Duo evangelizes over the airwaves for 20 years

	The Interview, a regular feature of The Catholic New World, is an in-depth conversation with a person whose words, actions or ideas affect today’s Catholic. It may be affirming of faith or confrontational. But it will always be stimulating.

This week, Catholic New World staff writer Michelle Martin talks with Father Pat Brennan and Dawn Mayer.

For more than 20 years, Father Pat Brennan and Dawn Mayer have hit the airwaves every week with “Horizons,” a half-hour show that blends reflections on Scripture and contemporary music. When the show started, Brennan and Mayer both worked in the archdiocese’s Office for Evangelization. Now the show is produced out of a studio at Holy Family Parish in Inverness, where Brennan is pastor and Mayer is co-director of evangelization and catechesis. The program can be heard each week on four different stations.



The Catholic New World: Why did you decide to start a radio program 20 years ago? Who were you trying to reach?

Father Pat Brennan: It was really an outgrowth of our youth ministry efforts at St. Hubert (in Hoffman Estates). That’s when the idea first came to me in the late ’70s. I used to take these long rides home from the South Side after visiting my parents on Sunday nights, and I used to listen to a show called Power Line that was produced by the Southern Baptist movement. What they would do would be to co-mingle contemporary rock with a spiritual message, and I always just wondered why doesn’t the Catholic Church do something like that?

We put together a pilot, I believe, in 1980, and we took it to NBC, at the time Q101 (WKQX) and we played there for almost two years.

Dawn Mayer: On Sunday mornings.

FPB: And since then, we have been both the victim and the beneficiary of stations changing formats. When Q101 changed their format after a couple of years, I just started walking down Michigan Avenue, going to radio stations and trying to convince them of the benefit of picking up a Catholic show, that they might pick up the large Catholic audience that’s in the Chicago metropolitan area. …

I’ve always thought that it’s God’s will that we be on, the fact that we’ve been on so long. We’re on four stations on Sundays. We’re on WYLL at 6 a.m.; we’re on WCKG where we pick up our more younger audience coming back from parties early in the morning at 5:30. We’re on WNDZ at 7 o’clock in the morning, 8:30 on Sundays on WLUW and at 9:30 Tuesday morning on WLUW.

But the radio show has really become part of a larger effort, and that’s the communications effort of this parish. We also videotape the radio show, and that plays on Tuesday afternoons on AT&T cable, and we put commercials on cable TV.



TCNW: Why do you do all this? What’s the goal?

FPB: Outreach, to reach all the folks who are unchurched. When we just talk to the people coming to church, we’re sort of preaching to the choir. But through these efforts, people do respond. We try to emphasize marketing points that the research indicates lead people to church—the search for meaning, the search for family spirituality, the search for meaningful worship, good music, religious experience—those are the kind of things we talk about in our advertising. We also have a parish newspaper which comes out quarterly, and we’ve found that we get the best coverage with that by putting it in the Wednesday Chicago Tribune, so it drops out as a supplement out of 61,000 Chicago Tribunes in the Northwest suburbs. … The thing that has me most interested now is Internet radio. We’re looking into the possibility of doing our own radio station on the Internet.



TCNW: What kind of feedback do you get from “Horizons”?

DM: Over the last 20 years, we’ve gotten stuff literally from all over the place. Over the years, I’ve encountered people who say “I’ve been listening to you for years,” and people that will just find it on the dial somewhere and say, “How long have you been doing that?” Part of the program is really designed to touch people where they’re at, based on what message we hear in Scripture, so the past couple of weeks we’ve been focusing on reconciliation and God’s forgiveness. The readings really do touch people in a lot of different ways. It’s really been very positive.

FPB: A lot of who listens depends on the different stations we’ve been on. Like WCKG attracts a young male audience. A lot of their programming borders on the bawdy. But at 5:30 a.m., they’ve allowed us to be on, and they’ve been a good station to be with. We’ve been with them a long, long time.

DM: The other group we get now is the group that flips through cable. I get a lot of people now telling me, “I saw you on TV.”



TCNW: How was it received when it first started?

FPB: When it first started, I think it was a novelty that a Catholic priest and a young woman were on the radio together.

DM: And I’m still young. After 20 years I’m still young.

FPB: She was about 20 when we started, I was 33. So we’ve experienced ourselves at different stages of life doing this thing. It was a function of the evangelization office at that time. It started in ’81. It used to require a lot more preparation. We used to write out scripts and so forth.

DM: Word for word. When we were new at the show, it was very intimidating. It was like, edit, stop, let’s do it again. Now we obviously have a theme of the show and an outline we’re working off of, but we don’t stop. It used to take a couple of hours to do the show.

FPB: We used to stop for a lot of edits. Then we took on a format where we just go in and do voice tracks, and the music would be added later, blended in by the producer. And now we tape it very much as if it is a live show, unless there’s a big technical breakdown.



TCNW: How do you choose the music? Who chooses the music?

DM; It’s pretty much me. Part of it is that through the music, there are a lot of things that can be conveyed through that. We try to use all different kinds of music, although occasionally we use more Christian music. Most of the time it’s very contemporary music. Through contemporary music, people can also get a message. Whatever the theme is that we’re trying to discuss, if we can find a song that relates to that particular theme, we use that song. It is amazing that over the years, people have commented on the different songs we have chosen, and people will go back at different points in the day or the month or whatever, they’ll hear that same song and kind of think back to what we were talking about. I think that music can play a very powerful role, especially in the lives of young people. We haven’t really been able to use everything—there’s a lot of stuff out there that doesn’t really fit at all. But there’s also a lot that does have a very spiritual message.



TCNW: Can you give me an example of a song that really worked well?

DM: There’s the song we used the last time, “Learn to Be Still,” by the Eagles, just kind of the importance of not being so busy and just learn to be quiet. We did a show once, it must have been around All Saints Day or All Souls Day. The theme was about life everlasting. One year, the song we used was by Mariah Carey, “One Sweet Day,” and another time we used Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On.” So there’s real powerful stuff out there.

We haven’t been able to include a lot of rap. It just doesn’t work.



TCNW: Why is it so important to have a media presence?

DM: In the past couple of years, I can remember driving around and hearing one of the first commercials from the archdiocese, and I was so proud that the Catholic Church was on the air. We’ve been on the air for so long, but I think it (the Catholic Church) really is the most silent voice out there. You hear commercials for all sorts of denominations, and when Cardinal George was on the air for Disciples in Mission and even some of the collections they’ve been taking up, it’s a way to remind even Catholics who do come to church that we’re out there. Come visit us. For the underchurched and also the non-churched, it’s just another door that’s opened to them.

FPB: Many of the big evangelical churches in the metropolitan area here have radio shows or are on TV. I don’t think we’ve duplicated the influence of a Fulton Sheen. I don’t think we’ve captured that power in almost 50 years. These other church bodies are going to be using the media. I think we have to ask the question, are we going to be left at the train station? Or are we expecting all of this to come free to us? You know these big stations should be giving us freebies. That’s not going to happen anymore with deregulation. There’s an old principle among many evangelical bodies that you should spend at least five percent of your budget on marketing your congregation. Marketing means reaching beyond the people who come to try to connect with the unchurched or, a term we use around here, the underchurched—those who dabble.



TCNW: The Northwest suburb seems to have become this hotbed of churches that are reaching out, starting with Willow Creek, which isn’t too far away. Why here?

FPB: I think there’s a big young adult population out here. I think there are intelligent, searching people out here.

DM: I also think that there are people who have good jobs. They’re educated. They have all the resources in the world that they need, but they’re still looking for something that kind of pulls it all together, and they’re finding it in spirituality. Maybe when you have to be more worried about how you’re going to survive from one day to the next, you don’t have a lot of search energy to do that. I think there’s a lot of people out there that are pretty comfortable in their life and are looking for what else is out there.



TCNW: Then as a Catholic church, you have to be pretty visible.

DM: The Catholic Church out here especially has to make its message a lot more out there. We have a number of people who go to Willow Creek or go to Harvest (Bible Church) and come here for the sacraments or other experiences of faith that they don’t feel in other places.

FPB: I think we have to face the fact that an awful lot of participants in these nouveau-evangelical churches are Catholic in origin. Another reason for us to be using the media is to say rather stridently and clearly who we are. We are a church that is Roman Catholic. We are a church that also stresses evangelization and conversion, works of mercy and justice. We have a counseling center here. We have five fine family ministries here. We have a vibrant youth program and we’ve just invested in hiring two people for young adult ministry, one specializing in the 30s crowd and another specializing in the 20s crowd. I don’t want to make this sound like a business, but in a sense, it’s a competitive market out here. I think we have to say here we are, and we’re good, we think, and if you’re a Roman Catholic you need not go elsewhere if you’re looking for religious experience. You can find it right here.