The Gospel for this Sunday, the 25th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B, is taken from the third quarter of Chapter 9 of St Mark. Between last Sunday and this Sunday (Mark 8:27-35) there has been the transfiguration of Jesus, questions about Elijah preceding the Messiah, and the deliverance of a boy with a spirit of dumbness.

At the transfiguration the Father had a message for the disciples and for us, ‘Listen to My beloved Son’; and what had Jesus been talking about prior to the transfiguration? That the Messiah must be rejected, suffer and be put to death, and be raised up.

After the transfiguration and the deliverance of the boy, Jesus deliberately takes the disciples away from the hurly-burly of public ministry, away from all the usual distractions, so that He could teach them something of the utmost importance.

The crucial mission of the Messiah – far above all the other parts of His mission from the Father – is to redeem the world from sin, to totally conquer evil, and the only way that can happen is through His sacrificial death as the pure and innocent Passover Lamb of God.

Soon the journey to Jerusalem, the one that will take Him to Calvary, to accomplish this crucial mission, will begin. It is imperative that He prepares His disciples for the cataclysmic events that are going to take place.

But it becomes obvious that they are either unable to listen or unwilling to engage with the topic of the necessity of suffering and of the Cross.

One reason for this is denial. Jesus is talking about truly horrific things as being a non-negotiable done deal. It is also our usual first response to bad news.

Another reason is fear. When we experience fear, the body’s fight/flight/freeze response kicks in, and the higher mental functions of reasoning are suspended.

So they don’t do their job as disciples, which is to ask questions of the teacher. Asking questions and probing a topic is how students best come to grasp and internalize that topic. And no teacher can go on to the next topic until he/she is sure that his/her students have grasped the prerequisite topics for understanding the new topic he/she wants to present to them. For example, in order to teach multiplication, you must first teach addition; before you can teach how to cook a mornay, you have to teach how to prepare a basic white sauce.

What kind of questions was Jesus expecting?

Perhaps…
How are You feeling about that?
Is this suffering you are to undergo absolutely necessary?
Help me understand why.
Why is it necessary for the Messiah to suffer like this?
What’s the point?
How do You prepare for sufferings like that?
How do You keep sane knowing that this is coming?
How certain is this, 80%, 90%, 100%?
Does that mean suffering of that order of magnitude is in our paths too?
What do You want us to do when this begins to happen?
How can we help You as You face this?
Is it possible for us to help You in any way?
Those psalms that foretell this are quite scary, is it really going to be like that?
What is the value of rejection, suffering and death?
How should we prepare for when these days overtake us?
Teach us how to prepare for our own times of suffering and trial.
How far away are these events? When will they take place?
How do you want us to handle your burial?
Death is final. What is this event after your death that you speak of?
How will we recognise it?
What will become of us when you are gone?

Can you begin to understand how differently the disciples would have coped with His passion and death if they had asked any of these questions?
Can you begin to fathom the treasures of wisdom and understanding that were there for the asking, but were never asked for, and how much we (the whole church throughout time) would have gained if those questions had been asked?
Can you begin to grasp how frustrating it must have been for Jesus, to see His disciples not listening, and so utterly disengaged from what He is trying to teach them and prepare them for.

Despite their lack of engagement, Jesus still continued to try to prepare the disciples for the horror to come, and also tells them that the horror won’t be the end of the story. What else could He do? He had to trust that when the hour of His passion and death overtook them, that they would remember that He had told them it was going to happen, so that they might find a ray of hope that God was still in control, that this was indeed part of God’s plan, and that His death was not the end of that plan, and there’s something big to come after His death.

Fear and denial are our usual response too
‘dear God I hope that’s not true, may it never happen’.

In fact we do it regularly. We dismiss prophets as false because what they say seems so surreal eg Kenneth Hargin 1963 http://garycarpenter.org/PDF/KennethHagin1963Prophecy.pdf

We did the same with the very few prophets who said ‘pray, because there are laboratories preparing bio-weapons’ and the ones who said, ‘a pandemic is coming’.
It seemed so wild, so far from the reality at that time, so weird, so far-fetched,
and yet ultimately it was true.

Our automatic response at the time was: ‘O dear God, I hope that’s not true, may it never happen’.

It should have been
How do You want me to pray about this?
What do You want me to do about this?
What kind of preparations need to happen to minimize and/or prevent this?
I need confirmation from You to treat this as seriously as You want me to; if this is true please send me confirmation, and help me to recognise it when it comes, as coming from You.

If the disciples can’t hear the part about ‘rejection, suffering and death’, then they can’t hear the part about being raised up either. We don’t know what else Jesus wanted to reveal, because the disciples shut their minds and hearts down and refused to engage in the teaching process.

Jesus must have been so disappointed and discouraged by this. Any teacher is when his/her students just don’t get it and they actively disengage by passing notes and creating paper planes.
And this was teaching of the highest importance, the key to understanding everything else.

To make things worse, instead of spending their conversation time productively
His disciples indulge in that sad masculine pastime of ‘I’m better than you because…’

What did Jesus do?

He set Himself to do the best job of teaching them these unpalatable truths that He could.
That way He knew He had done the best He could, and He could hope that later on they might remember that He had tried to teach them about the cataclysm that was going to happen.

He could have chosen to leave them in the ignorance they preferred
but He loved them far too much to let them face the days of His passion and death without preparation.

Jesus could have walked away, the provocation was there, but He chose to persist with His apostles and disciples. This was probably in obedience to His Father, because part 1 of the messianic mission is suffering, death, resurrection and ascension and part 2 is building the foundations of the church, of the kingdom of God. Both missions had to be fulfilled.

He could also have yelled and thrown things and generally have let His frustrations out with impact, but He doesn’t.
Have you ever tried to teach something as basic as the answer to 10 times 11, and they just couldn’t get it, no matter how many times and ways you tried? That kind of frustration.
Be amazed at His self-control in this situation, at His gentleness, and at His patience.

If we are amazed at His resurrection and ascension, we should be equally amazed at the church that emerged at Pentecost from this motley bunch; and astounded that today it is still continuing His mission, albeit at some times in history much better than at other times in history.

Jesus knew what was going on, with the one-upmanship game, and He had a plan.
But it didn’t get sprung until they were behind closed doors at Capernaum, where they felt safe.
He could have given them a public scolding about being unteachable and about how one-upmanship decreases love and trust.
but He chose to do it in private, to not humiliate them publicly.

But He still got the message across that even if they thought they could hide what they were up to from Jesus, He knew the whole without being told.

He waited patiently, and took this teachable moment when the opportunity was ripe, and then whammied them with a lesson in kingdom values that they would never forget.

Humble service is the yardstick of greatness in the kingdom of God;
the exact antithesis of the world’s yardsticks of money, power, attractiveness and pleasure.

What is the challenge for us in this Gospel?

Don’t be afraid to ask Jesus questions.
Don’t be afraid to ask Jesus difficult questions.
Don’t be afraid to ask Jesus to tell you more when He shows you something that is beyond your current levels of understanding and comprehension.

If you are game, pray with me…

Dear Jesus, there is probably something in my life, or something about my future, that you have been trying to show me, and I just haven’t grasped it. I may not have even picked up on Your signals. I am truly sorry for not having been attentive enough to You. I am sorry for the many times I have not recognised the ways You have tried to gain my attention. I am sorry for the times I have said to You in my words, or by my actions, ‘oh no, I don’t want to go there, I don’t want to know that’. Please forgive me. I trust that You only want to show me things – especially when they are difficult things – to bring about greater good in my life and in the lives of others – and that You know me and love me too much to give me anything that I can’t handle (with You and Your grace to assist me). In Your goodness, please help me to recognise the messages and teaching You are so graciously offering to me. Help me to engage with You on those matters, and to courageously ask You questions about those matters, and to wait for Your answers and to act diligently upon them. Help me to believe You the first time, and to take what You say seriously. I want to be a much better student and disciple of Yours, better than I have ever been before. Amen.
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Holy Mary, mother of Jesus, please intercede on my behalf for this. Amen.
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I’ve come to the conclusion that the Church the Plenary Council Agenda is talking about bears little resemblance to my pew-sitter’s view. Admittedly I’m an unusual pew-sitter, since I’ve read all the major reports issued on the Plenary Council website.

Like other pew-sitters, I’d determined that giving any more time to the Plenary Council process would be unproductive. But then someone asked me to read the official Agenda.

So I read it. One page of reading isn’t onerous.
https://plenarycouncil.catholic.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Plenary-Council-Agenda.pdf

Of the 16 Agenda questions, only 4 stood out as worthy of detailed deliberation, viz:

*How might we better form leaders for mission – adults, children and families, couples and single people?
*How might we better equip ordained ministers to be enablers of missionary discipleship: the Church becoming more a “priestly people” served by the ordained ministry?
*How might parishes better become local centres for the formation and animation of missionary disciples?
*How might the Church in Australia be better structured for mission, considering the parish, the diocese, religious orders, the PJPs and new communities?

(I had no idea what PJPs are: apparently they are ‘Public Juridic Persons’, entities set up in the Church for specific purposes eg Catholic Healthcare, Edmund Rice Education Australia. Hint: Church jargon of that magnitude means it wasn’t written for pew-sitters like me, but for people used to collaborating with diocesan curia – and above.)

But most of these kinds of questions mean very little until they are applied to a case study of some kind, to enable people to wrestle with possible answers to these questions in realistic situations.

What does an average parish look like in Australia?

Something like this:

It has one priest; by and large, if he is a senior citizen he was born in Australia, if he is younger he was born in another country where English was not the native language.
He has the equivalent of one paid administrative person on staff.
The parish contains a Catholic primary school with about 300-400 students.
Of those students, in any 12 month time frame, he might see 5% of the children from that primary school at weekend Mass.
The parish contains people from a variety of ethnicities.
The parish is located at least 50 kms from the diocesan cathedral, (an hour’s drive or more).
Daily Mass attendance average is 20 persons.
Weekend Mass attendance is of 550 persons spread over 3 Masses.
The parish is struggling to make even 50% of the expected annual contributions to the diocesan charitable works fund.
The parish has no resident religious orders, but perhaps has one or two retired consecrated persons of 80+.
95% of those attending weekend Mass are aged 70+, or even 75+.
The parish has at least one St Vincent de Paul Conference, and a few dedicated and overworked catechists who serve in local state-run primary schools.

From the perspective of that case study, even the most pertinent question (How might we better form leaders for mission?’) is framed incorrectly.

Because the question really is “How do we form our 70, 80 and 90 year olds for mission, as leaders, teams, and team members?”

And the follow-up question is “How do we keep our few sub 70 year olds from imploding under the weight of the regular tasks needed to keep a parish functioning and the isolation of how few people are on the same part of their life journey to share faith with?”.

In an average parish there are no able bodies with spare time to give to questions and to ministry in the areas of First Nations, ecology, wounds from abuse, ecumenism, education, health care and social services.

One might be forgiven for thinking that the current Plenary Council Agenda is like determining the precise positioning of deckchairs on the Titanic.

There are 3 very large items missing from the Plenary Council Agenda:

*No mention of the Holy Spirit. Without Him, neither holiness nor mission is possible.
*No mention of sacred scripture. Frequent personal reading of the Bible is the number 1 input that guarantees all discipleship outputs. (Read: ‘No Silver Bullets: Five Small Shifts that will Transform Your Ministry’ by Daniel Im) www.amazon.com/No-Silver-Bullets-Transform-Ministry/dp/1433651548
*No mention of ministry to families. As goes the family, so goes the Church. Family is the plan of God that pre-dates scripture by millennia. All vocations (of all types!) grow in families.

Until the Plenary Council Agenda items have any hope of becoming reality in an average parish, and until these 3 very large items assume due prominence, this pew-sitter will remain disengaged from the process.

If you are a pew-sitter who agrees with me, please share these thoughts with other pew-sitters and with any contacts you may have in the rarefied worlds of curia and episcopy.
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​Print friendly version below: ( 2 x A4 pages)

The Gospel for this Sunday, the 12th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B, comes from the end of Chapter 4 of St Mark’s Gospel after Jesus has been teaching a series of parables to the crowds. It narrates the story of Jesus calming the storm.

Following on from Jesus teaching the parables of the wheat and the mustard seed which invited us to trust God’s process and God’s timing, we seem to have a parable in this event of the massive storm that invites us to trust in Him even in the worst of times.

What comes after this passage is the deliverance of the Gerasene demoniac, which seems to be where Jesus was headed to on the other side of the lake of Galilee. Is this massive storm an attempt by the forces of evil to prevent this deliverance? It does seem likely.

We do know that Jesus set out deliberately for this locality on the other side of the lake, and plenty of witnesses joined Him in other boats. We know that it was evening before the lake crossing even began, and that they only set out after the crowds had been dismissed.

Jesus was already in the boat before they set out, and we know that at times He preached from Peter’s boat close to the shoreline. There doesn’t seem to have been any prior preparation or planning for this journey; and in all likelihood the seamen among the disciples would have expected a rather swift crossing – no more than an hour or two, with landfall before it got pitch dark.

But we see this sudden, intense, physical opposition to their journey’s progress; and they feel they are facing it all on their own because Jesus is in the back of the boat asleep.

The usual translations we read, do not do the original Greek justice, and water down the intensity of the crisis the disciples in the boats faced. What we often read as storm or great gale can also be translated violent wind-storm, squall, whirlwind, hurricane. They are hard enough to deal with in daylight, but in fading light and darkness it must have engendered extra terror.

So violent was it, that the waves were breaking over and into the boat, so that it was filled entirely. Any efforts to bail out the water were proving to be futile. The boat was beginning to sink.

At this point, like them, we are asking, where is God in all this?

How acutely they must have felt the absence of His reassuring presence! They could have also asked; Why is God permitting this to happen to us? What did we do wrong? Where did we go wrong?

‘Teacher, teacher, we are perishing. We are at the point of being fully and totally destroyed.’

And Jesus gets up, commands ‘Silence!’, ‘Be still!’, and the immediate calm that happens is as great as the storm was.

'megale’ is used to describe both the storm AND the calm.

This supernatural calm overwhelms the disciples with fear, awe and reverence.

Only God.
Only God Himself is able to transform utter disaster, turmoil and chaos into perfect peace and order in a single moment. No one else and nothing else can.

And what does Jesus say to them (and to us)?
Why are you so frightened?
Have you no faith?
Have you forgotten Who is in control?

Ummm. Errrr.
We’re still terrified, before and after, and it is human to be afraid.
Gulp. Obviously not as much faith as we thought we had. At all.
Yep. Completely forgot. Utterly failed that one….. Sorry.

May God help us to remember that even in the worst of times, that He is still completely in control.

May God help us to remember that especially in the worst of times, we can be expectant for His sudden divine action to happen to fix everything perfectly– and thus not despair nor become despondent.

May God help us to remember that nothing is going to stop us carrying out the mission we have been given by Him, even if it has been delayed by enemy tactics – and to expect far more spectacular results if there have been delays and opposition.

In our darkest moments may God send His holy angels to remind us of this Gospel event, and through it to remind us that He is completely in control, and that the end He has in mind is far more amazing and more glorious and stupendous than anything that currently terrorizes us.

Amen. Amen. Amen.
​
He alone is worthy of our trust.
Let us place our trust in Jesus.
Let us renew our trust in Jesus.
Let us massively increase our trust in Jesus.
Amen.

The Gospel for this Sunday, the 15th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B, comes from the next part of Chapter 6 in St Mark’s Gospel, immediately after last week’s passage about the visit to Nazareth. This next part of Chapter 6 has the Twelve move into a new stage of their discipleship with Jesus.

It seems significant that this new phase happens almost directly after the disappointing visit to Nazareth, as though the lessons to be learnt at Nazareth were a necessary pre-requisite – perhaps to prepare them for when the response to their preaching would be far less than enthusiastic.

So Jesus calls the Twelve apostles to Himself, and commences to send them out two by two to preach the necessity of repentance for entering the kingdom of God. In sending them out Jesus imparts to them a share in His own authority over unclean spirits. This indicates that there is a co-dependence of preaching with delivering people and situations from evil (and vice versa) for either to be effective.

They had seen Jesus preach, heal and deliver sufferers from evil spirits, and now they had a test run of doing it themselves.

The passage doesn’t say what Jesus did while the 6 teams went out in different directions on this mission ‘with training wheels’. Probably Jesus spent that time alone in prayer interceding for them and for the people they were to preach to; waiting for them to return to a previously agreed rendezvous place and time.

But the thing that strikes all of us is how little Jesus permitted them to take on the missionary journey. They don’t have to go bare-foot; but may wear sandals. Perhaps that is because heavier shoes may slow them down and increase fatigue. Apart from that, all they can take with them is their missionary companion, the authority Jesus has given them, and a staff.

The word used in Greek for ‘staff’ is ‘rhabdon’ and is does mean rod or staff, but it can also mean sceptre or staff of authority.

Any kind of walking stick is useful when traversing rough terrain, and for keeping up the endurance on long distances. I’ve followed the journeys via social media of some friends walking the Camino, and they all start out without walking sticks, and they all have walking sticks before the end of the first week.

A good solid rod or stave is also useful for protection against brigands and wild animals.

Maybe the aspect of a staff also representing the authority Jesus has given them now seems more plausible, especially remembering how God used Aaron’s staff and Elisha’s staff.

However we cannot forget that travelling light permits a person to travel much faster than if they have anything on them to weigh them down. This has something to say about the urgency we should feel for spreading the good news of Jesus, and the urgency Jesus must have felt to issue such instructions – that anything that slows us down has to be jettisoned.

To our surprise, and definitely to the Apostles’ surprise, they were very successful on this training mission; they preached, they evicted devils and brought God’s healing to others.

That’s the difference going out with the authority of Jesus makes.

We shouldn’t even consider going on mission without it; without some kind of commissioning by those in leadership in the Body of Christ.

Our other surprise should be that these three things are considered by Jesus and by the communities who were the seed ground for this Gospel of Mark as Normal on a missionary journey to proclaim the Gospel.

Please God, may our New Normal when this time of pandemic is over be this kind of Normal – Your kind of Normal. Amen.

Holy Apostles of God, please pray for us, and especially for all bishops, since they are particularly authorised by Jesus for mission, and to lead mission in His name. Amen.

Holy Apostles of God, please pray for us too, that preaching repentance, healing and deliverance from evil may return to being Normal for all believers in Jesus. Amen.

Holy Apostles of God, please pray for all whom Jesus is calling to Himself at this time, that they be given the grace of a whole-hearted Yes when He sends them on mission, thoroughly dependent upon His providence and authority. Amen.
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Holy Apostles of God, please pray for those who have been given a missionary mandate by Jesus, but who have not yet gone where He has told them to go, or who have become disheartened and discouraged along the way. May they be given fresh hope, and fresh anointing from Your Holy Spirit to completely fulfill the mission You, Lord God, have given them. Amen.
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P.S. I came across this excellent blog-post on the ministry of the prophet Elijah, it is well worth a read: https://www.awmi.net/reading/teaching-articles/lessons_elijah/

.... above is a print-friendly version, 4 x A4 pages, of that blog-post - since it deserves to be shared more widely.

​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.

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

​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 5G – Who do you say I am? Parishes proclaiming Jesus Christ: Opportunities and Challenges.

This workshop was led by Shane Dwyer, the new director for the National Centre for Evangelisation. 
https://www.facebook.com/evangeliseaustralia/

Shane has lots of theological, teaching and public speaking credentials, but he is difficult to locate on social media.

He provided a booklet containing the source material for the content of this workshop to participants, but it didn't make it onto the resource list at the Proclaim Conference website.

NB. These notes are rough, they do not contain everything said, and will lack his particular emphases and probably mismatch some of his thoughts.

Shane started with a quotation from Archbishop Christopher Prowse, 'We are all called to go out to all people with all of the Gospel message all of the time.' That is our mission!

The degree to which our parishes are beacons of light, peace, joy, mutual support and integrity is the degree to which they are places to which those responding to the invitation to walk with Christ can find the formation and support they need.

The call to evangelise is not meant to be a problem. It is meant to be an invitation.

We are not called to wait for a parish priest to tap us on the shoulder, and think that we can ignore serving the body of Christ until that happens. We are not living in an easy time, but there have been terribly tough times for the Church before during her 2000 year history. Those truly rough patches testify that is it the Holy Spirit who has kept the Church going – and that it is not a human work. Miraculously God keeps bringing something to be, and that is the cause of our hope.

Our families may be a bit shabby at times, especially when we have a black sheep, but we still love each member in their imperfectness. In ministry we often get to hear about people's disappointments. But if we think about how wonderful and beautiful the gift of faith is, and focus on that, then those difficulties get put into perspective and it becomes easier to cope with family members not on the full path.

Before having time with members of our extended family it is worth doing some preparation. What would be the best approach to speaking about Jesus with each relative? If there was a positive response, where would I recommend they go? Would their local parish be wonderfully welcoming and well equipped to help someone come back to the faith or into a deeper relationship with Jesus? What could you invite them to that would be beneficial to where they are at right now?

Our parishes and homes are called to be oases of mercy.

Our vocation can only find meaning in the context of the real world in which we live. A high school student once asked, 'How is the Catholic Church not a cult?' The answer is that we look to our leaders and teaching for truth, but we each decide how to live it. We are free sons and daughters of God, each with our own vocation, each called to take responsibility for how the truth we have received is incarnated in our daily lives.

For this reason we can say that our vocation as baptised Catholics breathes with two lungs: personal holiness (relationship with God) and mission. We need both. If either is missing we are ineffective. Mission without holiness makes us become a real nuisance. Holiness without mission, means that we are not sharing the gift we have received for others.

Sometimes it is easier to be told what to do. But each of us will be called to account to God for how we have lived our life. We each have to respond to His call. There are no back seat passengers in our faith. None.

'Simply reverence the Lord Christ in your hearts, and always have your answer ready for people who ask you the reason for the hope that you all have.' 1 Peter 3:15

It doesn't have to be rocket science. We get overwhelmed and give up. Don't start with the end point, start with this advice from St Peter, and the rest will follow.

The Church exists for one reason only – to reveal Jesus Christ to the world. That we may participate in this mission, the teachings of the Church are directed towards the transformation of every aspect of our lives so we may become more like the One into whose life we have been baptised.

For example one of the teachings of the Church is the rule about attending Mass on Sundays and Holy Days of obligation. Many complain that this is their only day off, and can't be bothered doing something someone else wants them to do. That rule is a nuisance until I am called to proclaim Jesus wholly in my heart, and realise that I need Him fully, that I have a hunger for Him, and that I need to receive Him in my heart in order to be able to live out this mission and to accept all that He is offering me. It is only then that I realise that if I don't receive Him that my spiritual life will wither up and die. Now I understand why the rule is there, and I experience sadness for those who are no longer in the pews and did not persevere until this rule became alive for them.

We are called to become 'as Christ Jesus' Phil 2:5, that we may proclaim Him to the world. He who emptied Himself to became one of us. We are all called to this mission of the Church. Resting safe and secure as we focus inwardly on the trappings of our faith may help us to feel good and holy – but it is not the mission to which we are called.

Holiness is for us the laity, not just for the clergy and religious. We the laity are the vulnerable front line of the Church's mission to the world. We are to be in the world, witnessing to our faith and our personal relationship with Jesus Christ in everything we say and do. That front line is experienced at every water cooler moment when I have to decide whether to speak up or not.

At times we will come across leaders who have taken on false teaching, eg 'Don’t worry if you don’t get to Mass. Nobody believes that the Eucharist is the body of Christ any more'. Remember that they are good people who are confused, good people who have been misinformed. In these cases it is better to say, 'Let's talk about that' than to shout out, 'That's a heresy!!!'

When we want to start discussions, having a good quotation to kick things off with is very helpful. Pope Francis has been providing lots of good quotations. We can share a quotation and say, 'If this is true, then it means we need to do something about it. What could we do?' And we need to allow everyone to contribute to the discussion, not just those with the best English and the best egos.

Evangelii Gaudium 27. '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 him. 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”.'

Evangelii Gaudium 49.' Let us go forth, then, let us go forth to offer everyone the life of Jesus Christ. Here I repeat for the entire Church what I have often said to the priests and laity of Buenos Aires: I prefer a Church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a Church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security. I do not want a Church concerned with being at the centre and then ends by being caught up in a web of obsessions and procedures. If something should rightly disturb us and trouble our consciences, it is the fact that so many of our brothers and sisters are living without the strength, light and consolation born of friendship with Jesus Christ, without a community of faith to support them, without meaning and a goal in life. More than by fear of going astray, my hope is that we will be moved by the fear of remaining shut up within structures which give us a false sense of security, within rules which make us harsh judges, within habits which make us feel safe, while at our door people are starving and Jesus does not tire of saying to us: “Give them something to eat” (Mk 6:37).'

Evangelii Gaudium 120b: 'Every Christian is a missionary to the extent that he or she has encountered the love of God in Christ Jesus: we no longer say that we are “disciples” and “missionaries”, but rather that we are always “missionary disciples”. If we are not convinced, let us look at those first disciples, who, immediately after encountering the gaze of Jesus, went forth to proclaim him joyfully: “We have found the Messiah!” (Jn 1:41). The Samaritan woman became a missionary immediately after speaking with Jesus and many Samaritans come to believe in Him “because of the woman’s testimony” (Jn 4:39). So too, Saint Paul, after his encounter with Jesus Christ, “immediately proclaimed Jesus” (Acts 9:20; cf. 22:6-21). So what are we waiting for?'

Evangelii Gaudium 127. 'Today, as the Church seeks to experience a profound missionary renewal, there is a kind of preaching which falls to each of us as a daily responsibility. It has to do with bringing the Gospel to the people we meet, whether they be our neighbours or complete strangers. This is the informal preaching which takes place in the middle of a conversation, something along the lines of what a missionary does when visiting a home. Being a disciple means being constantly ready to bring the love of Jesus to others, and this can happen unexpectedly and in any place: on the street, in a city square, during work, on a journey.'

Beginning in an encounter with the living Jesus Christ, Who fosters in us an attitude of conversion and the decision to follow Him, by our living in communion with Christ and being called by Him within the communion of the Church, a sense of ecclesial belonging is strengthened and generates life.

Conferences like these help us learn that we are not alone. We get enriched by different perspectives. Sometimes we will get it wrong, but if we are not alone, then we can work on solutions together. With God we can find unity in diversity. It is easy to love in theory, it is more tricky in practice.

Let us understand that the mission has a Church: not the Church has a mission.

God is already active in people's lives, even in the absence of the kerygma proclamation. If we can get people to reflect on their own life experience, and affirm them while seeking the right moment to say, 'This is how I make sense of …….. – with Jesus'. How to pick that moment, and not too soon, is the big question. Calling on the Holy Spirit will help. We remember that Jesus is always looking for His lost sheep. With that help we can see how to look upon each situation in a positive way, and to promise that you can have all this and more with Jesus in your life.

When speaking with those who have different belief systems from our own we can ask, 'Do you believe in a supreme being? It is the same One we acknowledge. Let's talk.' Points of contact and similarities are what we need to find, and it is an art to find and express them.

Talking to lapsed Catholics is more difficult. By comparison atheists and agnostics are much easier. It is tough talking with lapsed Catholics because they think they know all they need to know, they will be defensive, and will want to tell you what's wrong with everything and won't want to listen to anything that causes them to re-evaluate their position. The integrity of how you live the faith, your prayer for them, and your willingness to answer their questions, is all we can do.

As the saying goes: 'If you can find the perfect church, go and join it – but be aware that as soon as you join it, it will no longer be perfect.'

It takes prayerfulness, confidence and boldness to bring Jesus into a conversation, but it's worth it.
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My response

This workshop was additional reinforcement to the previous talks and workshops at the Conference. The consistency of the message, 'Evangelisation isn't as hard as you think, yes you can do it, no it isn't optional, it is essential, and here's some more ways you can do it' was rather amazing.

The real test, of course, is whether we are alert for the opportunities to talk about the impact Jesus has had in our lives, whether we use those opportunities, and whether we are actively on the lookout for more opportunities.

I am reminded of a holy parishioner from decades past. He was a retired journalist, and poet, with a deep love for the mother of Jesus and at daily Mass until his health began to fail. He had been hospitalised and I had gone to visit him. Thinking that this was just one more of his short hospital stays, I launched into local news. But he was wiser than that, and he stopped me and said that he needed to be still and to put all his attention on Jesus. As it turned out, he only had hours left to live. However, his lesson has stayed with me. The older we get, and the wiser we get, the only thing that matters is Jesus, the rest is distraction. So increasingly any homily that brings Jesus alive for me is a good one, and anything less is a wasted opportunity.
We have a mission, to bring Jesus to others, and we won't be pleasing to Him unless we do.
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May He help us fulfill that mission and purpose. Amen.
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The next issue will be the last in the series, with notes from the panel discussion session that closed off the conference.