​The Instrumentum Laboris (working document) for the first session of the Australian Plenary Council was released on 25 Feb 2021, and I eventually finished reading it sometime in mid-March.

You can read it yourself:
https://plenarycouncil.catholic.org.au/instrumentum-laboris/

It wasn’t an easy read, despite it being beautifully presented. Penitential, it was. Firstly it takes a very long time to set the scene and give a situational analysis of the Church in Australia. Many times I wondered if the document would ever get to the point. Secondly it uses lots of ambiguous language that feels like it was written by a combination of church bureaucrats and school teachers. It would be easy to decode for them, but not for me. I longed for some footnotes that gave situational examples to aid understanding.

In particular I longed for concrete and contextual explanation of this passage from 166:

“Not infrequently, Catholics and their family members find themselves in an uneasy situation regarding particular Church teachings or disciplines, not because they identify any less as Catholic, and not because their attachment to Christ has grown “lukewarm” (Rev 3:16), but because of shifts in cultural norms and expectations that they once relied on to support their Catholic faith. Very often, however, this tension between people’s lived experience and the teachings of the Church reaches the point where people withdraw from parishes or communities, and no longer identify as Catholic.”

Is this about going to Mass on Sundays, cohabitation, same sex attraction, blended families, or about some, all or even more than this? How do you even begin to discuss this passage without knowing what the original catalyst for the passage was? How do you begin to frame questions that ask, ‘prove to me how attachment to Christ hasn’t grown lukewarm despite being out of synch with Church teachings, disciplines and practices…by what other means can you show strong attachment to Jesus Christ (John 12:26, James 2:17-18)?’?

I admit I was struggling to reconcile the somewhat rosy view the Working Document paints compared to what I am seeing in the pews. Then Philippa Martyr’s article came up while I was trying unsuccessfully to find any online commentary on the Working Document which wasn’t a clone of the official press release. It is well worth a read:
https://gaudiumetspes22.com/2021/03/05/stranded-under-the-southern-cross-news-from-a-shrinking-church/

I found it a more accurate analysis of the Catholic Church in Australia 2021.

In particular I found her imagery of a carapace to be valuable, viz:

“I tend to see the Church in Australia as consisting of the ‘real Church’ and an unpleasant outer structure that I call The Carapace. The Carapace is like The Borg in Star Trek, if it helps. It attaches itself to the real Church and feeds off it. Its principal purpose is to employ people, and its mission is to protect the Church’s assets at all costs.”

What bothers me greatly is that the Instrumentum Laboris seems to be written by the carapace, and the vast majority of the delegates for the Plenary Council sessions will come from the carapace.

What else bothers me is that God seems to be a minor stakeholder among many instead of the One and Only opinion that matters.

Why else would there be so much virtue signaling about sexual abuse, indigenous issues, women in leadership issues, ecology, etc? I’m not saying that they aren’t important, just that they pale into insignificance against the urgency of saving souls from eternities in hell. Dealing with these things of necessity will be part of that primary mission, for the salvation of the people in these minorities, but they should never overshadow that primary mission.

Which matters to God the most?

What matters to God the most?

I put it to you that growth in relationship to Him (holiness), family (His plan that predates Scripture), and bringing people into relationship with Him (mission) and co-operating in expressing His love to others (service: which is the natural overflow of increase in holiness and mission) are what matter most to God.

On everything but service we are not doing well at all, and even our service is usually human powered service rather than Holy Spirit empowered service.

My view from the pew looks like this:

Everything starts from Holy Spirit inspired preaching. But for Holy Spirit inspired preaching to happen lots of prayer, study of scripture and sacred tradition, openness to the charismatic workings of the Holy Spirit and surrender to the workings of the Holy Spirit are necessary; and the preacher has to be able to effectively use the language and language idioms of those he is preaching to.

It is ‘hymns, hospitality and homilies’ or ‘music, ministry and message’ that either engages a newcomer and keeps them returning or turns them off for good. Generally we are mediocre when it comes to hymns and hospitality with the occasional flash of brilliance, but where we consistently fall down is in homilies.

When was the last time a homily encouraged you to pray?
When was the last time a homily invited you to go to confession? (and made it available)
When was the last time a homily opened your eyes to how good and great God is?
When was the last time a homily made you want to know Jesus better?
When was the last time a homily kept you awake and hanging on every word?
When was the last time a homily contained anything memorable that wasn’t a pre-prepared joke?

Every day I pray that God will use the words of the homilist that day to touch hearts. Often I wonder if God hears me because even I can only decode on average 3 words out of 5 from our overseas-born priests, and the most common question when Mass is over is ‘What did he say?’.

But a preacher doesn’t have to be in a pulpit. We pew dwellers are just as bad because we talk far more about parish politics, weather and medical ailments than we ever do (if we ever do) about Jesus, about inspiration we have found in Gospel passages, answers to prayers, and about living out the vocations we have been called to.

There is such laser focus on encouraging priestly vocations that you could be forgiven for thinking that vocations to family life, religious vocations, career vocations and vocations to special non-ordained ministries aren’t important at all. Yet apart from a very few exceptions to the rule, priestly vocations grow in strong families and in devotionally vibrant parishes.

When was the last time you saw any parish-based initiatives for encouraging and supporting marriages and families?

Did you know that Australia has no (nil, nada, ziltch, zero) Retrouvaille ministry/weekends for marriages in crisis?

Schools. Shudder. They are supposed to be places where the Catholic faith is taught and flourishes. Yet they are places where those who do teach the demanding parts of the Gospel are persecuted in various subtle and non-subtle ways. But these days no one in the parish knows anyone with children at the local Catholic primary school, and vice versa, and about the only person who visits both places is the parish priest and any assistant priest. What we actually have are non-government schools. At what point do we call a halt to the massive investment in schools that don’t evangelise, barely catechize and consistently churn out students indistinguishable from atheists and agnostics?

Families with faith have been choosing not to send their children to Catholic schools, many have chosen to home-school, some have chosen Christian schools, and the rest are sending their children to state schools partly because the cost/benefit analysis has swung the other way. In times past parents were willing to pay the extra cost of the Catholic school because it helped support the development of faith in their children.

The view from the pew can look very different from the view of the carapace.

An example may be useful…
In recent years the St Vincent de Paul Society went through a centralization process, and created regional hubs for furniture and other items. The people managing the hubs were happy. Some of the people in the local outlets were happy ‘it’s great, we refer them to the hub’. But those who knew how things worked pre-hub, and the people in need were not happy. Locally there used to be a room where furniture could be stored on a temporary basis. For the hubs to work, they were told rooms like these had to be stopped. The thing is, those rooms enabled society members to respond quickly when needs became manifest. With a hub, you have to send requests up, wait for decisions, and for action to be sent down, and sometimes have to follow-up the requests, all of which means many days, if not weeks, before needs get met. As for the person in need who had enough trouble asking for help the first time, now they have to travel to the hub to get help; and ask for help a second time. How many of them don’t take the extra step? For some the transport costs alone would be prohibitive. For others it was so hard to admit they needed help, it would be a long time before they attempted to admit it again. Or they would seek other alternatives with quicker responses to their urgent emergencies.

Even more seriously, the local outlet loses the opportunity to begin a relationship of accompaniment with that person in need, and the probability of needy people falling through the cracks increases. But the hub managers will only see the turnover of furniture and other items, and fluctuation in staffing levels, and never record or quantify these other losses, and will assume everything is going great guns.

Thankfully there have been moves towards decentralization again.

There are very good reasons why the Church values the principle of subsidiarity, and why any moves towards adding bureaucratic layers for co-ordination of smaller entities has to carefully make sure that the principle of subsidiarity is not violated.

Pope Francis has encouraged leaders to take on the smell of the sheep, to take time to be with those on the fringes and on the front lines. It is the only way to find out what is really going on.

An example may be useful…
A person serving at the diocesan curia has responsibilities for parish support. Most of this person’s time is spent liaising with parish staff and with parish members who voluntarily take on co-ordination roles. The parish support team puts together a Lenten discussion group programme, sends it out to the parishes. Some groups will meet every year regardless. Other groups will only form if there is active encouragement from the pulpit, and some recruitment and engagement of group leaders. Some parishioners will use the contents of the programme privately.

The parish support team will know how many programmes got sent out, and have a rough idea how many groups formed and how many participated. But they don’t usually get information on how many programmes were thrown out because they were still on the display table several weeks later, nor information about why parishioners left them there, nor information about why groups didn’t form, nor why anyone gave up part way through (individually or group). The only way you get that information is by talking incognito (without them knowing what your role is) with people in the pews whom you have never met before and truly listening to what they have to say, even if it isn’t what you want to hear. (eg. “I picked it up, but I put it back when I saw you needed to download stuff. I’m not that good with computers, and there’s no one at home who is any better at it than me, no one who could help me if I got myself into computer trouble.”)

Can you see how from a curial vantage point everything could look rosy, and better than last year? And yet from a pew dweller’s view point it could look very different indeed?

That’s why I am so worried that the Instrumentum Laboris seems to be written by the carapace, and the vast majority of the delegates for the Plenary Council sessions will come from the carapace who haven’t taken on the smell of the sheep.

A few passages from the Instrumentum Laboris caught my eye:

Passage 74 page 27
Rather, Pope Francis, echoing the thoughts of his predecessors since the Second Vatican Council, insists that an authentically Gospel-inspired renewal of the Church flows from a renewed encounter with Jesus Christ and His Holy Spirit and gives rise to a ‘pastoral conversion’ of the entire Church, a renewal that is expressed in a ‘missionary option’ or ‘missionary impulse’ for making the saving love of God known in every place.

Amen. Amen. What we all need more than anything is a deeper encounter with Jesus, and a deeper encounter with the Holy Spirit. Without that, nothing, but nothing changes for the better. We can’t make it happen, that is up to God Himself. But we can make the conditions and environment more conducive for those encounters to happen. Things like encouraging private individual prayer, corporate prayer (prayer meetings, public devotions, liturgy), scripture study, reconciling strained relationships, forgiveness of wrongs done to us, getting to know each other better so as to grow in unity, self-discipline, generosity to others, encouraging more frequent visits to the sacrament of penance, and asking God (individually and corporately) to grant us these precious encounters.

Passage 123 page 41
Submissions to the Council also raised what Pope Francis, among others, has identified as the danger of an unhealthy culture of clericalism within the priesthood and in the wider Church. At its most extreme, this has been identified as a significant factor in the sexual abuse crisis in the Church. It can also undermine the mission that belongs to the entire Church and discourage the exercise of gifts within it. Some fundamental questions arise in light of this concern: What are the causes of such a culture of clericalism? What are the theological, structural, psychological or spiritual influences that can contribute to it and how might the Church better equip its clergy and laity for mission today and for increasing co-responsibility in the decades to come?

Clericalism encourages an ‘us and them’ mentality, with ‘us’ being far superior to ‘them’. Sadly our seminaries are still full of it. We have seminarians visiting parishes on placement and making the assumption that no one in the parishes knows how to use incense properly except for them. That assumption most certainly gets up the noses of parishioners who have been serving at the altar and using incense for decades. Then there’s the practice of getting 2nd year seminarians and above to always wear soutanes at Mass, even if they are sitting in the congregation. That’s visibly making an ‘us’ and ‘them’ distinction well before the vocational discernment process has scarcely begun. It is very difficult to get to ‘we’ and ‘team’, albeit with different gifts and vocational callings, if from the ‘get go’ seminarians are treated as heroic and special. For the mission of the Church to proceed, ie the making of disciples of Jesus, clerics can’t do it without laity, and laity can’t do it without clerics. We vitally need each other. It is one of those ‘both/and’ things. Mutual respect will get us much further in that mission than clericalism.

Passage 131 page 43
There is not a well-developed understanding and practice of the Church as a community of missionary disciples. The Plenary Council offers the Church in Australia an opportunity to consider carefully, and prayerfully, what steps must be taken to awaken this awareness of the missionary vocation of every Catholic, for all the baptised are called equally to live and proclaim the Good News of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world.

This is true. Although there are sub-groups within parishes that have this awareness eg catechists. Vatican II speaks eloquently of the universal call to holiness and the universal call to mission and so have subsequent papal documents. Encouraging us pew dwellers to read these texts is one thing, helping us to understand how to respond in our own lives is quite another since most of us have no idea what that looks like, nor what it feels like. A possible way forward is gathering and sharing testimonies of how God has used pew dwellers to make disciples, with particular emphasis on how pew dwellers came to understand what God was calling them to do, and how that mission developed over time.

Not everyone is going to be called to be an evangelist (nor to the same evangelistic mission field eg family, co-workers, young people, PSTD sufferers etc); not everyone is going to have a calling to specific works of mercy; not everyone is going to have a calling to accompany people through the RCIA process. So there needs to be intentionality about gathering a wide range of stories, and in presenting them with an openness to the multiplicity of God’s callings. It is really easy to unconsciously fall into the trap of ‘God has called me to be a preacher, it is so wonderful and exciting, therefore God is calling everyone to be preachers’, thereby putting unnecessary burdens/guilt on listeners who may be called to very different missions.

Passage 135 page 44
Underpinning such renewal of practices and methods within dioceses, parishes, migrant communities and movements must be the renewal of sacramental life and prayer among all Catholics for it is the encounter with Christ in the midst of the Church that rekindles hope and makes genuine renewal possible. This is seen in the Emmaus story in Luke’s Gospel (24:13-35) where, in the midst of the disciples’ difficulties and even disillusionment, the faith of the followers of Jesus is restored and a new future opened for them by this encounter.

Without prayer and the sacraments, there is no fuel for mission. We can’t give what we don’t have. What we most need to give are God’s love and access to Jesus. Prayer and the sacraments give us access to the infilling of God’s love, and to experiential encounters with Jesus. We haven’t done a good job of proclaiming this truth about prayer and the sacraments, by and large it has been a well-kept secret, when it should have been ‘shout it from the rooftops’ stuff. Again one of the best ways to renew sacramental life and prayer is to gather testimonies from pew dwellers who are living as missionary disciples. We need to share with each other what a difference prayer (personal and communal) and the sacraments (baptism, penance, eucharist, confirmation, anointing of the sick, marriage, holy orders) make in our lives. It is good news, in fact it is great news. All of them make a big impact. But again, sensitivity is needed, because some people feel and experience lots and some people feel and experience little even when God’s grace is just as active in both. It is all too easy for a focus on feelings and experiences to get us chasing them rather than God, and for this focus to make those who barely feel or experience anything to rate themselves as second class citizens of the kingdom of God. For this reason it is always wise to focus more on the fruits eg growth in patience, generosity, peace, trust, improvement in relationships etc.

Passage 197 page 67
It is this assurance that should encourage us and empower us to speak and act with that parrhesia, that boldness and courage, which are a gift of the Holy Spirit: We need the Spirit’s prompting, lest we be paralyzed by fear and excessive caution, lest we grow used to keeping within safe bounds. Let us remember that closed spaces grow musty and unhealthy. When the Apostles were tempted to let themselves be crippled by danger and threats, they joined in prayer to implore parrhesia: “And now, Lord, look upon their threats, and grant to Your servants to speak Your Word with all boldness” (Acts 4:29). As a result, “when they had prayed, the place in which they were gathered together was shaken; and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the Word of God with boldness” (Acts 4:31).

It is my dearest desire that when the delegates gather for both of the sessions of the Plenary Council that they dedicate somewhere between a half day and a full day as representatives of the faith communities of Australia to imploring this parrhesia for Australia – and that they do so before they start any discussion of the Working Document. What this needs to be is heartfelt spontaneous prayer ebbing and flowing as the Holy Spirit prompts. Apart from an introduction and a conclusion, it needs to be totally unscripted. It needs to be allowing God to dredge up from the depths of our soul’s expressions of our personal, corporate and national desire for Him and for the dynamic action of the Holy Spirit in our midst, in words, songs, groans and anything else He inspires. It needs to include our leaders begging pardon of God for the ways we have failed Him personally and corporately, to include confessing our failures and our shortcomings, and asking God to step in, to take control, to take leadership and give us sure guidance and the courage to respond with an active Yes to everything He wants us to do.

Without this, nothing else will really matter.

Come Holy Spirit, Come!,
and through this Plenary Council
make of this nation Australia
the promised great south land
in complete synch with You.
Amen.

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​
​A printer friendly version is available below, 6 x A4 pages:

The Gospel for this Sunday, the 5th Sunday of Ordinary Time Year B, comes from the first chapter of St Mark and shows us what happened in the 24 hours after the man was delivered from evil in the synagogue at Capernaum on the sabbath.

From the people of the town we see a huge response once the sabbath is technically over. It is normally difficult enough getting the ill and the frail to travel in daylight hours, let alone the additional difficulties in travelling in twilight and in the dark; and yet they all come; and their expectant faith is rewarded.

Carefully watch what Jesus does next; because it isn’t what a celebrity would do. A celebrity would enjoy the limelight, and probably take a few curtain calls the next day, and let word of mouth bring increasingly more people to him each day.

Jesus after a very long, tiring and rather amazing day doesn’t sleep for very long, because His priority is spending quality time in prayer with the Father, in order to get grounded again in the reality of that relationship. He gets up long before everyone else, and intentionally seeks out a place of peace and quiet.

And He stays there.

And He waits there.

It is highly likely that Jesus left Simon Peter’s house with whatever travel gear He had.

When day comes we are told ‘Everybody is looking for You’. Some may have searched Peter’s house. Some may have searched Peter’s boat. Others would have looked for Jesus along the lakeside shoreline. Others would have gone looking at the market place, or back in the synagogue.

The only people who actually found Jesus were Peter, James, John and Andrew.

Why is that?

Because they had got to know Jesus enough to be able to work out His likes and dislikes.
Because they knew enough of His character to be able to go looking in the right places.

In some ways this was a test. How well did they know Him? How prepared were they to leave all familiar things behind? Would they follow wherever He lead?

After big ministry days and momentous experiences of God have you noticed that Jesus becomes a little difficult to find? It isn’t uncommon. Often the same test is placed before us. Are we following Jesus for what He can do? Or are we following Jesus because of who He is? And out of a desire to be with Him and get to know Him better?

So that’s the challenge for this week. To examine just how far we are willing to go in order to find Jesus, and to discover whether we are willing to follow Him on His terms or not.

May God help us to be faithful to Him in all seasons, when everything is going more than well, and when everything is dry, arid and lonely, and everything in between. Amen.
​
#GospelReflection   

The Gospel for this Sunday, the 3rd Sunday of Ordinary Time Year B, comes from the first chapter of St Mark and contains an account of how the public ministry of Jesus began.

If it had been up to us, we would have begun preaching and healing straight away after the baptismal experience in the Jordan river. But Jesus has taken extra preparation time, and there must have been a decent time lapse between John’s encounter with Jesus and John getting arrested, which could have been well over 40 days.

The ending of John’s public ministry becomes the signal for Jesus to begin His public ministry.

Where does He choose to begin? Not at the Temple, not in the ancestral lands of Judah and Benjamin, but out in the boondocks of Galilee where there’s a big ethnic mix of Jews, Greeks, Romans and peoples from nearby countries and plenty of descendants of Abraham who don’t know which of the 12 tribes they belong to.

How does He begin? By repeating the message of John to repent and believe, and in the early days without any kind of team at all.

The message of repentance is perennial. If we don’t make some kind of change in our lives, then we aren’t giving God any room to work in us. How can we expect God to do something new in us, if we keep on with the same routine week in and week out? Perhaps it doesn’t have to be a big change, just something small, sustainable and regular, and over time God can lead us step by step into more of Him.

Although sometimes He does ask for the big change.

We know that Peter and Andrew, James and John, had met Jesus before. Last week’s Gospel confirms that. But when the crunch came, and Jesus more or less said, ‘It’s go time, are you coming with me?’, they had to make a complete and total change of lifestyle then and there, or miss out on being disciples of the long awaited Messiah.

Which begs the question, if you had an encounter with Jesus tonight, and He invited you to do something completely different, would you give Him an unequivocal yes, a timid maybe, or a blunt no?

Note that Jesus doesn’t start the next phase of His public ministry with a big team, but with a small team that already has good working relationships with each other.

Jesus seems to be in the business of building solid relationships, not in the business of seeking celebrity. Only solid relationships endure the tests of time and other trials, celebrity is ephemeral.

For those of us seeking likes, comments and shares, this should make us pause and reconsider our priorities, and commit to putting more time and effort into building up the quality of our face to face relationships.

For many of us the ‘kairos’ time has arrived. Many of us have been waiting for a long time for this anointed moment. May God grant us the grace to give Him an unequivocal Yes. Amen.
​
#GospelReflection
​

A Christian is someone who has accepted Jesus as Lord and Saviour. Most of us find the Saviour part easy, and it is the Lord part we struggle with.

​This relatively short talk (34 mins) is one of the best I have ever heard on that topic:

Joe Chircop is one of the founders of the Servants of Jesus Community in Western Sydney, it is an ecumenical community, and this talk was presented in the middle of the lockdown that Sydney experienced from mid March - late May. 2020. His heritage is Maltese.
 
The first 3 mins are rather slow, as they give background to why he is speaking on the Discipleship topic. The last few minutes contain a prayer which extends to all online viewers.
 
Here is an excerpt:
 
Imagine if a young man proposed to a young woman - re marriage - and instead of giving her... and the young woman instead of giving herself she says to the man, you can have my jewellery, you can have my house, you can have my car, you can have my property, you can have my wealth: what would we think of that? We would think that's a bit strange. But actually Jesus is asking us the same thing, but we often say, well I'll give You my tithe, I'll give You my house, my talent or whatever, but refuse to give Him our selves.

.......................................................

I am blogging about this talk because I want to be able to find it again, and I am hoping that you might want to find it again too. All too frequently the things we share on social media get submerged and rarely found again.

I see this talk as a great resource for anyone assisting those who have recently accepted Jesus as their Saviour, and for those assisting others on their way to the fullness of the Christian life. As we all know, it is possible to get stuck along the way, and this video will go a long way to helping people get unstuck. It is short enough to be played at a Youth Group or Connect Group as a discussion starter.

Why? Because it often isn't easy to have a conversation about the truths this video contains, and I have rarely heard them expressed so clearly and in an easily understandable way.

But there's another reason I am blogging about this talk, and that is our responsibility to share with others the good things we have found. All too often we come across a great book, podcast episode, twitter thread, newspaper article or video link, and we do nothing to pass that good stuff on to others. 

It doesn't take much effort to write a review of a book and post it online at Amazon, Goodreads or elsewhere. It doesn't take much effort to like and share a podcast episode on Facebook. It doesn't take almost any effort at all to like and retweet a twitter thread. It is normally only a matter of using a search engine to find an online version of the newspaper article and to then share it on social media, or to take a photograph of the article and share that instead. It is rather easy to share YouTube videos on social media, and even easier to click the like button or to add a positive comment.

And yet so few people think to do so.

Your challenge today, should you choose to accept it,
​is to determine which content had the most positive impact upon you and your life during the past 7 days, and to then share it with others in at least 2 different ways, and with at least one of those ways being through social media.   

​After wading through the first third of the Congregation of the Clergy’s Instruction on Parish Renewal, I came across Fr Michael White’s blog on the Parish of the Future, http://nativitypastor.tv/the-parish-of-the-future/ which includes discussion on this Instruction.

He inspired me to attempt my own report on the Instruction, which I had already half begun to think about. Why? Because I’m finding the document hard to decode without some examples to apply it to.

Here is a copy of the Instruction in English, 27 x A4 pages in length:
Don’t worry, it isn’t as quite as much reading as that; the last 8 pages are references for footnotes. 

We all come at these Vatican documents with different lenses, so I will disclose mine. I have lived in both city-suburban and regional parishes, but not yet in a cathedral parish. I have visited parish churches and cathedrals in many parts of Australia and in some overseas locations.
​
I was part of a covenant community at the time they were applying to be recognized as an Association of Christ’s Faithful. Because of this experience, I understand the tensions between an organization that gathers and serves beyond a parish’s boundaries and the parishes where the members of that organization regularly worship.

I also understand, first hand, how it is possible to be members of more than one parish simultaneously, eg weekday parish vs weekend parish; the parish you go to when you are rostered on vs the parish you go to when you are not rostered on; the parish you go to for most things vs the parish you go to for confession; and in these pandemic times and in times of chronic ill health, the parish you live in vs the parish/es you visit for live-streamed Masses.

This would also be the case for those who belong to one of the Eastern rites of the Church, but who also attend the Latin rite. Ditto for those who attend a Traditional Latin Mass regularly but also attend Novos Ordo Masses. Then there are those who attend Masses as part of a national chaplaincy service (eg Vietnamese, Korean, Filipino etc) as well as local parish Masses. Similarly there would be members of the Anglican Ordinariate who from time to time would attend a local parish Mass or non-Ordinariate Mass when on holidays.

The Instruction begins by referencing Pope Francis in Evangelii Gaudium 27, and this Instruction could be considered a response to that papal challenge.
“I dream of a “missionary option”, that is, a missionary impulse capable of transforming everything, so that the Church’s customs, ways of doing things, times and schedules, language and structures can be suitably channeled for the evangelization of today’s world rather than for her self-preservation. The renewal of structures demanded by pastoral conversion can only be understood in this light: as part of an effort to make them more mission-oriented, to make ordinary pastoral activity on every level more inclusive and open, to inspire in pastoral workers a constant desire to go forth and in this way to elicit a positive response from all those whom Jesus summons to friendship with Himself.”

The traditional view of parish, in living memory, is situated in a specific geographical location and ministers to the people who inhabit that location, and where you would expect most people to be baptized, married and buried from the parish in that location. In modern society this lifetime identification with a single location is now more the exception than the rule.

It also makes building sustainable ministries quite difficult. A pastor of an inner city parish expressed the difficulty to me something like this: As an inner city parish he had lots of couples who had moved in to be close to work in the CBD, but by the time he had got to know them, they had received an interstate or international transfer with work, or had moved out of their apartments to a location in the suburbs more conducive to bringing up their first child or welcoming their second. The average length of stay of these couples was 3 years. By the time you got to know them, found a fit for their ministry passions and talents, within 6 months they were gone. When the ‘bricks’ keep on moving, it is hard to build anything.

In this context, section 9 of the Instruction makes sense:
9. As a living community of believers, the Parish finds itself in a context whereby the territorial affiliation is increasingly less evident, where places of association are multiplied and where interpersonal relationships risk being dissolved into a virtual world without any commitment or responsibility towards one’s neighbour.

Not all parishes and pastors are equal, and people do vote with their feet if it is convenient to do so. While parish leadership may consider parish loyalty a virtue, in reality many parents choose to attend the parish that has the greatest chance of engaging their children (children’s ministry, youth group, better than average preacher, better than average music, convenient time, ample parking) and adults go where they feel they are receiving the most spiritual nourishment even if they have to travel 30-50 mins away to do so. The concept of staying within the parish boundaries to receive sacramental ministry is quite foreign to many, especially those who don’t live in rural and outback locations.

I do know of current experiments where non-parish faith communities have been given permission to have chaplains and to administer sacraments to their members. What I can’t remember is whether that non-parish faith community was linked to a television-and-parish-mission ministry or whether it was linked to an ecumenical covenant community’s Catholic fellowship. Not that it matters too much, because I can see the logic in bringing someone into sacramental participation among the same people who evangelized them rather than sending them to his/her local parish where they have no personal connection. It also makes some degree of sense that if the person to be initiated into sacramental life has taken on the sense of mission and is growing in the charisms given to that non-parish faith community, then receiving the sacraments within that community will strengthen and support that vocation. Obviously, a non-parish faith community would have to be of substantial size to receive this kind of permission, and would have to demonstrate processes of keeping in communion with the universal church.

But we also live in an age of online communities and movements. Think of Bishop Barron and Word On Fire and of Fr James Mallon and Divine Renovation. It could be argued that they lead far more than the diocesan and parish responsibilities entrusted to them. With their online content, and offline content, they have attracted many people from across the globe who look to them for spiritual nourishment and who have formed online communities of shared faith.

It seems to me that if you are feeding God’s sheep, online or otherwise, and those sheep engage with you in a substantial way, eg sign up for email newsletters, follow on social media, participate in on-going online discussions (eg Alpha, Bible Study, mentorship, online training course, then you have ipso facto pastoral care for them until such time as they have been successfully integrated into an in-real-life parish community. It further seems to me that this Instruction is acknowledging that this pre-evangelism, evangelism, catechesis process is taking place outside the traditional parish model, and also giving it the green light to be explored and developed further.

At minimum, if by sharing the Word of God with people online or offline, we are feeding them, then we should also be praying for them consistently and regularly, even if we don’t yet know what their names are, nor where they live. And this applies as much to lay people and religious, as it does to those ordained to be pastors.

Here’s what the Instruction actually says:

14. With the Parish no longer being the primary gathering and social centre, as in former days, it is thus necessary to find new forms of accompaniment and closeness. A task of this kind ought not to be seen as a burden, but rather as a challenge to be embraced with enthusiasm.
 
16. The Parish territory is no longer a geographical space only, but also the context in which people express their lives in terms of relationships, reciprocal service and ancient traditions. It is in this “existential territory” where the challenges facing the Church in the midst of the community are played out.

18. Ecclesial membership in our present age is less a question of birthplace, much less where someone grew up, as it is about being part of a community by adoption, where the faithful have a more extensive experience of the Word of God than they do of being a body made up of many members, with everyone working for the common good.

These are some other excerpts that caught my attention

24. In these times, marked as they are by indifferentism, individualism and the exclusion of others, the rediscovery of brotherhood is paramount and integral to evangelisation, which is closely linked to human relationships.

25. A Parish must be a place that brings people together and fosters long-term personal relationships, thereby giving people a sense of belonging and being wanted.

27. The Code of Canon Law emphasises that the Parish is not identified as a building or a series of structures, but rather as a specific community of the faithful, where the Parish Priest is the proper pastor.

29. The Parish is a community gathered together by the Holy Spirit to announce the Word of God and bring new children of God to birth in the baptismal font.

I think these excerpts give us permission to think about parishes as groups of sheep under a shepherd, and to loosen our focus on parish buildings and sharpen them on relationships; relationships between pastor and parishioners, and between parishioners who are on a discipleship journey through pre-evangelisation through to missionary discipleship.

What a very different place/community our parishes would be if the commitment to building long term faith-sharing relationships was normal and had some primacy in our structures of accepted/cherished values!

The Instruction has to speak in terms that are universally applicable. It is possible that they had the concept of a personal parish in mind. If you want to know what that looks like in practice, read this article about this parish in Pittsburgh USA:
https://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/pittsburghs-newest-personal-parish-shines-light-on-the-black-catholic-tradi

The team at Divine Renovation also did a 5 part video series discussing this document. It is worth watching/listening to.
Hopefully this link gets you to the playlist for the full 5 parts:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpDOJiw6wP4&list=PLqZfwqi7RxBDzEYiTzvJ0DITKyuJbN7OV

The Instruction also goes into some detail about what is, and isn’t, possible according to Canon Law, and the various ecclesial structures other than the traditional parish which are considered legitimate. That section takes some ploughing through, but it is useful information for everyone to be familiar with. Many of these non-traditional structures are quite common in places considered to be mission territory, and I recognized some of them from my studies in early Australian Catholic history and from conversations with a missionary priest resident in South America.

If God is bringing about something new and more pastorally effective in this post-Covid era, then the recommendation about putting new wine into new wine-skins applies. If the familiar structures are no longer suitable for the mission, then we need to be open to different structures, and to be willing to explore them, as the Holy Spirit leads. This Instruction functions as high octane motivation power to get that exploration and innovation started.

May God bless, protect and empower those who are called to take the permissions given in this Instruction seriously, and who called to be pioneers of the new things God wishes to come forth in this new era.
​
Our Lady, Queen of the Apostles, pray for us.

During this session Fr James Mallon and Ron Huntley bounced off each other as they co-presented this Unread Chapter. (As usual, this is not a precise transcription.)

Fr James Mallon (FJM): Praise God! Isn't God great?!

Ron Huntley (RH): Good morning.

FJM: We originally called this talk the Unwritten Chapter because when the book (Divine Renovation) was published in early September 2015 it was actually written – I finished writing it in the very first days of January 2015. So if you think about the time gap (from end of writing to start of this conference), it's a good year and a half. And one thing about our experience here at St Benedict's – and any time a parish heads off in a direction of mission it is because you are innovating, you are doing things you've never done before, you're taking risks. And if we keep our eyes, our minds, our hearts and our ears open, we are always going to be learning things. So the original idea of this talk this morning was to communicate to you all the stuff that we've learned – mostly through making all kinds of mistakes – since the book was published, to kind of bring you up to date. However, as you heard from Dan, well, we now have to call it the Unread Chapter, because basically all the content of what we are going to cover this morning is in the Guidebook, and as Dan said, the royalties (not necessarily all of them mine) are going back into supporting this ministry. Perhaps it is certainly yet Unread but not Unwritten. We are going to cover 6 things.

•The three phases of renewal
•Four non-negotiables of a senior leadership team
•Process versus programs
•The game plan (one of the workshops covered this in depth)
•The three 'Ables' of ministry
•Three critical success factors for ministries

RH: How many days do we have to do that? It's going to take a while. You know, it's interesting, because as we were planning for the conference and were preparing staff for the workshops we realised some of the things we don't do anymore, and some of the things we are doing we are looking at transitioning, so should we stop what we are doing and go back and live out who we were when the book was originally written? No, because we are living this in real time, and what's so fun about this and what we want to communicate today is this spirit of learning that takes place on our team. It's really fun. What is really cool about it is we have no idea what God is going to come up with next. God is God. He is in charge. And the Holy Spirit animates our ideas, our hopes and our dreams in ways that we have no idea where the next wave is going to present itself. So it's been really fun learning together in this culture of health, and it does include a lot of conflict – as Dan said – but it's fun conflict, because we love each other, we love our team, we love our parishioners and leaders and we are committed to the goal, and so the first idea doesn't rule the day, it's the best idea that we want to rule the day. So we want to share with you what we've learned, but we also want to communicate to you a spirit of being open to how the Holy Spirit wants to empower your team with even better ideas. That's what we want to communicate right now more than anything else.

The Three Phases of Renewal

FJM: At this point, this is ¼ theory ¾ coming from our experience. Why do I say that? Because I believe in this journey from maintenance to mission. We haven't completed it yet, we're not fully there, we're still in process, but out of our experience we've discerned what I believe are 3 distinct phases of renewal. Now I've got an image of a sailing ship up there. I'm not much of a sailor, but imagine a trans-Atlantic voyage. There are 3 phases to a journey isn't there? There's when you go out and you go to the point where you can no longer see where you came from. Remember the 'Lord of the Rings'? When Sam says, 'Mr Frodo, if I take one more step I'll be further away than I've ever been before'. Well, this is in a sense the end of Phase 1. And the middle phase, of course, is the whole part in the journey where you can't see where you've come from and you can't see where you are going. And the third phase is where someone shouts 'Land Ho!' The end is in sight. This middle phase is where we find ourselves at St Benedict's parish right now. We have a sense that we're halfway through this middle phase. And I'll tell you, it's sometimes scary. Have you ever seen 'Mutiny on the Bounty'? You know, it's the middle phase, where you can't see where you are going and you can't see where you came from that you begin to think, 'Are we doing the right thing: Are we crazy?' And maybe some of the crew might begin to think of mutiny.

FJM: But I think that these 3 distinct phases are very, very necessary, and I just want to speak briefly about what they are. And I want to use a good old Canadian symbol to talk about that. Now I know that some of you cannot relate to this (image of men pushing a snow-bound car) but when a car gets stuck in the snow there's a technique to it you see. There's an initial phase where you have to rock the car back and forth, you've got to build up momentum and get it going and you need 3 or 4 people, and at one point when you have enough momentum you give it a big heave and it starts moving. And what's really cool is when the car starts moving you kind of just walk alongside it. You can push it with one hand and it's really easy, but the other thing you need to do – you need someone at the steering wheel. Because if you don't have someone at the steering wheel, you are in big trouble. And in a sense, that's Phase 2. And in most Catholic parishes, when it comes to discipleship and evangelisation (and we've already identified that the primary task of leadership is to change culture: is to lead cultural transformation) that initial phase is about getting momentum, enough momentum to overcome the inertia, and that requires a lot of building momentum, back and forth, a lot of brute force, a lot of repetition and a lot of pushing. But just like when the car gets freed from the snow once it starts moving, you don’t keep rocking it, you've got to change what you do. You've got to change how you do it. Now we didn't know this when we started off. In many ways we didn't know what we were doing. We just knew where we wanted to go. But we knew that something was up.

RH: It's interesting as well. It does take a lot of momentum. It takes a lot of teamwork to rock the boat. But do you know what it takes? It takes a lot of trust. Because if the people in the parish don't trust that you love them, and that you care about the people that they care about, then it's just a good idea. We need to care about people and we need to communicate that, and they need to see us loving them, Right? Because if people catch you loving them they are more likely to get behind you and help you in the direction you're going. But if it's all academia, if it's all good ideas on paper, then it's not going to get a lot of traction: it's love that wins the day. It's love that wins people over, and so one of the really cool things that Alpha does (if you haven't done Alpha, you should really try it) is that it gives us an opportunity for people to see us loving them. We love people, and they see us doing it 10 weeks in a row in Alpha, it is really creates a lot of people behind this car that we can push things in a direction. Wouldn't you say?

FJM: And the primary tools that we used to get that initial momentum were Alpha and Stewardship and having Stewardship Fairs. I cover all that in the book. So basically what you read in the book was this – how we got the car out of the snow. But then, once it started moving we realised we had to make a change, and someone once said that the hardest model to change is a model that works. Because it's working! But the truth is this: that because of the very fact that it works it will mean that you will eventually have to change it, because, guess what, because it works it will eventually stop working or it won't work as well as it once did. And that's what we experienced. And the 5 remaining points of this presentation are the things that we changed because of this.

RH: And what was that line that Carey Nieuwhof said that day when we went to see him? "Are you married to the method or are you married to the mission?" And sometimes what happens, especially when people have a conversion, they think that's the way to do it. Don't change anything, because it worked for me. It's really funny, we see it every time. We went from Alpha over 10 weeks to Alpha over 7 weeks. People lost their minds. And it was so funny to manage that because they were married to the "It's the 10 weeks". No it's not. There's a lot of things at play. So as people get used to things that work, it really is hard to change. So change is important.

FJM: There's a very difficult thing to communicate to our people. We said, trust us, we asked for your trust as we move forward and do these new things – and you know three years later we're saying, well, remember the thing that we asked you to trust us about? Um, err, we're going to change it. It's even worse when you write a book about it. Because a lot/some of the things I talked about in the book, we don't do anymore. But the principles are the same, the vision is the same, the values are the same, but the method is always going to be adjusted from time to time. So let's dip into what some of these things were.

Senior Leadership Team

FJM: You would have heard Patrick Lencioni talking about this last night (at the conference). Dominic Perri is here today from Amazing Parish and he's going to be doing a workshop. For those of you going to it – it's going to be great. This has been the single most greatest game changer in my life in the last couple of years as we finished Phase 1. Because, let me tell you something. I came to this parish. I've always had strong vision. My first hire was Ron who has been my sidekick through all this. He's the one who actually introduced me to Alpha many, many years ago. And we knew where we were going, we had a common vision, and I knew what my original strategy was going to be. Why? Because I had used it before in previous parishes, and it worked. But I had never moved into Phase 2 because I don't have those gifts. I get things going. I start things. I blow things up and start new things. But once they're going I kind of get bored and move on and start even more new things. And eventually I blow the engine, and the whole thing comes to a halt. So it required something different, a different way to lead.

RH: I heard it said in a blog I read recently that good leadership needs management and good management needs leadership. And Fr James is an amazing leader and he does blow things up, in a good way, because he wants great results, he expects great results, he expects changed lives, he expects staff and ministry leaders to do great things. And what ends up happening is often times his biggest influence is because you guys all invite him to travel all over the place and speak to your dioceses, and so we miss him a lot of the time, which is fine, we love to share him, but what happened was – that's when he'd have the opportunity to read really cool books and when he'd have opportunities to talk to people like you and get really inspired by good ideas, and then without any consultation at all, he would come back to our church and wreak havoc on us when we're already doing something. It was like, "Dude, what are you doing? Stop the madness. Why don't you ask some of us what a good idea is rather than asking everybody else out there?" And he had no idea he was wreaking havoc on our staff and where we were going.

FJM: The interesting thing is, you know, with the strategy that I knew, I knew this is what I wanted to do. The problem was as I said, it worked, and like Sam in the Lord of the Rings all of a sudden I realise, O my goodness I've never been this far out before and then I realised I don't know what I'm doing anymore. I honestly don't know what to do next. My strategy has expired. I need help. I need help.

We talk about 4 non-negotiables of a leadership team. These are very much reflective of what Pat Lencioni talks about in his 5 Dysfunctions of a Team. So we've kind of adjusted that a bit according to our experience, but it's really very much rooted in his teachings and we have some of his books here. And initially we tried to make our parish staff function as a leadership team, and it was at that point about 8 or 9 or 10 of us, and it just kind of wasn't working all that well.

RH: That's an understatement.

FJM: That's an understatement. Then we realised that the optimal size of a leadership team is really the pastor and 3 or 4 other people, or maybe 5 of them at the most. You can read about that in Pat's book.

RH: Was it fair to say it was working for you? Because you travelled and stuff, it was giving you an opportunity to get updated from other people and is it fair to say it was probably feeding your needs? At the time, in terms of meeting in a bigger group. Is that fair?

FJM: Yes, I think initially when we had staff meetings before we moved into Pat's methodology we would have weekly staff meetings. We'd pray together, and we'd have some time of sharing and we'd have updates from everyone, and that was good because I was travelling a bit and it kept me on track with things. But then we did change how we did things.

RH: And it's really important. And I want to point out to the pastors to hear this. It might be working for you, but if it's not working for your team, it's not working.

FJM: I was really excited. I was gone probably about 25% of the time. Was that good or bad?

RH: We've got it all written down. It was.

FJM: I'd be almost like proud, O yes I can be gone 25% of the time and my parish is great because I've got great staff and they're doing great, and I think I remember it was you Ron who said, pulled me in and sat me down and said, 'We're not doing great'.

RH: True enough, and to be honest with you and to be transparent, 2 years ago we were toxic. Our staff culture was toxic. It wasn't a fun place to work, there was a lot of dissension, there was a lot of water cooler talking going on, frustration was high. People were on the edge of burn out. Now we love Fr James, we love his mission, we love his passion, and yet, just because of the way he's hardwired he wasn't able to see that we were dying trying to keep up with the things he was blowing up and doing.

FJM: And I was having a blast. I'm loving it. When we talk about the 4 non-negotiables, this is No.1 Unanimity of Vision. We talked about this: vision is where you are going. And if you are going to form a senior leadership team, that close group that's going to meet with the pastor every single week to hammer out your tactical issues, the implementation of strategy, and even some low level strategic stuff (because we work out broad strategy with our pastoral council) you need to have unanimity of vision. You've got to have absolute commitment to where we're going and there has to be absolute intolerance of a different vision. Because if you're in a canoe in the middle of a lake with 3 people, and one person wants to go to the north shore, one person wants to go south and one wants to go east and west, and you all start rowing, guess what's going to happen? You're just going to go round and round and round in circles or tip the canoe. When you have 2 visions, you have division, and division at the top will divide the entire team. But the amazing thing about it is when you have unanimity of vision it opens the door for what Pat talked about – to have healthy conflict about other things.

RH: Fr James, if I could just say too. That doesn't just go for the senior leadership team. That also goes for the rest of your staff and your ministry leaders. You have to raise people up into ministry who have a common vision because they can be in the parish undermining everything you're doing. And so they might be great people, but it might not be a great time for them to be in leadership because they might not be on board with where we're going. And it's OK to remove people from leadership because that toxicity is what tears down churches and makes them less effective.

FJM: The 2nd non-negotiable is Balance of Strength, and this is absolutely fundamental. Last night Pat talked about the different tools you can use, DISC and Myers Briggs. We use StrengthsFinder from Gallup. We find it's a tool that came our way and it's been very enriching. We really recommend that you check that out. Basically we have this myth of the well balanced person, right? You know in the seminary we were formed to be well balanced. Well, guess what? There's no such thing as a well-balanced person. No such thing. We are all weird. But there is such a thing as a balanced team. I've got real gifts. I've got leadership gifts for influencing and vision and communicating vision and getting things going, but left to my own devices I blow things up. In the end I'll blow the engine. And I will drive everyone into insanity because I've got blind spots. I've got a whole bunch of blind spots. I'm also a terrible coach. I think I'm just too impatient. I'm just not good with that. And we found our staff were getting frustrated with me and just a whole bunch of stuff I'm not good at. I'm not 7 foot tall. And here's the great realisation – that everyone is gifted, everyone has particular gifts. You have leadership gifts that I don't have. And I really believe our parish…God was able to use our parish to bring us even further because we had the grace to bring a team around me that complemented my gifts. Sometimes pastors will bring a team around them and the people have all the same profile. You see we all have blind spots, and as I said last night the problem with blind spots is you don't know you've got them. And we need a team that will compensate. You know, again whatever tool you use you generally have those 4 quadrants. Make sure that those quadrants are covered.

RH: Just to give you some insight into our team. Now Fr James is really strong on influence. I'm really strong on relationships, Kate is really strong on executing and Rob is really strong on strategy. So that 4 of us that cover all 4 quadrants of what you'll find in 'Living Your Strengths' book. Where's Fr Simon? He's on the senior leadership team.

FJM: It's a great balance and it's an incredible gift. Now here's the thing about unanimity of vision. If you have total unity in vision it allows us to engage in healthy conflict, not about the vision, but about how we're going to get there. You know Pat when he's writing says that you should mine for conflict, because the more truth we can get on the table, the more perspectives from people who have our blind spots covered, the better decisions, the more information we are going to have to make the best decisions.

Healthy Conflict and Trust

FJM: And healthy conflict is a risky thing. We heard last night that's why you need to have trust and vulnerability. We are going to talk about that as well. But we have. I have to say that the 3 hours we meet every week (3 hours, O my goodness!), the 3 hours are the most exciting, fun, difficult 3 hours of my week. It's incredibly life giving. We have a blast.

RH: We do. I'd just like to say I only like mining for conflict when they are his ideas. I don't like mining for conflict when they are my ideas because I don't think it's appropriate. He's the priest, he can handle it.

FJM: We take conflict so seriously that this is a standard piece of equipment (shows a nerf ball blaster) at our senior leadership team meetings.

RH: And the thing is, his attention span is…and he gets bored easy, so he starts shooting people at random for no good reason.

FJM: Sometimes we are on the floor laughing. Here's the thing. We commit together, we pray together, we put up the white board, we have a quick report from our different teams, some stuff for accountability, but the main focus of our discussions are the decisions that need to be made around the implementation of our strategy, when we are not sure what to do. And I mean this in all humility, it's not like we can call the parish next door and say, 'What are you guys doing for this?' They're like, 'Huh? What are you talking about?' So we don't know. And we have some amazing discussions, and Pat talked last night about accountability. And I want to tell you this (and I'll just put the 4th one up, it's self-explanatory), vulnerability and trust. Because it gets real. We have sometimes very heated disagreements. We get upset. We get that silence. And we stop and say, what just happened there? Could we just talk it through? We don't let anything like that pass. It's very vulnerable and I'll tell you it's incredible, it really is. We talk about accountability because we will have decided, this is the principle, this is what we're doing and often, OK, sometimes I might come in with a decision and I want it to go this way, but deep down I know it is not in line with what we agreed a couple of meetings ago – and these guys don't let me get away with anything. And sometimes, and I'm going to be very, very honest, in the midst of this passionate discussion because its right there on the table – and remember it's not about vision, it's about how we get there, there is sometimes a part of me that wants to say, 'I'm the priest!'. But you know, I could do that and there's ways to say that verbally and non-verbally – and we don’t get away with it – you get called out on it. I get called out on it. Let's be clear that the goal of senior leadership team is not to come to consensus. We don't try to find consensus. If there's no clarity on what we've got to do, I'm the pastor, I'm the leader, I've got to make the decisions, but as Pat said if people have been able to invest in the process, they're going to buy in. But I know this, that if I was ever to abuse that authority – you know no one in that room is there for the pay, they can all find better jobs somewhere else. They've given their lives to this too, to this vision, to this dream, and for me to do that would be an act of violence, and beside the point 99.9% of the time they're right anyway, and I know it. And it has been an incredible experience.

RH: And that goes for us too. We come in with great ideas, but we always leave with the best idea. And I was the last guy to get shot down in a ball of flames in a senior leadership team meeting, and it was painful. It was really painful for me because I put a lot of thought into it. I did all the pre-work, I did all the discussions, I know where we're going, I know what we're doing, and these guys didn't agree and it drove me bonkers. And I left and we just had to pause it. Fr Simon in his wisdom said, 'Guys why don't we just pause this?' because it was heated, it was, you know, I was blowing my stack. It wasn't healthy, right? That happens sometimes. And we had to walk away and as a day or two passes I'm thinking yeah, they're right. Doh! I hate when that happens.

FJM: You see it's about passion, right? We talked yesterday about the splankna, remember? You know, the feeling you get when you get passionate people who see what you don't see? And I'll tell you, it's amazing. And to my brother priests, when I first realised I had run out of strategy, I felt so alone, because I'm the pastor I've led them this far out – like we can't see the shore anymore – and they're looking at me, and I don't know what to do anymore, I don't know what to do next. I've got to pretend. I'm alone. And since we formed this team and have been living it this way, it's been absolutely profound. There is no decision – I want to speak even to the bishops here, because I think this model we desperately need it in our church – there is absolutely no decision in my leadership that I am left to work through on my own. No decision whatever. Nothing. We want to work it out together, and no one's after my job, and it's been an incredible experience. You don’t have to be afraid about losing the authority in all this.

RH: Can I say something to that too? You spoke to the priests and bishops. I want to speak to the lay people here. Can we love our pastor enough to let him make the decisions around who those 2 or 3 people are? Again, it might not be you. You might be here, and an important part of your staff or your volunteers or your leadership, but if your pastor needs people around him that can help him to be the most effective pastor possible, can we put our egos aside and let him make that decision and then support it? Whether we are on it or we're not? I remember talking to you and pleading before we got there, pleading Fr James, who are your people? And I don’t care if I'm not one of them, but you need them.

FJM: And by the way, that conversation took place several years before I knew what Ron was really talking about. I remember we were actually in Royal Albert Hall in London and he was saying, 'Who are your people?' 'Who are your team?' I was like, 'Ron, I don't know what you're talking about'. And he saw it. And many of the other staff saw it long before I did. Let's move to the next one, I think back to those three Phases.

Process not Programs

FJM: Remember, what we're covering in this chapter is Phase 2 stuff. If you are here today from a parish that hasn't really begun to do anything to move from maintenance to mission, remember your focus is going to be Phase 1. So take notes, but put it aside and go back to it in time. Because the rocking and pushing out of the snow, you've got to do that. If you go into a parish that has no culture of discipleship and evangelisation and start doing this stuff it will blow up. You need to do Phase 1. But if Phase 1 works, you've got to move to Phase 2. And we had the first couple of years doing stewardship initiatives, we had tons of stuff going on. I think we had like 73 ministries one year and 76 programs of faith formation, for adults, children and families.

RH: And we'd be at staff meetings and someone would ask a question, 'Hey, who is responsible for that ministry?' I didn't even know we had that ministry.

FJM: I loved it, it was great. I was having a ball, you know, the more the merrier. That was my philosophy. And it was kind of like, something for everyone. Like when you go to MacDonald's and there's the full menu and you can take your pick, and in one sense I do believe that in that initial phase we needed to do it like that, but once the car got moving, once evangelisation and discipleship, more people like Laurie and her family, and people having conversions, hearing testimonies, the more that just became normal, we had to shift it. Because it's not just about random programs that aren't connected to each other. This is the thing, like people would do stuff, so we had a lot of stuff going on, a lot of busyness, but the question is, 'What's it all about? What's our purpose?' It's to make disciples. And we define our purpose statement, you will see it all over the place: 'To form disciples to joyfully live out the mission of Jesus Christ'. That's our purpose; not to be busy. I mean we might be busy making disciples to joyfully live out the mission of Jesus Christ, and that's good, keep doing it. But we can be busy doing a whole bunch of stuff that's not making any difference ultimately. And so this was another thing that we had to do.

RH: It was interesting. I was in the pharmaceutical industry and I was running into the hospital and Fr Owen Connolly was the chaplain there. And he said, 'Ron, how are you doing?' 'Hey, Father, I'm doing great, I'm so busy' and he took my arm and he was so sincere and he said, 'Ron, busyness is not a virtue'.

FJM: One of the things that I had to basically repent of was my 'the more the merrier'. I honestly, to be brutally honest, I think for me, I like the chaos, I think my own needs were being met by that, I think my own ego loved 'Look how busy we are, our parking lot's full all the time, we've got every room at the school..'

RH: That's not hard by the way; it's a small parking lot.

FJM: So I had to repent from a 'more is merrier' to a new philosophy called 'less is more'. Think about when you go to a restaurant, the best restaurants. Do they have 20 page menus or 1 page menus? The point is we can actually accomplish more for the kingdom of God by doing less things and doing them incredibly well, rather than doing a whole bunch of stuff even a little bit well, or oftentimes poorly. We can accomplish more. God can accomplish more in and through us by doing less things, especially when those things are the things that actually work. A couple of weeks after we were talking about this, I actually went on the internet and googled the name 'less more' and I found a photograph of a guy from the 1940s. His name is Les Moore – so we printed it off and framed it and it hangs in the room where we have our senior leadership team meetings and actually if you walk around his eyes actually follow you everywhere you go. And if you start a suggestion, 'Hey, I've got a great idea, how about we do this?' he actually shoots lasers out of his eyes and gives you a hundred volts. Because as many of you know, it is in one sense hilarious. But it's relatively easy to say no to a bad idea, but there's tons of good ideas, and every single week – especially when parishioners start waking up and taking on the mission and getting excited – they're like 'Woah, I've got a great idea' and every day there's lots of good ideas coming for us. And when I first started I would say, 'Yes, great, go for it', I'd just light fires everywhere. It wasn't such a good idea after all.

RH: In fact, we begged Fr James to no longer say 'Yes' to anything, but to say instead, 'That's a neat idea, you need to talk to Ron', and I say 'No'.

FJM: The next thing we want to talk about is the Game Plan. You've seen these pictures. I'll let Ron introduce this concept.

RH: So an archaeological dig, sometimes you'd think they happen by mistake, don't they? Maybe a big back hoe making a building or clearing something and all of a sudden they maybe bump into something that they think might be important, and then all the tools change, right? They get rid of the back hoe, they stake everything off, and they start painstakingly uncovering things to see what's underneath. And in many ways, well, it was already there, and we're just uncovering it. And with this spaghetti approach, with this busy approach we were taking at St Benedict's parish there were some things working great, somethings working well and somethings not working at all. And at one point during this second phase – that is all about nailing down the process – we started unearthing, removing the distractions away, to see what is really working. And I know at that time I was working with Tanya Rodgerson, who was previously with C.C.O. She was a staff member here and she was a genius at helping us see through the chaos and the busyness and the clutter to see what is actually working. And the Game Plan, it was unearthed, and it has allowed us to stay laser focussed now on forming disciples who joyfully live out the mission of Jesus Christ vs 'Oh man, I'm so busy'.
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FJM: We had always had a sense of the basic movement of the Game Plan and I've got to tell you this story: that 5 ½ years ago within my first 2 months in this parish, I went to a meeting of church leaders. There were 10 churches, Catholic and non-Catholic, and I had my parishioners with me and we were asked to think about our vision for the role that Alpha would play in the renewal of our church. And I was great, getting ready to write something down and the presenter said, we want you to draw a picture, and I said, 'Man, I hate that'. It turns out that the guy I was with, his whole life ambition was to be a cartoonist. So it was great, but we sat there and we thought things over and I said to him, 'I have this image of a pump, and the handle of the pump is the Alpha question mark', because I really believe that at least at this point Alpha is the best tool that I've found to help evangelise people; people from the pews and people from outside the pews. We've always brought both together in our Alphas. I think that is very, very important. And to pump them into a discipleship process so that's the image that comes to me – a pump that is pumping people through. And he said to me, 'Wow, the image that came to me was a church building filling up from the inside with water and when it reached the level of the windows, exploding the windows and flooding the city. So this is what we drew – or rather what he drew. My contribution is the written reference to Ezekiel 47 up there beside the church. And at the top, that's not a flying fish, that's actually Nova Scotia, the blue part being our diocese. We said our vision was that by pumping people through Alpha and evangelising and discipling them our church will slowly fill up with missionary disciples who will spill out and touch and change our city. And what absolutely blows me away is the fact that a little less than 5 years later that flow of water has somehow touched many of you, to bring you here today. So that was an amazing vision that God put on our hearts and it really was the beginning of a Game Plan. You've seen this poster in our foyer

Invitational Culture: Alpha: Alpha Team: Connect Groups: Ministry: Discipleship Groups: Worship

What we struggled with was a representation that communicated process but wasn't linear. That was very important to us. It's not that you do this, then you do this, then you do this. We also wanted a process that had multiple on-ramps. So this is basically our fundamental strategy in making missionary disciples. This is not just for the people in our church. The starting point is invitational church. Yes, we want to invite those in our pews who have not yet encountered Jesus personally, experienced the power of the Holy Spirit, who have not yet become missionary disciples to take Alpha. But we want to have an invitational culture. You heard about Hayden inviting everyone. That's what we want. That's what we celebrate at our parish. Whether the people say Yes or No, that's not our problem. Our call is to invite. And here's an important thing. Here in our context in Nova Scotia, Canada, and Canada, I think is a bit more advanced in the process of secularisation than the United States – so our fundamental interface with the unchurched is not the weekend experience, it's Alpha. Because I believe there are limits to what you can do (you can still do a lot of things) but in the end it will still be a bit strange because I don't think the Eucharist was meant to be a frontline tool to evangelise. That's why if you look here, (at the Game Plan), worship is at the very end. Now that doesn't mean that we don't recognise the presence of unchurched people in our weekend. We don't have signs up saying 'Only Committed Catholics Allowed'. And we try to maximise our weekends with the 3 H's, Hymns, Homilies and Hospitalities. And often a lot of people will start coming and then take Alpha. So we try to do both, but this is our primary strategy.

RH: And it's interesting too, because at one point we did have a couple of different models that we were wrestling with and we were just about to embark on a particular journey of communicating where we were going when I was brought on full time – just about 2 years ago – and I'd realised that it was a clash of two different influences and it wasn't going to work, and so fortunately  we were able to hit the pause button before we launched it – and it was such an important piece because where we were really falling short is at the very top, the apex, which is connect groups. Connect groups are where Alpha alumni go to connect and to grow. To grow how? To growth in all of the gifts and also in the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and it's out of that model that we have our very most trusted leaders as connect group leaders who then pastor, small 'p' pastor a small church because you (FJM) can't do it. I can't do it. But we want to care for you individually, we want you to be loved and cared for. Like how many priests here often, or occasionally, get a telephone call from the hospital? 'So and so is here, they would like you to come down and visit them or anoint them or what have you', and that's really important. But I tell you if you belong to a connect group and you go down, your health goes down, you've got 30 people around you providing food for your family, visiting you at the hospital, praying for you, and yes you will call the priest.

FJM: Yes definitely we have the sacrament of the anointing of the sick once a month, we'll anoint 120 people, and we do go out to homes and to the hospitals for sacramental ministry, but that's a whole other topic. They're about the demands that this is going to mean for our model of priestly ministry, where the pastor is the personal chaplain of everyone. If we cling to that model of ministry we are never going to be able to lead anything like this. So the traditional ways of belonging to our church and having a sense of belonging was often a personal relationship with the priest – and if you are in a church of 200 people or less, that's actually what you should do, you should keep going, because that's the model of leadership appropriate to the size of your church. But if you are a church of over 500 you need to change that, and definitely if you are a church – we get a weekend attendance here of between 1500 and 1800 people on a weekend and probably have about 2000 'regulars' – that model is not going to work. And if it does work, 2 things are going to happen: the level of pastoral care is going to be pretty small proportionate to the size of this church: and I'm going to be dead in 3 months: and all the growth that we've got is going to be coming to a standstill. And so we see this process as an invitational culture. You heard about the Journey of Hope, inviting people to a pre-evangelisation program, we've used the Marriage Course, the Parenting Course, Prayer Breakfasts, but ultimately the goal is to get people into Alpha. We do Alpha several times a year. We have lay witnesses. We constantly invite, invite. I invite people as well. After Alpha our goal is to get as many people as possible either back on the Alpha team or into a connect group. Because Alpha team is our basic leadership pipeline. You can only be in the Alpha team circle for a couple of years and then we literally fire you. You get moved on. Because a pipeline can only function as a pipeline if it keeps flowing, if people come out. And this often happens in churches, people often own their ministry and they block the pipe. And see we want – you heard about Laurie – essentially Laurie was formed in her leadership through the experience of Alpha team, so that when we fired her we said to her, 'What's the Lord's call on your life?' and then we came around to her and equipped her for this new ministry. You see connect groups (on the Game Plan). When I first started doing Alpha many years ago my primary concern was to fill in the catechesis. So that was it, get people through Alpha, and those who have – or have had or have been touched or have had an experience, let's bring them in and let's fill out the theological picture. That was my primary concern. But I still realised at the same time that we lost a lot of people. Those of you who have done R.C.I.A., do any of you lose people after the Easter Vigil? Happens all the time. And I became convicted that we need to focus primarily after people are evangelised into getting people into community, authentic Christian community, where, as Ron said, they can grow. So connect groups are primarily about connecting, they're about community, where people are loved and known and supported and are accountable to and for one another. And when people are caught up in a web of relationships, then they've got the rest of their lives to grow.

Ministry. We call everyone into ministry. Anyone can enter a ministry. We'll still invite people back to Alpha. We are seeking to have ministry shepherded from within connect groups. Ron, how many connect groups do we have right now?

RH: 13, I believe. We just had 3 new ones. 2 new ones, and I'm hoping to close another deal – right after we're done talking – and start our next one. But it's not growing. It's not keeping up with demand. Our demand far outweighs our supply, but it's really important. One of our values is we will not grow at a pace that exceeds the leaders that God reveals to us and raises up. Because I don't want to do anything poorly, it's important we do a great job. So we will not start something until we have the right people to lead it, and it's hard.

FJM: The next symbol is Discipleship Groups. It looks like a little flower or like 3 people gathered around a book. These are our small groups that are focussed on content. This is where our catechesis happens; adult catechesis, bible studies, different programs, and unlike what we did in Phase 1, where we had everything in the building with these big groups, we have decentralised this. All of the connect groups happen in homes. The discipleship groups, the majority of them happen in homes. Small groups between 4 and 10 people who will gather for some program whether its 4 weeks, 6 weeks, 8 weeks, 10 weeks. And the number of groups will fluctuate. Last Lent I think we had about 90 groups meeting at homes. We try not to manage this as much, because it would be impossible to manage. We want it to be impossible to manage. Because we want to say, 'grab 3 or 4 friends and gather for coffee and watch a DVD and talk about it'. That's it. We will vet resources though. We want to vet what people are watching, you know, we don't want any crazy stuff, you know what I mean. So, we're still kind of implementing this, in changing that model, but it has already started to bear fruit.

And finally, the final piece is Worship, and you'll see it’s the chalice and host are someone doing this, (person with raised arms) symbol of worship because the Eucharist is meant to be the source and summit of the Christian life. The problem is that in most of our parishes all we do is the Eucharist. The only experience of Christian life people have is the Eucharist, and it is not the source of anything, it's not the summit of anything, and the life, the vitality that can come through the Eucharist is blocked. And we believe that when people live the Game Plan to the fullest that's when worship will truly come to life.

And I think of someone like Laurie and her family, I mean, a perfect example, you know she was invited, she experienced an invitational culture here, she eventually did Alpha, she did her time in the Alpha team, she went into a connect group. (In fact I understand that Alan and Laurie are actually in 2 different connect groups – it could be a possible source of divisiveness to which connect group they might eventually end up in together.) Involved in disciple ship groups and then finally worship comes to life, and then ministry, involved in ministry. So it's been an incredible blessing for us.

We have 5 minutes and we've got a few more things to cover, but here's a picture of our family friendly connect groups, and I wish I had time to tell you the story of every person in this picture, because as you'll see Johnny B there, there's Laurie and her family at the back there, it's such a delight. Hundreds and hundreds of these gatherings have happened over the last number of years, and I think I've gone to 3. I was at one a couple of weeks ago, and I just ate food and prayed, and as we were singing and praying together there were babies crawling over my feet – I was in heaven. It was just such a joy to see this happening.

The Three Able's of Ministry

FJM: This actually came to me, I was thinking about this and it's not new, per se, but the idea of the 3 Able's of ministry, and the first one came out of the experience that we've talked about. The others followed. Sustainable, Scale-able and Transferable. We just want to say something quickly about it. Sustainability, this was Ron's big thing in calling me out, because, well, you tell the story.

RH: So Fr James' health actually wasn't so good for the first number of years he was here. He would get a virus of some sort, and it would take him down big time, and that would happen several times a year, and plus he'd be travelling and things like that. So he physically was not healthy, his schedule and all the other demands he had, plus the pressure of being a pastor of a big parish like this was hard. And he wasn't healthy and he knew he wasn't healthy, and people came along side of him and helped fund a consultant to come and help us restructure, which was wonderful. And he started getting healthy, because we had a healthy structure, which allowed him the support he needed to get healthy. And his physical health even got better, and that was great, but our staff – at the time I mentioned – they were burning out too. So he was healthy but we weren't healthy, and so, I'd say, OK I'm glad you're doing good, but we're not. It's so good for you.

FJM: I was so happy. I'd tell, 'I'm feeling so great everyone', 'yeah, well, we're not feeling so good'.

RH: And so we realised that we needed to stop every now and again because we red line here. We work really, really tirelessly. We've got amazing both volunteers and staff that give like you can't imagine. And we need to care enough about them to see when they're red lining and we need to say, 'How are you doing?', 'What's going on?', and 'How can I help?' We need to be sustainable, which means healthy, as individuals and as a staff team, as leaders and volunteers.

FJM: Healthy things grow and bear fruit.

RH: Amen.

FJM: The second thing is scale-able. Why does something need to be scale-able? If you're innovating and looking to create and establish a model, create something from the start that is scale-able, that can grow. Why? Because if your church is healthy, it will grow. If you have a missionary church, it will grow. You heard Laurie's story about her ministry. She started, she found one other person, within a year she had raised up other teams. They were able to multiply these courses. It was set up from the start to be scale-able. And if we have ministries that are running that are all focussed around one person, who is running around really, really busily and not calling out other people, not raising up other leaders, it's not going to grow. And your proportional impact is going to be very little in the larger organisation, even though you're very, very busy. So make it scale-able.

And finally transferable.

RH: That scale-ability thing, if I could just speak into that for a quick second, I know we're running out of time. If often does start with one person. And they're really good at something and we have to figure out why they're good at it. They often don't know why, and we help them figure it out and it only then does it become scale-able. Because sometimes people are just really good at stuff and we know that, but we've got to figure out why they're really good at it, and sometimes it's partnering up with them to understand it, and once we do understand it, then we can give it away, and that's the transferability piece. Like once we understand, then we become consciously competent. Ken Blanchard has a great book, 'The One Minute Manager' and stuff and he talks about those principles. But once we became consciously competent and knew why, we became really good. Then we can teach other people and give it away. And one of the things that we value here is to become a blessing, as much as God calls us to, to anyone who asks. And that's part of the reason we like to have churches like you understand what you are doing that works well, so you can bless your local diocese. So that people when they come to you – not when you go to them, unsolicited advice never works…

FJM: It doesn't work. I tried it.

RH. Yeah, you did. (laughter) You got shot down like a ball of flames. It was awesome. (more laughter) I told him not to do it. He did it anyway. (more laughter) He thought it was the Holy Spirit. It was indigestion. (more laughter). But when people knock on our doors we want to pour ourselves into people, so that they can make church work. We just love the church, don't we? We love the church.

FJM: Here's the thing, you know. As I said at the end of yesterday morning I'm sure, I wish I had an hour to spend with every single one of you here. Because I know there's things you're doing in your churches that we could benefit from, and learn from, especially if you're innovating. But if you've made the decision to move from maintenance to mission, and you do find something that works – and by the way for everything you find that works it takes about 3 false starts or mistakes to get there. But don't be afraid of taking risks. But when you do find something that works and bears fruit, we have a responsibility to communicate that to others, and to ensure that from the beginning when we construct a model of ministry to be a part of fulfilling our strategy and purpose that it should be transferable. That we should be able to say, 'here's how it can work in your context'. Finally we are just quickly, I'm going to ask Ron to speak about 3 Critical Success Factors for Ministries.

RH: And the 1st thing is, and we communicate this to all our ministry leaders. You need to be healthy. 'Health vs Toxicity'. Just because we are doing the Lord's work in the church doesn't mean we are healthy. Toxicity can reign in churches, and it stifles everything. So we teach people how to have that talk. Within team environments do we want to be healthy or are we going to let toxic rule? Because culture is created by two things: what we reward and what we tolerate. If we tolerate toxic behaviour, then that's the bed you made, and you actually deserve it. So root out toxicity. We demand health. And we get toxic from time to time, and we need to call each other out, and love each other enough, the mission that we're on can't. I always say, everybody has a bad day, but when a bad day turns into a bad week, a flag should go up. And a bad week should never turn into a bad month when you are in leadership, because there's too much at stake, and I need you to love me enough to call me out when I'm toxic.

The 2nd thing is a 'leadership pipeline'. Understand your ministry. Understand the different roles in that ministry. Rank them in terms of influence and responsibility. Your early entry points should have low responsibility and low impact. But the more you move through a pipeline, you grow in impact or influence and responsibility. But you need to define the different places because once you've defined each role, what it takes to be good at it, then you can have a great culture for apprenticing. Because now you actually understand your ministry, what's required at each phase, and how you need to grow people through your ministry. It was Rick Warren who said, 'don't use people to build up your church, use the church to build up your people'. What if we applied that to ministries as well? We want to make people great here by being a member of St Benedict's parish and what we do.

FJM: Ron began this morning by talking about whether we have the capacity to learn, the willingness to learn, whether we are teachable, and in truth, some days we are, some days we're not, especially when there's ego and there's pride and we may have, you know, come up with this great idea. Something we thought was great, and it turns out it's not so great and rather than having an honest conversation and backing away we double down. But sometimes it's not just bad ideas that are a threat to this, or bad models of ministry, but again, if you get something that starts working - eventually it's not going to work, and we need to be willing to allow ourselves to be pruned, and to allow our ministry models and our leadership structures to be pruned as well and 'pruning' is always a painful reality. It's always difficult. And yet Jesus says, you know, 'I will prune every branch that bears no fruit, it will be cut down and put in the fire'. But here's the thing, 'Every branch that does bear fruit, I'm going to prune it.' Why? So it will bear even more fruits. See it's not enough to have a good plan or a good model or something that's kind of working. If it's kind of working, let it be pruned so that it will work better. Let it be pruned again. Because as Ron said, we owe it to the Lord, to the mission of the church, to be the best that we can so that grace can build on nature. It's only the Lord who ultimately produces this fruit. So the question for us this morning is, 'Are we willing to learn?' I'm saying this to a bunch of people who have travelled to come and learn, so praise God for that.

So let's stand together and take a moment just to reflect on our ministries. I want you to think right now of everyone back home, your home parish, your staff, your ministry leaders, your volunteers, and let’s ask the Holy Spirit to reveal to us, to bring to mind to whisper in our ear, our hearts and our minds anything that we need to prune, even the things that might be working, even the things that are working. Does the Lord want to prune it, so it can bear even more fruit? So let's just wait, let's just ask the Holy Spirit to come as we did yesterday morning. I invite you to just close your eyes and just, if you're comfortable, to open your hands to just pray 'Come' in the silence of your hearts. Come Holy Spirit. Come Holy Spirit. Come into this place Lord. Speak to us now Lord. We come with expectant faith Lord. Come Holy Spirit. Holy Spirit you are welcome here. When the Holy Spirit comes, He will speak truth into our lives, and into our ministries and convict our hearts. (music)

You are welcome Holy Spirit. Come, Come Holy Spirit. Speak to us Lord. Speak into our hearts as we imagine our parishes, our ministries, our staff, those at home, even those who are here with us Lord. Convict our hearts right now. What do we need to stop doing? What needs to be cut and removed? What needs to be pruned Lord? Speak now, into our hearts, convict our hearts.

RH: I just invite you to, as you are praising God, as you are making space, to just to, if you've never just put your hands up before or just as a sign of openness. I see this hole here, and God just pouring His grace and mercy on us. Just allow, like Fr Simon talked about in his homily the other day, let it rain down on you. You don’t have to do it, but if you've never done it before allow yourself the freedom as you're singing this next verse to just raise your hands. Come Lord Jesus.

I just get this image while we were praying, this beautiful image of just being in a big field, with flowers all over the place, and just dancing, just hands in the air, just so aware that God's just pouring His mercy, His grace, incredible freedom to just be yourself. You're loved. You are loved. You are loved. It's awesome. As we were praising I just see this field and I was just dancing, and God's rejoicing and just smiling. He loves you. Fr James used to have a dog, and he used to love to watch him run, because the dog was crazy, it just loved to run. You were meant to praise God. You were made to praise God, to experience His love and to give Him glory and praise. Thank you Lord. Let us just dance with You as we sing this (music)
We praise You. Let Your love just pour down on us, wash away our egos. Praise You Jesus. Praise You God. You are awesome.

FJM: Father we bless You and thank You. We thank You for this time of grace. Lord we remember Your word to us to not be afraid. Do not be afraid. And Lord I pray for the parishes here today who are looking at beginning Phase 1, and with everything that that means to push the car out of the snow, and Lord I pray that they may not be daunted because Lord, You are pushing with them. You are with them. Lord, I pray for the parishes who perhaps are on the verge of Phase 2 and might not know it. Lord, I pray that You will give them wisdom to truly know what to let go of, what to stop doing, what to focus on. And Lord, I pray for any parishes here today that who are moving towards Phase 3, because Phase 3 doesn't happen when Phase 2 is finished. That's the amazing thing, Lord, Phase 3 happens one person at a time, just like Laurie, as she is equipped for mission and off she goes. Just like Flavia, she's equipped for mission and off she goes, and like other people throughout the world. So Lord we bless You and thank You for this day. We pray through Christ our Lord. Amen.

(The remainder of the video recording has some housekeeping announcements regarding lunch, dinner and transport, and some more music.)
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You can view the recording at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUtE9nbMsjE
This talk begins around 32 mins 40 seconds in.
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For a 16 page print friendly version, that has edited out some of the 'just', 'so', 'and', and other not fully necessary linking words, and has edited a few other bits to make it flow better, download the PDF below. The testimony that began the plenary session has been included, because it is referred to several times in the main presentation.

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​Personally I suspect that Phase 3 is corporate and not individual. That healthy things not only grow, they reproduce. Whether that is in birthing new movements and ministries, or whether that is pioneering new parishes with the right culture from the get-go, or both, we'll have to wait and see. 

Workshop 4E – Who do we think we are? Models of Parish that help or hinder our mission.

This workshop was led by Lorraine McCarthy, co-ordinator for Alpha in a Catholic Context, and a spiritual director with many years of pastoral associate experience behind her.
You can find her on Facebook and Twitter .

Working out who do we think we are is an important question, because we cannot communicate a clear vision or mission without agreeing about our purpose and identity.

Then we can ask 'Who do people outside the church think we are?'

Lorraine showed us a very good video-clip prepared by the diocese of Wheeling-Charleston and the Any Given Sunday Project about the various reasons people give for not coming to Sunday Mass.

***Hopefully access to the video-clip link will be restored soon www.anygivensundayproject.org

They included: 'I've got to get my life together first'; 'They're hypocrites, who only care about money'; dress code; nervousness; 'I don't believe everything you do'; 'It is only for wimpy girly men'; 'My past is an issue'

We were invited to chat about these reasons, and any others we could come up with.

We have to build a big bridge of trust. Outsiders no longer look favourably upon us as a church.

Before we begin to welcome, we have to break down those barriers.

Trust is not the same as an active personal faith, but it is a step in the right direction.

We were then given three questions to chew on:
•Have you seen evidence of negative attitudes in people on the fringes of your parish?
•How is a bridge of trust built?
•Name one step your parish can take / does take to build bridges of trust in your community.

There is a difference between being a welcoming community and being an inviting community. Building trust has to happen off church property, eg on train trips, down at the footy club.

Who do WE think that we are?

The Church's mission is given in Matthew 28:19-20
Go, therefore, make disciples of all nations; baptise them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teach them to observe all the commands I gave you. And look, I am with you always; yes, to the end of time.'

Making Disciples is the core mission statement of our parish.

Pope Francis encourages us in Evangelii Gaudium 25

I am aware that nowadays documents do not arouse the same interest as in the past and that they are quickly forgotten. Nevertheless, I want to emphasize that what I am trying to express here has a programmatic significance and important consequences. I hope that all communities will devote the necessary effort to advancing along the path of a pastoral and missionary conversion which cannot leave things as they presently are. “Mere administration” can no longer be enough. Throughout the world, let us be “permanently in a state of mission”.

Models of Practical Ecclesiology: The Presumptions that hinder our mission

Parish as Social Club
We might see parish as a place for community building, and for leisure and social activities, but we have to ask whether in doing so we are building Christian community. Socialising and Christian Fellowship are very different. Socialising is getting people of like minds together, and excluding those who are 'a little bit different'. Socialising can tie up facilities and resources. Fellowship leads to people saying, 'look how they love one another'.

Parish as Funeral Home
Funerals are an important part of the provision of pastoral care. People with little or no church affiliation expect a funeral Mass and the use of parish facilities for refreshments afterwards. It takes some 6-8 hours for a priest to prepare for a funeral. If he has an 8am Mass and a 10.30am funeral, he has no time and energy for anything else. Funerals, although necessary, have the potential to cripple the timetable and energy of the priests, staff and people of the parish.

Parish as Museum
We have a fixation on the parish buildings and maintaining things of the past, the outward forms of our faith. 80-90% of parish finances can be spent on maintaining, insuring, heating and cooling buildings. The clustering of parishes that is going on means that some parishes have sets of presbyteries, churches and halls. Some of the funds tied up in buildings could be released for more staff or more modern facilities. Are our buildings meeting the needs of our current parish identity or are we doing the equivalent of marching around with pom poms on our feet like the Greek Presidential Guard – relics from times gone by?

Parish as Bank
When a parish is following a maintenance model, its primary focus is on maintaining the flock. Concurrent with this will be a focus on debt reduction and having money in the bank as a buffer. As a parish's average age of member increases, pressure is on to save now to make it through future times of financial aridity. But Jesus Christ calls us to a kind of 'venture capitalism'. If you are asking members to give of their resources to aid the mission of the Church, then if that money is saved in the bank rather than spent on the primary 'making disciples' mission of the Church –something stinks. Often we play it too safe, too careful. When a strong vision is presented, people will buy-in and donate. Disciples are raised up through relationships not through buildings, and you need the parish staff to enable the relationships.

Parish as a School
For many parishes their main missionary and financial focus is the parish school. It is not unusual to see a nice school adjacent to parish plant (church, office. meeting rooms, presbytery etc) that is in poor repair. Some parishes are contributing $30,000 per annum as well as the labour of parish staff members to keep the local parish primary school open for business. How did we get to this situation when the example Jesus gives in the Gospels is of teaching the adults and blessing the children? Traditionally (at least in living memory) we've been teaching the children and blessing the adults! To follow Jesus our teaching priority should be adults not children.

Parish as a Soup Van
In this model the parish exists to provide services to the parish members and to the community. Such a model risks seeing individuals categorised through the specialised care that they need, and not as people called and gifted to serve God's mission.

Evangelii Gaudium 183
Consequently, no one can demand that religion should be relegated to the inner sanctum of personal life, without influence on societal and national life, without concern for the soundness of civil institutions, without a right to offer an opinion on events affecting society. Who would claim to lock up in a church and silence the message of Saint Francis of Assisi or Blessed Teresa of Calcutta? They themselves would have found this unacceptable. An authentic faith – which is never comfortable or completely personal – always involves a deep desire to change the world, to transmit values, to leave this earth somehow better that we found it. We love this magnificent planet on which God has put us, and we love the human family which dwells here, with all its tragedies and struggles, its hopes and aspirations, its strengths and weaknesses. The earth is our common home and all of us are brothers and sisters. If indeed “the just ordering of society and of the state is a central responsibility of politics”, the Church “cannot and must not remain on the sidelines in the fight for justice”. All Christians, their pastors included, are called to show concern for the building of a better world. This is essential, for the Church’s social thought is primarily positive: it offers proposals, it works for change and in this sense it constantly points to the hope born of the loving heart of Jesus Christ. At the same time, it unites “its own commitment to that made in the social field by other Churches and Ecclesial Communities, whether at the level of doctrinal reflection or at the practical level”.

We are called to witness with both our words and our actions.

Evangelii Gaudium 200
Since this Exhortation is addressed to members of the Catholic Church, I want to say, with regret, that the worst discrimination which the poor suffer is the lack of spiritual care. The great majority of the poor have a special openness to the faith; they need God and we must not fail to offer them his friendship, his blessing, his word, the celebration of the sacraments and a journey of growth and maturity in the faith. Our preferential option for the poor must mainly translate into a privileged and preferential religious care.

We have to do both together, practical care and spiritual care for those in need, especially the poor. But a parish should primarily be where competent apostles are formed and sent out to bring Jesus Christ to the world through acts of love and mercy. At least some of our energy and resources have to be used to form people to use their gifts. The more apostles we send out, the more all that good stuff we are called to do is multiplied.

At this point workshop participants were invited to discuss the following question: Do you see echoes of these models operating in your own mindset or in your parish?

Archbishop Porteous: 'Evangelisation is not an ecclesial marketing campaign. The Church does what she does because Jesus has changed our relationship to everyone.'

Parish as Photocopier
This is a model for evangelising, discipling and missioning. Evangelisation is the work we do to draw people in, just like the photocopier draws in paper. Everything we do has to have the capacity to draw people in. Discipling is what we do in the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA), in schools, in sacramental preparation. Through the catechesis and sacraments people are transformed in Christ, just like the photocopier prints, copies, fold and staples, our task is to imprint Jesus on hearts and souls through their involvement and formation in the parish. Just like you can't get the ink off the photocopied paper, the transformation is meant to be permanent. Missioning is the sending out of apostles. In a photocopier, the paper that comes out the other end is designed to be a message distributed to many. Likewise, the parish is designed to send forth its members to spread the message about Jesus, the Son of God.

This kind of cycle is how the Church (and parish) works best. A healthy parish looks like this, with all three parts working properly. Are our parishes overheated, jammed or gathering dust?

Who wants change? Yes, everybody does.
Who wants to change? Nobody does.

What are the characteristics of a mission-driven parish?
•It is united in how it understands mission
•It regularly talks about mission
•It has multiple experiences available for those at pre-evangelisation, kerygma and catechesis stages
•There is a clear, simple path for discipleship, which is visible and understandable by everyone.

Stages of trust and curiosity
-are where pre-evangelisation is used
Stages of openness and seeking
-are where the kerygma is presented
Stages of discipleship and apostleship
-are where catechesis is offered

The game plan or discipleship path looks like this:
Invitation, Alpha, Alpha team member, Connect group member, Ministry group member, Discipleship group (to each year learn something) and Worship

All parishioners are expected to participate in the game plan at their level of interest.

The culture of discipleship contains an expectation of growth, where the relationship with Jesus and the faith community is nurtured and sustained.

Let's make Pope Francis' dream in Evangelii Gaudium 27 real:
I dream of a “missionary option”, that is, a missionary impulse capable of transforming everything, so that the Church’s customs, ways of doing things, times and schedules, language and structures can be suitably channelled for the evangelization of today’s world rather than for her self-preservation. The renewal of structures demanded by pastoral conversion can only be understood in this light: as part of an effort to make them more mission-oriented, to make ordinary pastoral activity on every level more inclusive and open, to inspire in pastoral workers a constant desire to go forth and in this way to elicit a positive response from all those whom Jesus summons to friendship with Himself. As John Paul II once said to the Bishops of Oceania: “All renewal in the Church must have mission as its goal if it is not to fall prey to a kind of ecclesial introversion”.
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My response

This workshop highlighted what the missing link is: trust. By and large parishes are doing better at greeting and welcoming…but that only works if a newcomer has the courage to enter the door of the church. Too often we sit and wait for them to come, and forget that the first word of the Great Commission Matt 28:18-20 is Go as in 'Go, get 'em'.

So the question becomes, how do we get an outsider to go from thinking of church going folk as weird aliens steeped in stupidity and superstition and a danger to children to thinking of us as people just like them finding real help from God in the struggles of life? It is not going to happen through a letterbox drop or an ad in the local newspaper, it has to be living person to living person. Good quality testimonies on YouTube have their part to play, but won't reassure a viewer about the type of person they would meet if they showed up at church. That's where the dog walking lady who lives on the same street and stops and chats has an infinite edge, if she mentions she goes to church and once in a while says, 'hey, would you like to come too?'.

'Building trust has to happen off church property' and by extension where you naturally find lots of people'. That means we need something to precede kerygma opportunities like Alpha. St Paul Street Evangelisation teams are one way of doing this: http://streetevangelization.com/ . Having a table at the local once a month market stalls is another. Renting vacant space in a busy local shopping centre and setting up an area of prayer and rest, with a corner to listen to personal stories and offer intercessory prayer for needs revealed is something else to consider. Entering teams in local fun runs and walkathons for charitable causes is an option, as is getting together contingents for the public celebration of days of national significance (eg. a lone priest at the local dawn service on Anzac Day will make a much bigger impact if there are 30 parishioners with recognisable name badges with him, who mingle and chat with people they don’t know before and after the ceremonies).

The image that keeps coming back to me is of a car with the motor running, and the wheels turning, but not touching the ground. Unless the rubber of the tyres makes contact with the street, the car will go nowhere. Local parishioner to local person conversation that includes content about prayer, faith, Jesus, and the benefits of worship as a united community is what will get the rubber hitting the road...it might take a few times to gain traction…but that's what will get the missing link of trust active again.

I've seen all these models of parish (except the photocopier) in action. Chances are you have as well.

Parish as social club is a tricky one because generally we have to get to know each other first before we are comfortable to talk about what God has done for us, and is doing with us. Having a culture that expects one to lead to the other, and facilitates it; that's the goal to aim for. Beware of the subtle forms of exclusion: locations difficult to get to by public transport, functions with a cover charge that people on a very tight budget could not afford.

Parish as a funeral home is unavoidable, firstly because burying the dead and praying for them are acts of mercy; secondly because they are moments of truth. Depending on how the family of the deceased is treated, they will either grow in openness to God and parish or they will shake the dust from their feet and never look back.

Parish as museum, parish as bank, parish as a school and parish as soup van are part of our commitment to those of the past who built them up, and part of our commitment to those of the future who will benefit when we are long gone and pushing up daisies. The issue is whether scarce resources are being managed with a balance between maintenance and growth.

Surely we would all laugh at the business owner who didn't have budgets for advertising, public relations, professional development, and product research and development. Without them he'd he would see no growth and sooner or later the business would be insolvent. Likewise we can no longer view budgets for pre-evangelisation, kerygma, and adult catechesis as optional luxuries; they have to be looked on as essential costs of doing 'missionary discipleship' business. Granted, those budgets might have to start small and grow gradually, but they have to start!

I do really like the parish as photocopier analogy. It is very good for helping people understand the making disciples process; highlighting why each part of the process is absolutely necessary and working out which part of the process their God-given gifts have equipped them to serve in most. In this model, let's not forget where the electrical power comes from: co-operation with the Holy Spirit and lots of intercessory prayer. Even the best photocopier will be useless unless the connection to the Holy Spirit power source is switched on.
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In the next issue will be notes from the homily from the third Mass of the conference with Cardinal Wuerl, archbishop bishop of Washington presiding.
 

The title of Cardinal Wuerl's Keynote address was Pope Francis, Renewal and Parish Evangelisation
His Archdiocese of Washington bio.
His Wikipedia page.
He can be found online at Twitter using @Cardinal_Wuerl and on his regular blog http://cardinalsblog.adw.org/

Thank you for your kind introduction. It is pleasant to be a part of Proclaim 2016. So much of the renewal and evangelisation is in the lived experience in our parishes. That's where every kind of action takes place. Our Pope speaks of his experience of parish in Evangelii Gaudium 28:
'The parish is not an outdated institution; precisely because it possesses great flexibility, it can assume quite different contours depending on the openness and missionary creativity of the pastor and the community. While certainly not the only institution which evangelizes, if the parish proves capable of self-renewal and constant adaptivity, it continues to be “the Church living in the midst of the homes of her sons and daughters”. This presumes that it really is in contact with the homes and the lives of its people, and does not become a useless structure out of touch with people or a self-absorbed group made up of a chosen few. The parish is the presence of the Church in a given territory, an environment for hearing God’s word, for growth in the Christian life, for dialogue, proclamation, charitable outreach, worship and celebration. In all its activities the parish encourages and trains its members to be evangelizers. It is a community of communities, a sanctuary where the thirsty come to drink in the midst of their journey, and a centre of constant missionary outreach.'

Amoris Laetitia 202: 'The main contribution to the pastoral care of families is offered by the parish, which is the family of families, where small communities, ecclesial movements and associations live in harmony'.

How do we see that each parish carries out these many missions?

There is a new spirit of welcome evident today. Pope Francis is reaching people. We can see the development of his thought through Evangelii Gaudium, the Synod, Laudato Si and Amoris Laetitia. He writes from the perspective of a pastor of souls, so they are not theological treatises but words from a pastor of souls.

So what does the Church/Christ offer us today? What do we bring to the world of today? A while back I was giving a keynote address at Harvard University on the topic of the Role of religion and faith in a pluralistic society. Following the address there was time for questions. A lawyer, in full garb, named Albert had his hand up. 'What do you people, and religion in general, think you bring to our society?' My answer was a return question, 'What do you think the world would be like without the voices of the religious traditions in our world – reminding us You Shall Not Kill, You Shall Not Steal etc, - reminding us that someday we must answer to God for our actions. How much more harsh would this culture be? 'His answer, 'It would be a mess.'

The Christian Gospel teaching us about right and wrong and about God's love may seem to being eclipsed by secular voices. At the Synod for the New Evangelisation one of the speakers described secularism as a cultural tsunami that has washed across our world, taking with it so many cultural markers and frames of reference: on marriage and family, on right and wrong.

The present energy and focus in the Church is towards openness and outreach. That level of energy has increased with Pope Francis' smiling face of welcome to the world. What is the New Evangelisation? St John Paul II spoke of the need for a New Evangelisation, new in ardour, new in method and new in expression. Pope Benedict renewed this call for a new evangelisation, seeing it as a prophetic task of love to evangelise the whole world. Pope Francis calls us all to the work of the new evangelisation. It is a hallmark of his ministry and preaching. 'Go Out, Go Out', he says, 'Go Out and share the beauty of the Gospel and the amazement of the encounter with Jesus.'

Outreach is especially involved in parish ministry. Blessed Paul VI taught us that we have to do more than just speak the words, we have to be modern examples of them: we only listen to teachers if they are witnesses.

How do we invite people? Sometimes it is just a matter of actually doing it. As I went down the street yesterday a Church of Scientology brochure was offered to me. Wouldn't it be wonderful to have run into a Catholic lady handing out parish bulletins? On a plane recently I had an aisle seat, and the person sitting next to me asked,
'Have you been born again?'
'Yes'
'When?'
'At Baptism.'
'Oh, you're a Catholic'.
She had a lot of bags, so I asked her whether she had a bible. She didn't, but she did have some 3"x5" cards with scriptural texts on them. One had the passage from Matthew 16 where Jesus tells Peter that he is the rock on which He will build His Church. She asked me, 'Tell me about this church thing'. So I did. But I was struck by how much we take for granted. So many people have no idea about anything about the Church, the sacraments and the Eucharist. Afterward the man across the aisle leaned over and said, 'Hey Father, I'm a Catholic, and I didn't know that.'

Renewal requires these elements:
•Renewal of personal faith. Not just the assent of the mind, but prayer asking the Holy Spirit to fill us.
•To stand confident in the truth. We don't have to apologise for our Risen Lord.
•The desire to share it.

The evangelising disciple has to know and be confident in the message.

In 1962 Vatican II began with the goal of preparing the Catholic faith and mission to shine forth to bring people to receive the Church's love. The purpose was to present better the precious deposit of Christian doctrine, and to make it more accessible to Christian people and people of goodwill and to show the strength and beauty of the doctrine of the faith.

Looking back over the time from the mid-1960s until now, we can see the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Pathways of renewal began, some consistent with the Gospel, some not and they introduced confusion into the liturgy and catechesis. Even before becoming Benedict XVI, Cardinal Ratzinger began to work on the hermeneutic of renewal and against the hermeneutic of discontinuity. This need for a deeper appreciation of our faith - so that we can be prepared to speak it - has been verified by a whole line of pontiffs.

Paul VI stood up for the truth despite the times of turmoil around him. John Paul II's task was to implement Vatican II and he spent 27 years doing that. Benedict XVI's writings renewed our appreciation of scripture and patristics – the profound roots going back to the revelation of Jesus Christ. With Pope Francis we are the beneficiaries of 50 years of preparation for this time of fresh perspective. Pope Francis brings his own emphasis to this renewal – that the role of the laity in the renewal is absolutely essential. 'Go out, encounter people, accompany them on the journey so that more people may experience Jesus Christ.'

Collegiality – working together collaboratively and co-operatively- is also for parish, reinforcing the message of the college of bishops. Amoris Laetitia gives us a perspective on renewal and its content shows us how to do what Pope Francis invites us to do – to listen. The Synod on the Family, in its two parts, was a time to listen, to talk, to dialogue. Out of that experience, and consensus, came the apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia. In it is a focus on the human person as the object of an invitation to faith, speaking more about grace and less about law and obligation. The shallow happiness with which many are content falls short of the joy that should be the sustenance of every believer.

We can now actually hear, understand and be willing to share our faith, as a result of these post Vatican II years. We need to hear that God is a loving forgiving God. While we might get tired of asking for forgiveness, He never gets tired of granting it. At the same time we have to be aware of these words of Jesus, and do them: 'You will be My witnesses; go out, and make them disciples'. God's mercy and our conscience leads us to focus on living our lives as an expression of mercy and love.

The principle attributes of a missionary disciples are:
•Listening
•Accompanying
•Discerning
•Evangelising

The Synod on the Family was preceded by extensive consultation. Pope Francis understands this process of listening to the faithful. This synodality, this journeying together is essential for the Church today. Not just listening, but accompanying. We are going at this together. This involves a change of style and intensity which has implications for parish life and personal outreach. Pastors need to do more than just teach Church doctrine, they must take on the smell of the sheep and realise that we are here to serve. Our liturgy does not have to be so complex that it is off-putting.

Not too long ago I was in a cab in Rome. The traffic was chaotic and the cabbie was the type to drive while looking at you. 'Have you met this Pope?' 'Yes!' 'You can understand him when he speaks, not like you people.'

We need to present the faith, the kerygma, in all its clarity. In Pope Francis' morning homilies at Mass we see a continuous renewal of the kerygma of faith made simple.

We have to help our people discern what does it mean to say Christ is Risen.

Amoris Laetitia 37: 'We have long thought that simply by stressing doctrinal, bioethical and moral issues, without encouraging openness to grace, we were providing sufficient support to families, strengthening the marriage bond and giving meaning to marital life. We find it difficult to present marriage more as a dynamic path to personal development and fulfilment than as a lifelong burden. We also find it hard to make room for the consciences of the faithful, who very often respond as best they can to the Gospel amid their limitations, and are capable of carrying out their own discernment in complex situations. We have been called to form consciences, not to replace them.'

People respond as best they can to God's call within their limitations. We are called to help form their consciences. We need to do this so that we can all grow closer together to Christ. As we do this, we all draw closer to Christ.

What kind of qualities do our new evangelisers need to have?
It is a moment of grace. Calling parish a neighbourhood of grace is a beautiful description. We are living in a new moment – given the history of the Church and the special emphasis that Pope Francis brings.

Courage & Boldness
In the Acts of the Apostles, before Pentecost we see the apostles timid. Afterwards we see them bold. Peter and Paul both boldly preached Jesus, and this boldness was born of the confidence in the truth of the message.

Connectedness to the Church
We are not individuals, we are members of the Church. Renew this revelation, recognise it. Our membership of the community that passes on the good news of Jesus is our authentication. Children get to the heart of things much better than we do. For 30 years I have kept a letter I received from a child called Dominic who was then in Year 4: 'Dear Bishop, I find it amazing that you knew somebody, who knew somebody, who knew somebody, who knew somebody…..who knew Jesus.' It is our living continuity with the disciples who knew Jesus that matters.

Sense of Urgency
We are not passive bystanders. We have to be involved, and play our part in the New Evangelisation. It is our turn now. Others will take it up later. When we look at the visit of Mary to her cousin Elizabeth we see what urgency looks like in action – she went in haste on a long and difficult journey.

Joy
It is alright to smile. The Gospel is a glorious announcement. Christ is risen, truly risen. He is with us. 'You should see Me in the faces of the people you care for.'

We are called to reinvigorate our faith every day, to share it, and to be open to the movement and outpouring of the Holy Spirit as we try to bring the Good News to others: as we share the simple announcement: Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.
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We were then given a discussion question: What is one thing that struck you about Pope Francis' vision of evangelisation for your parish?
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My response

Cardinal Wuerl is even more impressive in person than on paper. He went out of his way (just like Pope Francis) to greet and chat to as many non-dignitaries as possible. Even sitting still he still exuded the presence of the Holy Spirit.

There is a lot to unpack from this talk, and it bears reading and re-reading several times. However the part that stayed with me the longest was that we are living in a privileged time of grace, prepared by God during the last half-century and that we need to respond to God's call for us Now. When I think about all this the picture of a big wave of grace comes to mind, building and building - a bit like a tsunami-, and that we need to ride that wave as it begins to move. But the time is short, and if we are too slow to respond, then we will miss that wave of grace.

The call to 'Go Out' is one we need to hear and work out how to respond to. Frequently we put on programs and expect people to come to us, and to come to the parish buildings. As was recalled to me recently, Jesus did not sit in a synagogue and wait for people to come to Him. He went to every town and village He could get to. Somehow we need to get out of our parish building mindset and set up outreach in the community, where people go and gather. Granted, there is a significant amount of red tape (paperwork) and money that local Councils want these days for setting up a street stall – or to get a pop-up stall in a shopping centre – but our commitment to mission has to find ways through these obstacles.

On the good news side, it isn't necessary 'to reinvent the wheel'. St Paul Street Evangelisation is doing great work, and training people too. Their Twitter feed is worth following @spstreetevan . Faith on Tap @FaithOnTap, Theology on Tap and Spirituality in the Pub are all doing their outreach in venues where schooners and middies available. The very good work 40 Days For Life does as a public witness against the evils of abortion cannot be underestimated from an evangelical perspective either.

Anyone who has listened to Pope Francis over the past few years has heard that we need to do more to truly listen to people and accompany them where they are at. The next step, of helping them discern how best to respond to God in the concrete circumstances of their lives, hasn't had much 'air-play' up until now. But we do need to plan for it, otherwise it won't happen. Maybe we will hear more about that when we start getting the listening and accompanying going.

That Roman cab driver sure issued a challenge! It is all too easy to forget that we speak in what to the ears of others is 'unintelligible church-speak'. To get any traction with our listeners, we are going to have to learn the local patois, just like Our Lady did when she came to speak to St Bernadette at Lourdes.

I loved Cardinal Wuerl's description of the Church as a community of believers who have passed on their knowledge of Jesus from the first disciples to us today. Viewed that way, Church isn't an option extra but is the way we meet the living, breathing Jesus.

Urgency: I can't tell you how often my memory replays for me Warwick Neville saying 'The Gospel message is always urgent'. If it doesn't bother us that the things we have failed to do today may have stopped someone encountering Jesus, then it should. But for that encounter there is a chance he or she could be eternally lost. Hmmm, that parish Facebook page that I started pushing for over a year ago, just think how many people might have been reached or at least have had a thought about God cross their brains if it had happened back then.

For myself, I am making a point of trying to get into conversation with anyone who crosses my path whether it be waiting at the chemist, sitting on a train or bus, or trying to make sure that the stranger who came to church this morning was acknowledged as a person. So far the openings haven't come to speak directly of faith in Jesus, but hopefully these 'practice runs' will eventually produce that kind of fruit. On the plus side, every person has been memorable and in quieter moments prayed for afterwards.
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In the next issue will have the homily from the opening Mass of the conference with Archbishop Coleridge presiding. I often find that the conference homilies contain the true keynotes of conferences like these.

A reminder that these notes are indeed rough. Many times I may not have caught Cardinal Wuerl's thought correctly or have mis-decoded my hasty scrawls. Apologies for any errors.
 

On Monday 13 June and Tuesday 14 June 2016, the parish of St Benedict's Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, ran a 2 day conference to share their experiences of successful parish renewal. Using #DR16 will get you an overview of the conference via Twitter or Facebook.
 
I wasn't able to attend in person, but I was able to participate through the Livestream video of the plenary sessions which were uploaded to the internet. http://livestream.com/accounts/6379109
 
Here follows a rough transcript of that Plenary Part 3 and then my own response to it. Why bother? Not everyone likes getting their information via video, and going through the process of taking notes and typing them up enables the message to get internalized more and shared with others, and it also forces me to go looking for the background information and links to round things out. And there's no guarantee how long the Livestream option will be available for either.
 
This session could have been entitled 'Stewardship'
 
It was introduced by Fr Mallon with the quip; 'If you want to get Catholics to shut up, begin the Sign of the Cross. It works every time.' #DR16 was the No.1 trend on Twitter in Canada that day.
 
This was followed by some praise and worship songs with good lyrics:
'Open up the heavens, we want to see You. Lord unveil our eyes. Open up the floodgates, a mighty river, flowing from Your Heart, filling every part of our praise.'
'Our God is able. He will never fail us. He has done great things. In His Name we overcome. He defeated the grave.'
 
Rick Fersch then spoke to us, currently the Director of Evangelization and Stewardship for the Archdiocese of Seattle and formerly the CEO of Eddie Bauer (a clothing / outdoor adventure supplies store, Kathmandu would be an Australian equivalent)
 
My three aims for this talk are to
•Fan the flame of renewal
•Inspire and empower transformation in your parishes
•Give you the tools for growth/engagement
 
The Archdiocese of Seattle has 174 parishes and missions, and somewhere between 750k and 1 million Catholics. It is traditional in Seattle to begin a talk with a prayer and a joke.
 
St Thomas Merton's Prayer of Abandonment
My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me.
I cannot know for certain where it will end.
Nor do I really know myself, and that I think I am following Your will does not mean I am actually doing so.
But I believe the desire to please You does in fact please You.
And I hope I have that desire in all I am doing.
I hope I will never do anything apart from that desire.
And I know if I do this You will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it.
I will trust You always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death.
I will not fear, for You will never leave me to face my perils alone. Amen.
 
The joke was about how a wife knew that her husband had come home drunk. Plenty of evidence there was, but the most damning were the band-aids on the hallway mirror where he had tried to dress the broken-glass wounds on his rear end.
 
I am an intense kind of person, and I find that adding a bit of humour and laughter helps. I retired from Eddie Bauer in Jan 2012, after 16 years of Catholic education and a degree in sociology from Villanova Uni in 1971. I've been serving the church full time for the last 13 years. I'm 44 years married with 4 children and 5 grandchildren.
 
Is it just me? Peculiarities in the Church
•The concept that organizational charts, reviews and job descriptions are not inseparably linked (and not done either!)
•The concept that there is no need for timely decision making ; tomorrow, even next year, that will be fine enough
•Is the Church the earthly home for passive-aggressive individuals? (met with lots of laughing and nodding)
•Although it seems to have 'always been done this way', is it possible that another way may work better?
•Do you still get weird looks when you question something that doesn't make sense (or worse…silence?)?
•How about the concept of succession planning? All right…now I've pushed the envelope too far!
 
We all know that these are temporal issues. So don’t let them mask, overpower or sabotage the ministry to which you have been called.
 
What is my ministry?
On December 7, 2000 I had a serious stroke, which put me in Intensive Care at the hospital. I was surrounded by my wife Patti and the 4 kids, but I could not move, I could not talk, and yet I was totally aware of what was going on. Patti told me, 'You have to live, you have to hold our first grandchild.' The priest showed up to anoint me. That was the turning point, the miracle that saved me. Through it all I knew that I had to listen to God, and that He had a 'Step 2' for me. I did indeed hold our first grandchild, 2 years after the stroke.
 
God's life game plan for Richard T Fersch
1988 Eddie Bauer. What a great place to work, it was on fire, and I loved working there. We saw lots of growth, and I learned a lot about customer service and hospitality. We were ranked in the top 40 companies to work for.
1996 United Way. This was my way to give back to the community. I joined the board and learned how to ask for money – and discovered that I'm good at it.
2000 Sacrament of the Sick
2002 Archbishop Brunett of Seattle. He called me.
 
What can the Church learn from business?
Healthy things grow. Unhealthy things don't.
Between 1988 and 2002, Eddie Bauer's measures of success (sales etc) grew between 10 and 100 times.
While we measure sales, it is an outcome and not a cause. Only a cause is actionable.
The solution is to focus on the cause – usually a bad/unwanted product, maybe the weather (which usually masks the real cause, and we really shouldn't empower something we don't control.)
Identifying a cause allows you to acknowledge it, to accept responsibility, to identify a specific action plan, to execute a solution, and then to measure it again.
 
Let's look at the figures for the Church in Western Washington 2003-2016
Households 2013 131k; 2016 145k
Mass Attendance 2013 179k; 2016 145k
Income on plate 2013 72m; 2016 94.5m
 
Is it the case that we have less people giving more?
The sacraments are being received by less people.
 
These three things are the traditional ways of measuring the health of a parish.
Registered households (those who sign up)
Mass attendance (those who show up)
Ordinary income (those who cough up)
All three are outcomes, they are not causes.
Therefore they are not actionable.
 
What is the cause? Why is that the case?
Gallup's concept of engagement.
Gallup would propose the cause for a lack of healthy growth in Church is a lack of member engagement – a lack of commitment to community – a lack of a sense of belonging.
 
(Ed. Here's the link to the Gallup Member Engagement Survey : http://shop.gallup.com/faith/gallup-member-engagement-survey.html )
 
From Chris Stefanick's 'Real Life Catholic' http://reallifecatholic.com/
'The unchurched person usually doesn't feel welcome at church. It is up to us to help him or her lower their defenses so the Word of God can pierce their heart. If we provide a boring and unwelcome weekend experience, the unchurched believe the church has nothing relevant to say to them. Worst – they come to believe God is irrelevant.'
 
Engagement is how a parishioner feels about their parish.
•Engaged parishioners have a deep and strong emotional connection to their parish and are more fully involved in all aspects of the mission of the church.
•There is a direct correlation between engagement and an increase in the defined outcomes of a parish's spiritual health (inviting, serving, giving, life satisfaction).
•Research reveals that spiritual commitment is an ultimate result of active engagement – leading us to a new paradigm : Belonging leads to Believing.
 
'People will forget what you said and did – but people will never forget how you made them feel' Maya Angelou
 
The use of prayer partners at St Benedict's is building member engagement. I was very happy to hear when I asked someone 'Are we sitting in your pew?' to receive the answer 'We don't own pews at St Benedict's'. Think about how we treat people on Christmas Eve. It is more like, 'Where have you been for the last 51 weeks? I've earned the right to sit here, you haven't'. This is where we really need to be hospitable, and not just think we are.
 
In the church there is a critical need for measurement to assess our current 'status' and thus create workable and measurable action plans.
What is needed is a new approach – an approach leading to this new paradigm. An approach that is sustainable, scalable and transferable.
If you were asked how you parish is doing on hospitality, from 0 to 10, how would you know what to answer? If you can't measure it, then how can you manage it?
 
Engagement is not an end in itself. Rather it is a way to purify the 'soil', enabling a healthy church to bear fruit, the fruit of disciples ready for mission.
 
Summary
Increasing engagement is not the end – it is a means to help achieve the end.
Increasing engagement among parishioners is the KEY to increasing the spiritual health of the parish!
 
The Archdiocese of Seattle launched an initiative 8 years ago called ' Engagement – Empowering Stewardship as a Way of Life'. It has three parts: Leadership, Member Engagement and Strengths.
 
This grew out of an earlier initiative by Archbishop Murphy called 'Stewardship' which ran from 1992-2002. There were booklets, ministry fairs, etc. The take up rate was the same as similar programs you have done in your own dioceses, a lot of effort for not a lot of result.
 
In 2009 we began a new plan.
We could see that the Catholic Leadership Institute (CLI) was doing good stuff with its 'Good Leaders, Good Shepherds' and 'Tending the Talents' programs; and that Gallup was doing good stuff with the ME25, Q12, and Clifton Strengths Finder; but they weren't using the same language.
 
So we asked them to work together, and very generously they agreed, and a pilot program was prepared.
Bear in mind that our solution may not be your solution for your situation, and that we are happy to share details of what works for us in the hopes that you may find what will work for you.
 
Sower : Leadership and developing leaders
CLI provides leadership training for parish priests, and 'Tending the Talents' training for parish staff.
We noticed a lack of training for our priests in leadership. How can we get stuff done without leadership to make it happen? Good Leaders, Good Shepherds is a 2 year program. When the priest graduates we send his parish staff on the Tending the Talents program. It is practical, it works, and everyone is thrilled with the results.
 
Seed : Strengths and Talents
How well do we understand our hearts? How well do we know our gifts?
Once you accept the gifts you have, the gifts that only you have, a whole new responsibility t own, embrace and use those gifts emerges. Using them is the way we give our gifts back to God. Gallup has proved empirically just how unique we all are with our strengths. Some 4000-5000 people in the Archdiocese have gone through the StrengthsFinder process. What we need to do now is convert those talents and strengths into ministry, and give purpose to them. At the moment we are working on launching the Catholic Strengths Institute to help everyone connect their strengths with ministry pathways.
(Ed. The website for this still seems to be in pre-production mode : so keep an eye on it for a change in status : http://catholicstrengthsinstitute.tryradiuswebtools.com/ )
 
Seed : discovering talent
If we are to cultivate and share our unique gifts of talents we must first understand and embrace these gifts. When we do, we receive a 'personal awakening' of who we are called to be. The results are:
•Deeper understanding and respect of self
•Deeper understanding and respect of others
•Deeper relationship with God
 
A quote from St Catherine of Siena (Dialog 7)
God said to me, 'I could well have made human beings in such a way that they each had everything; but I preferred to give different gifts to different people, so that they would need each other.'
 
Soil : Member Engagement
We have been using member engagement surveys with great results. Some parishes have done the surveys multiple times. You cannot measure if you are not measuring.
 
'Therefore go and make disciples of all nations'
The ultimate goal of parishes is to develop Disciples of Christ – Catholics who are fully spiritually committed to the mission of the Church. This is the ultimate result of increasing engagement among parishioners.
 
In the hands of a leader committed to using the ME25 to its fullest extent, the ME25 becomes a powerful tool for helping to move your parish from maintenance to mission.
 
Please engrave this definition of insanity in your brain :
insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
 
So what next?
•Will it be business as usual when you go home after the conference?
•Will you grasp and embrace a part of the new paradigm you were seeking when you signed up for this conference?
Be not afraid. Be bold. There are resources to help you on this journey. Take a step. Make a difference. The choice is yours.
Don't be overwhelmed. Remember the story of the boy finding an elderly man along the beach throwing starfish back into the sea. The boy questioned the pointlessness of it all, but the elderly man replied, 'I might not fix it all, but I certainly made a difference to the life of this star fish.'
 
Fr Mallon then introduced Gemma to us, after agreeing that 'Making a difference is what it is all about'.
​
5 years ago Gemma would come to the occasional Sunday Mass, sit in the pew, and think about other stuff. At that time a relationship with God was not at the centre of her life. The same was true for her mum and dad, sister, brother and grandfather. Spiritually her dad was the least likely to go to church. Her grandfather had struggles with alcohol addiction. One Sunday Gemma got shocked out of her daydreams by seeing the priest pull out an iPhone. It awoke her curiosity. She told her family, 'you have to meet this guy, he's crazy' (it was Fr Mallon, of course). He was talking about Alpha.
 
Her Mum wanted grandfather to go and do Alpha. During the prayer session at Alpha, grandfather had an amazing encounter with Jesus, experiencing within himself the light vs dark battle. After that prayer session he felt cleansed, saved, and his desire to drink was gone. The family was stunned at the change, especially mum and dad. So we went to Friday night family Alpha, the kids had their sessions upstairs and the adults downstairs. The sense of community and belonging we experienced there kept us coming back. We all encountered God in our own way. My sister and I felt called to do church activities, like bible studies and youth groups. My mum started praying every morning. My dad is now with us in the pews every week, as is my brother. My mum and I did the trip to HTB and encountered the Holy Spirit in a real and personal way, along with 5000 other people.
 
Then we moved to Toronto. On our final weekend the parish prayed over us and commissioned us to go out and use this chance to bring what we had experienced to Toronto. In Toronto we joined a parish and started a daytime and youth Alpha, but we encountered difficulties. The priest was not strongly supporting us, and was not involved. We realized we could not take it much further. So we switched parishes and found a priest who was hungry for something to help his parish. He got on board, promoted it, became a table leader, and invited his friends.
 
Gemma, aged 17, is now the Alpha coordinator in that parish, organizing the food, tables and dealing with the emails. Her sister had her big turning point at a Steubenville conference. In many ways Alpha is being run a bit like a family business. 'Jesus has made a huge difference to our family life. He has given us purpose, and a happiness in service. It is good to know that as a teenage I can be in the world but not of it.
 
This part of the session closed with prayer for Gemma and her family.
 
…………………………………………………
 
My own response
 
That's a lot to take in, isn't it?! But it is the pathway forwards, and we need to tell people about it.
 
Why are Catholics so passive-aggressive? Maybe because the direct route to getting things done so often gets blocked and we've had to become experts at getting things done by back channels.
 
It is encouraging to see that if God wants you somewhere, that He has the ways and means to get you there, like he did with getting Rick out of Eddie Bauer and into service for Him with the Archdiocese of Seattle.
 
The contrast between the high rates of growth for Eddie Bauer and the stagnant/almost recessive growth for the Archdiocese was staggering. The former is the kind of growth and health God would like to see in our parishes. To keep on the same path that got us to this lack of health, that's no longer an option.
 
It is going to take a while to process the implications of belonging leading to believing. We are so used to expecting things to be the other way round. It means that we have to be consciously choosing to draw people into our community of faith. It means that we need independent assessment on how welcoming our parishes actually are, maybe something similar to the mystery shoppers that retailers use.
 
Thinking about engagement…A few months back our parish had its first episcopal visitation in its history, and there was a meeting with parishioners and the bishop. He asked those present to name what it was about the parish that draws you here. Many of the answers hinged on engagement parishioners had with the community of faith present in the parish, and named the people who drew them into involvement (often a parish priest or a switched-on parishioner who called them into some kind of service or ministry). Those present at the meeting were already engaged, otherwise they would not have given up their time to be there. The ability of some gifted individuals to notice potential talent, and to give people gentle nudges in the right direction for using that potential talent, is what is needed. If we can locate those gifted individuals and help them harness and intentionally use those gifts in God's service, that would be a big step forward to increasing engagement in the parish. People with StrengthsFinder combinations of Developer and Individualization are most likely to be those gifted individuals.
 
I went investigating Clifton StrengthsFinder after an intriguing mention or two of it in Divine Renovation. There are 2 ways to do the StrengthsFinder questionnaire. Do it online for $15 US or around $20 AUS through this link, it is supposed to give you access to an e-book, but the process is long and convoluted. A better way is to get the book with the access code in the back, the Catholic Edition of 'Living Your Strengths' Because postage costs are a nightmare, order more than one copy – you are going to want others to do it too. If you have the money, get friends together and buy a full starter kit, which comes with workbooks and a seven session discovery process.
 
My top 5 signature themes are Intellection, Input, Connectedness, Deliberative and Learner. That meshes perfectly with my top 3 transferable skills, problem solving, using my brain and research. I'm still searching for a way to leverage those strengths to serve the mission of the Church as part of a team, and suspect that until enough leaders find value in StrengthsFinder and learn to build balanced teams I'll still be a square peg in a round hole and getting lots of those weird looks and silences that Rick spoke about.
 
I'm really interested in the work Rick is doing in matching combinations of strengths to ministry opportunities. (See, it's a problem that needs solving! :) The Living Your Strengths has lists of ideas for how to use your strengths in Christian service, but they only go so far. But it should be possible to work out which combinations of strengths are suited for particular ministries. For example, someone high in empathy and harmony is the perfect fit for a hospital chaplaincy role or pastoral care work with the sick.
 
Gemma's story needs to be shared widely. It breaks my heart that so often us lowly parishioners try and get something good going, and it falls flat because there is no active support from the parish leadership. Passive support, which is basically permission to run with something and rooms to do it in, just isn't enough and frequently it is a recipe for failure. Waiting to see if something is going to be a success before getting behind it might feel like the prudent thing to do, but it sure doesn't feel like the loving thing to do from the perspective of those who are risking it all. However if people see that the parish priest is giving something his full support, they do get behind it. It feels like they all watch him to see what he thinks before joining in or not. So much stands or falls depending on the parish priest, no wonder Our Lady is so insistent in her messages that we must pray for our priests.
 
Those Catholic Leadership Institute courses look like they are worth investigating. I hope they start getting students from my side of the globe soon. I really like that it there's some for parish priests and some for parish staff.
 
The National Church Life Survey is probably the Australian equivalent to the ME25. It certainly asks the engagement questions. It would be worthwhile comparing them properly.

Workshop  2A: RCIA: Ideas for welcoming new Catholics AND ensuring they stay

This workshop was presented by Sharon brewer of Canberra Goulburn diocese.

Sharon Brewer is a wife and mother to four children. After her family her second passion is her involvement in parish life. For the last 23 years she has been involved with the parishes of St Francis of Assisi, Calwell and more recently Corpus Christi Parish, South Tuggeranong. Sharon first became involved through the Parish Social Group and then offered her help with parish administration. As the Tuggeranong Valley became one of the fastest growing areas in Australia, Sharon assisted with Baptism classes for many families. Over time she became more involved in the sacramental preparation of children. In recent years she has been developing programs for Older Child Baptisms, Teenage Sacramental Programs, adult faith formation and assisting with the RCIA program. Additionally she has collaborated in the publication of a quarterly parish magazine and the Corpus Christi Parish Prayer Book.

At the start of the workshop Sharon asked for a show of hands of cradle Catholics vs converts, and then how many of the converts had been through an RCIA process as opposed to one on one sessions with a priest. About 3 or 4 had been through an RCIA process.

Sharon then went briefly through some of RCIA handbooks and publications on offer from various Australian dioceses. Some of them are hardcopy, others are DVD sets or can be downloaded from websites. The choice of which resources to use has to be made on pastoral level and not on a practical level. To use the same handbooks year in and year out does not take account of the different mix of enquirers in each 'intake' and what would suit that intake best.

From visiting parishes in the Canberra Goulburn diocese and asking about their RCIA experiences and retention rates, it was clear that the smaller more isolated parishes had better retention rates than the bigger city parishes. This is likely to be because the smaller more isolated parishes have stronger, less fractured communities, than bigger city parishes.

One way to get greater involvement and understanding in the parish about the RCIA is to hold an Open Night rather than an Enquiry Night. If people know more about the RCIA process they are more likely to invite someone to come along, and to get involved themselves.

One trend we have noticed is that there are more children / teenagers wanting to become Catholics in the school setting. The challenge is how to run the RCIA / RCIC at the schools and still link them into the parish. The parish has to go to the young people, and cannot expect the young people to come to the parish to do the programme. Currently 'The Christ We Proclaim' is being re-written for the Australian context and is being field tested. Look for it to be available for use in the next 12 months.

Another trend is that 15 years ago new enquirers would come knowing that they would have to get their marital issues sorted out before becoming fully initiated Catholics. Now we are finding that people are getting towards the end of the RCIA programme before finding out that they need to get their marital status in the eyes of the Church sorted out, together with all the tears, disappointments and delays that situation causes. It is very important to do an interview process at the start of the RCIA journey in order to get all those things out into the open (re-marriages, de-facto relationships, blended families, any need for annulments etc) so that they can get worked on while the RCIA is going on. While the interview process cannot be an interrogation, it still needs to be both pastoral and thorough.

What are our enquirers / seekers seeking?

Enquirers have different needs and cannot be treated the same. Here are some common scenarios. At the workshop participants were broken up into groups and given a scenario each. Then they had to answer two questions:

1) Name three things your enquirer might be looking for in the RCIA process.

2) Name three things your enquirer might be looking for in the faith community

1. Mr Jones is married to Mrs Jones, who has been a Catholic all her life. They have three children who have gone through a Catholic school. After 20 years of marriage, he is thinking of becoming a Catholic.
   
   
2. Jessica Smith is in Year 11 at high school. Her parents are not Catholic but thought it might be nice to send her to a Catholic school. Because of her school experiences Jessica is thinking about becoming Catholic.
   
   
3. Mr and Mrs Green are not Catholics, but they are interested in sending their children to a Catholic school. This was picked up in the enrolment interview process and the Parish Priest has asked them to go along to the RCIA enquiry night. They probably will attend, since they realise that they might have to get their children baptised in order to increase their chances of their enrolments being accepted.
   
   
4. Patricia Brown is in her mid 60s and when she was a little girl she went to Sunday School. Now she is divorced, her children have left home, and she is feeling lonely. She is not a Catholic, but knows there is a Catholic church near where she lives and wonders if she could become a part of that community.
   
   
5. Jack is in his late 20s and has a few tattoos. He's done a few crazy things and he is struggling with relationships. Could religion help him?
   
   
6. Melanie is studying at a Catholic university and hopes to graduate as a teacher. She was baptised Catholic, but her parents didn't go to Mass and she did not complete her sacramental initiation. Her uni friends are advising her that she will have a better shot at getting a job in a Catholic school if she has completed the sacraments. She's thinking about it.
   
   
7. Frederick White was baptised and raised in another Christian tradition. He takes quite an academic approach to life. He no longer identifies with the church he grew up in and has heard some interesting things about the Catholic Church. He's making enquiries.
   
   
8. Max is engaged to Mary. She is a Catholic and would like a nuptial Mass for her wedding. Max is not a Catholic, but is prepared to do whatever it takes to please Mary. One snag, the wedding date is a few weeks before Easter.
   
   

Each of these enquirers will have different expectations of the RCIA process and it will be very rare that they are coming because they want to find God or Jesus. Some of them ….  

• Will want to know exactly what is required. How much time is involved, any costs? They almost need a spreadsheet plan with dates and times etc. Detail is what they want, including who will be involved (the priest, the team, others), and how the whole process works.
  
  
• Will want a lot of flexibility - they won't be able to get there every week - does that matter? They'll be looking for the easiest path and the minimum requirements. Do they really have to do the "Easter Thing" i.e.do they have to wait that long.
  
  
• Will need a way to discuss their personal baggage/problems etc. All of them will bring baggage. Does your parish have access to counselling services or a pastoral care person? The RCIA team need to help such people address those issues outside of the RCIA meetings and should be looking for people outside the team to assist them.
  
  
• Will want to know why the Church is interested in their previous/current marriage arrangements. Make sure you get to know the person at the diocesan marriage tribunal who does have the answers. Does your parish have the resources to help them (books, DVDs, web-links)? What assistance and advice can the marriage tribunal give?
  
  
• Will want a very academic approach versus a more conversational/storytelling approach.
  
  
• Will want to know how you live your life of faith - you need to be honest and vulnerable. Be prepared to share your struggles in detail. Be prepared to share how God has worked in your relationships. If you share at this level they will be able to begin a relationship with you, and through your experiences get the courage to start building a relationship with God.
  
  
• Won't know what to expect at all.
  
  
•  The person who comes who doesn't know what they want will be the hardest to satisfy.
  
  

The way you start small talk with your enquirers will have an impact upon how quickly you can build a relationship with them. You need to step out of your comfort zone and talk about something other than 'What do you do for a living?' For example, 'What did you think about Father's talk tonight?', 'Where do you think you are on your faith journey?'  Remember, everyone is somewhere on their faith journey, if they got as far as an enquiry night they are not at the very beginning.  You will know that the conversion process is going in the right direction when they start to discover God's love and get excited about it. Sharon knew they had nailed it when all of them when writing about their RCIA experiences talked about discovering God and how much He was now part of their lives.  

What are our enquirers / seekers looking for in a faith community?  

• They will be looking for the very same things that cradle Catholics are looking for in their faith community.
  
  
• They will be attracted by ministry (especially hospitality), music (good liturgy) and message (something to nourish the soul and to chew over) - "The Rebuilt Story". Until a parish starts doing these three tasks well, parishioners will not begin to invite newcomers to their Churches.
  
  
• They are looking for relationships, with God and with the parishioners.
  
  
• They want to feel that they belong on the journey to God together with the congregation.
  
  
• They want to learn how to find their way to God through prayer.

 
Keeping it going

Just because an enquirer has started the journey into the church, it doesn't mean that they will finish it.

• The enquirer tells you 'I'm exhausted. I've got to have a break'. That means they are beginning to drift away. In such cases it does help to have non-team parishioners praying for the enquirers and verbally reminding them of those prayers once in a while.
  
  
• It is crucial to build the expectation that the initiation process ends at Pentecost not at the Easter Vigil, and even after Pentecost they haven't finished learning and growing – and that this is a full lifetime's work. If there is an expectation that there are some vital follow-up sessions/events/experiences, they will come.
  
  
• Keep reminding them that the time of mystagogy (the life long journey of growing closer to God) is not an "add-on" or "optional extra" but something essential. (Ed. Would you teach a youngster the road rules then give him the keys of the car and give him or her no further driving help? Of course not! Theory is one thing, practical experience is quite another). Build up some excitement for the post-Easter Vigil  learning and sharing.
  
  
• The RCIA team needs a break. The usual programme from August to March/April is a long haul. To keep things fresh and interesting it is worthwhile introducing some new team members during Holy Week who will be involved in the mystagogy process. That will lighten the load a bit.
  
  
• Some team members will need pastoral care themselves. Team members should be looking out for each other and alert for the early signs of burnout.
  
  
• Consider options that don't necessarily involve the team, eg. other parishioners or other parish groups, diocesan follow-on and adult ed. programs.
  
  

Things to look out for after the sacraments of initiation have been received :

• The downer after the high.
  
  
• The newcomers may feel that they are not special any more. Now they are just another Joe Bloe in the pew. To illustrate this, one mum had post-natal depression and had attempted RCIA three times. Prior to becoming a Catholic she would go up in the Communion procession and receive a blessing, maybe the sign of the cross on her forehead. Now she was receiving the Body of Christ, but she wasn't receiving that physical touch and she really missed it.   
  
  
• The newcomers may feel like they are on their own with no one to turn to for further help or advice (particularly if the team are busy with a new intake of enquirers).
  
  
• We should look out for tell-tale comments like "it doesn't matter if I miss Mass every now and then, because no one will miss me if I'm not there, so it doesn't matter if I come or not'.
  
  

 Ideas for keeping them coming back
 

• Consider giving them a regular task to do in parish life.
  
  
• Foster a sense of gratitude so that the transition from consumer to both consumer and contributor is smooth. We need to have answers for how they can support the local parish and for how the local parish can support them.
  
  
• The parish needs a plan at the parish council level for integrating the new Catholics into parish life. It requires both thinking and planning to make it happen.
  
  
• Get your parishioners involved along the way. Make some of your RCIA meeting nights 'open nights' for anyone to attend. However if you do, make sure that the hospitality is excellent (ie far more than tea, coffee and a biscuit). It is very important that the team regularly attracts fresh blood and doesn't become a clique.
  
  
• Get your new candidates onto e-mailing lists for both the parish and the diocese, eg Cath News, parish bulletins, diocesan e-zines.
  
  
• Get them to tell their story in person (at church, in schools) and to write it down too, and publish them in your diocesan magazines and online eg http://myfamilymyfaith.org.au/
  
  
• Help them to discern their gifts and charisms and encourage the use of them. They need to understand how the Holy Spirit has gifted them beyond what they were already good at. The Called & Gifted programme is good for this. http://bne.catholic.net.au/asp/index.asp?pgid=11362
  
  
• Consider what could they offer the next RCIA process
  
  
• Ask the bishop for some words of encouragement and send it to them in a letter from him.
  
  
• Send birthday and Christmas cards, and 'one year since the Easter Vigil – how are you going?' cards
  
  
• Personally invite them, by phone, text email, to events such as Faith formation and social events.
  
  
• Offer once in a while to come and take them to Mass so that you can go together for coffee afterwards
  
  
• Introduce them to good internet links and websites and YouTube clips.
  
  
• Give them personal encouragement.
  
  
• Don't underestimate the importance of excellent sponsors. These will be their role models, their encouragers and their listening ears. The right sponsor makes an enormous difference, since their role will last much longer than the RCIA process. Discourage if you can sponsors who are friends at a similar point in their faith journey as the candidate. If necessary, live with it and appoint a mentor for them instead.
  
  

Useful Resources  

The Catholic Enquiry Centre has brochures that can be downloaded for free. http://www.catholicenquiry.com/

Fr Robert Barron  10 one hour DVDs http://www.catholicismseries.com/study-program

Australian Catechumenate Network http://www.ozcatechumenate.org/

At Home With God's People, http://www.ahwgp.com/asp/index.asp?pgid=11988 from the Archdiocese of Brisbane

Fr Robert Barron, YouTube 'The Real Presence' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJjW3LXuHzo

The Skit Guys http://skitguys.com/ Christian video clips

Encouraging words from Pope Francis  

"All of us are called to offer others an explicit witness to the saving love of the Lord, who despite our imperfections offers us His closeness, His word and His strength, and gives meaning to our lives. In your heart you know that it is not the same to live without Him; what you have come to realise, what has helped you to live and given you hope, is what you also need to communicate to others".  (EG 121)

"So what are we waiting for?"  (EG 120)

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
 
The next blog-post will be about the keynote talk on trends in the National Church Life Survey – which may get posted in two parts.

Some of the workshops have been made available as podcasts via www.xt3.com

To access them visit http://www.xt3.com/library/view.php?id=17454