Write Non Fiction In November : #WNFIN Day 8

The topic for today is inspired by last night's initial session of preparation for the Sacrament of Penance. I get why they call it the Sacrament of Reconciliation; it's more meaningful to the people of our time, but technically it is still the Sacrament of Penance, with three Rites of Reconciliation (First Rite, one on one; Second Rite, group preparation with one on one following and group thanksgiving to end it; Third Rite, general, many on one, for emergency use only).

After introductory discussions about God's love and how infinite and for ever it is, came a very frank look at what God expects our response to that love to be. i.e. 'Hear, O Israel, the Lord s our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.' Deuteronomy 6:4.

It is something that we are all supposed to take seriously, and yet it still comes as a bit of a shock when we go behind the familiar words and ponder what they actually mean and think about how to live them.

God's definition of an acceptable response is perfectly logical if we take the time to consider who God is, how completely dependent we are upon Him, and how much He desires our eternal welfare. For God only the best will do, and calling forth the best from us helps us to develop into the best selves we can possibly become. Every parent wants their child to make the most of their unique gifts and talents, and no parent is happy when a child settles for mediocre instead of fulfilling all his/her potential.

If you have had an experience of God's personal love, then such a full and complete response is normal and natural. But if you have been living a rather worldly life with God on the very outer edges of the picture (i.e. in case of emergency only) then such a required response is draconian and totally and unrealistically extreme.

Our personal preferences cannot change God's word. Ignorance of the spiritual laws that govern the universe is no excuse.

We only have to go back to the book of Genesis to see the difference between Abel who offered God in sacrifice the very best of his flock and Cain who offered the produce of his farming. If it had been the best of the produce Cain's offering would have been acceptable. It was a teachable moment where God invited Cain to do better, and Cain decided that getting jealous of his brother was far easier.

This is really radical stuff, especially for a mum looking for the quickest sessions to attend to fulfill her child's preparation for a sacrament.

It is radical for us too, because we have to stop and think whether we are giving to God the first and the best of our selves and all that we have. Most of us, myself included, are quite comfortable in what we have considered to be 'okay' to give to God – conveniently forgetting that God calls for our 'all' and not for our 'some'.

To see what living this 'all' for God, or as holier people have put it, 'all for the greater glory of God', is all about – we turn to the lives of the Saints. We need to pay attention not only to the St Francis of Assisi and the St Mary Magdalene types, but we also need to pay attention to how the holy people around us live.

Spotting them is easy, look for joyful people who are filled with thanksgiving and gratitude and who do not complain.

How would we measure up beside the stewardship challenge of giving God 10% of our time, talent and treasure? Time in prayer and voluntary service; contributing our skills to the welfare of the body of Christ; and the monetary fruits of our labours.

It is better to start small and grow incrementally than to go all in and peter out quickly.

How are we increasing the quality of what we give back to God? In some ways this is the greater challenge. We give, but is it our very best? How could we make it better, more intentional, more conscious and less habitual and routine? Where have we slipped into compromise and mediocrity?

We might rant and rail at this, and probably will – especially in times of feeling aridity and abandonment – but that doesn't change the fact that our long term (temporal and eternal) happiness depends on living 'all for God' and 'all of my best for God'.
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Like St Therese of Lisieux if we try to do our best in the little things and do them with great love, then eventually we will get there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who do WE think that we are?

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

Making Disciples is the core mission statement of our parish.

Pope Francis encourages us in Evangelii Gaudium 25

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

Models of Practical Ecclesiology: The Presumptions that hinder our mission

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thoughts and ideas have been coming to me, and at the present time I do not see the way clear to bring them into being. Maybe you can, if I tell you about them.

The second one, for want of a better name, I have dubbed 'listening to the call'. The rest of them will be in later blog-posts.

This is the situation:

My parish has the most extraordinary cohort of parishioners well into their retirement years in their late 70s, 80s and 90s. They are wonderful people who constantly inspire me. My guess is that your parish is quite similar to mine.

However, most people don't get to that age without a regret or two. Of these the most serious would be not acting upon the persistent dreams and desires that God gave us. None of us wants to come face to face with the Lord at the time of our death knowing that we haven't done anything towards what He consistently asked of us.

There is a line from one of the Proclaim 2014 Conference workshops that stood out for me when I had to retype it earlier this week: 'Ask them what they would like to do. The answers may surprise you.'

The standard way parishes ask for help is to either a) plead in the parish bulletin or from the microphone near the end of Sunday Mass or b) to run a stewardship campaign with a survey form that lists a large number of parish ministries and asks parishioners to tick the boxes of those things they are interested in. Sadly those survey forms tend not to be acted upon fully – except for the one or two parish ministries that the parish administration most wanted to get people involved in. 'Ethel, go through those forms and bring me only the ones that ticked catechist or senior server'- that kind of thing.

What we don't do is find out what God has already placed on the hearts of His people. I'd like that to change.

Let's face it, most of us do nothing about the persistent dreams and desires God gives us because we haven't got a clue how to begin.

For example what if every time you heard stories about homeless children on the streets that you felt a strong desire to do something, so much so that you decided decades ago to pray for them on a daily basis. That alleviated some of that Godly-pull for a while, but it's still there and you don’t know how to act upon it. So you've done nothing.

What if your parish did something different, and asked you to write down on a postcard-sized piece of paper your name, some contact details, and that call in your life that you regret not acting upon – no matter how wacky it might sound?

For all you know there could be seven other people in the parish who have the exact same life regret. The parish could put you in contact with each other and arrange for a mini bus trip to visit an existing ministry to homeless street children. That might spark an idea you could all work on together locally. Or you could decide as a small group to go back and visit once a month and to each take an interest in one of the children and pray for them and write letters to them.

Perhaps that life regret was not getting to Nepal, and now your health is beyond it. But your parish might be able to put you in contact with missionaries in Nepal to whom you could give moral support and prayer support or there might be some Nepalese immigrants in your parish that you could befriend.

Perhaps that life regret was not learning Hebrew. For all you know there might be two others in the parish with the same life regret that you could get together with and form a friendship and easy stages study group with.

To make this work would require quite a lot of hours of co-ordination from parish admin or parish volunteers, but it would be joyful work because it would be helping people finally start acting upon some of the life-long calls that God has had upon their lives.

In just naming and writing down that life regret on the postcard, already grace would be active. To then talk with another parishioner about that life regret and brain-storm easy and simple ways of doing something about it, it would suddenly seem far more possible and achievable.

Can you imagine the joy and the relief that would be released by finally doing something concrete about that Godly pull in your life? I can. That's what I'd love to see happen for all my beloved parish friends, because it is never too late to do something about answering God's call. St Helen and St John XXIII did extraordinary good in their 80s.

I entrust this idea (which hasn't gone away in several weeks) to the Immaculate Heart of Our Lady Help of Christians that she may arrange for its implementation in the places where God wants it to happen.