Christ’s followers? Transformation into the image of Jesus means more than reading one’s Bible every day and praying. Its goal is a life molded into Christ’s image where the believer actually begins to look like Jesus in every aspect of his or her life. Christ’s life was characterized by caring for the poor, marginalized, and unwanted people and drawing them into a life of wholeness and reliance on the Spirit of God. Thus, for Evangelicals seeking lives transformed by Jesus, St. Vincent de Paul provides a robust example of a life lived by the grace of God for the good of humanity. We can emulate four areas he modeled: openness to the Holy Spirit, collaborative organizational models, relocation alongside of downward mobility, and the discerning use of social capital.

Vincentian spirituality has become increasingly attractive to Evangelicals seeking to reconnect with ancient forms of spiritual disciplines. As lectio Divina, centering prayer, spiritual direction, and other traditional ways of seeing the active presence of the Holy Spirit become a part of the vocabulary and habits of Evangelicals, their inner renovation will naturally produce fruit: they will learn to both love God and their neighbors more. The two walk in tandem as St. Vincent de Paul’s live indicated. His disponibilité to the Holy Spirit sensitized him to the priorities that the Spirit had, allowing him to live from a place of grace. Seeing himself as radically poor and in need of God’s grace, acknowledging his own acceptance and unworthiness, in turn made him “open to receiving every person, without judgment or disdain.”[1] As Evangelicals seek to engage social justice causes, they must do so by first acknowledging their own need for grace, and respond from that place to the needs of others.

The manner in which St. Vincent de Paul worked collaboratively must be an example to Evangelicals as they form partnerships and small groups. Even as the modern societies that bear his name are unashamedly Catholic in the United States, “Vincentian ecumenism expresses itself in a willingness to cooperate and collaborate cordially with others of goodwill in alleviating deprivation and suffering.”[2] Following this example, the Evangelical church ought to form both ecumenical partnerships and serve the needy without regard to religious affiliation or allegiance. Loving one’s neighbor is not limited to those from one’s own ethnic, social, or religious background as the story of the Good Samaritan indicates (Luke 10). Working collaboratively for St. Vincent de Paul also meant operating within the church to motivate his peers to pursue the true calling of the priesthood. The Tuesday Conferences roughly parallel modern small groups as weekly gatherings of disciples praying, and discussing how to live out their faith, where participants leave with “renewed zeal.”[3] These groups cannot be focused only inwardly, but must truly represent the church’s vocation as the Holy Spirit’s vessels by which he accomplishes transformation in a broken world.

Living and working among the poor and adopting a lifestyle of poverty as a Catholic priest transformed St. Vincent de Paul. It was not until after he became the priest of a poor rural parish just northwest of Paris in 1612 that de Paul’s inner transformation took place.[4] Addressing the members of the Congregation of the Mission, St. Vincent de Paul wrote, “Christ himself, the Lord of all, lived in poverty to such an extent that he had nowhere to lay his head. He formed his disciples, his co-workers in his mission, to live in the same sort of way so that individually they did not own anything. In that way, they were freer to combat greed for wealth in a better and more practical way, greed which is ruining almost the whole world.”[5] While he goes on to qualify somewhat the practicality of living in total poverty while trying to do mission, St. Vincent still insists that it should be “an ideal.”[6] Evangelicals today ought to consider the inner transformation that they too could experience if they were to follow in St. Vincent de Paul’s footsteps. Relocation and conscious choices towards downward mobility (the modern equivalent of a vow of poverty) seem radical to today’s Evangelicals. But if we espouse a belief in the priesthood of all believers, and desire to live whole-heartedly for Christ in his footsteps, then should we perhaps consider more seriously choices like these that men and women of the cloth have made for centuries? Has our American affluence made us so comfortable that we are unwilling to even consider the radical calls of gospel Jesus preached? Even if the Evangelical church were to encourage downward mobility and living simply for the sake of giving generously, this would be a significant shift from the current state of most churches.

Finally, integral to St. Vincent de Paul’s success were his friendships across social classes. While class stratification looks different in 21^st century America than it did in 17^th century France, in part because of America’s tragic history of race relations, socio-economic divisions alone still manage to divide people in significant ways today. St. Vincent was transformed by his friendships with the poor and called upon his wealthy friends to help his brothers and sisters. Relocation to form friendships with the poor, coupled with Vincent’s own inner transformation and acknowledgement of his own interior poverty, changed the way he leveraged his social capital. Drawing upon his friendships with the wealthy and powerful, Vincent unabashedly asked for them to come alongside him in caring for the abandoned children, prisoners, refugees, invalids, and the poor to whom he ministered.[7] As the Evangelical church seeks to participate in the Colossians 1:15-20 vision the restoration of all things, one key way in which it ought to do so is by encouraging those with privilege and power to acknowledge it and then leverage it on behalf of the disenfranchised and powerless.

[1] Frances Ryan and John E. Rybolt, Eds. Vincent de Paul and Louise de Marillac: Rules,

Conferences, and Writings, (New York: Paulist Press, 1995), 17.

[2] Gallagher R.G.S., Sister Vera, Hearing the Cry of the Poor: The Story of the St. Vincent de Paul Society, (Liguori, MS: Liguori Publications, 1983), 21.

[3] Ryan and Rybolt, Eds. Vincent de Paul and Louise de Marillac, 25.

[4] Ibid., 17.

[5] Ibid., 93.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Bernard Pujo, Vincent de Paul: The Trailblazer. Trans. Gertrud Champe (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), 251 and http://www.catholic.org/saints/saint.php?saint_id=326 (accessed 26 March 2016).