This is the resource material I had collected for the second of the three sub-parts to Theme 6, and it is a loose grouping because there will be a degree of overlap with the other two sub-parts.
It should be useful for choosing people to interview and lines of inquiry for research, and providing common language to talk about these ideas.
NB. I have not repeated the relevant material from the pre-requisite reading list which you can find here
Open to Renewal: Corporate/parish conversion, movements of grace
https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/newslocal/this-rare-successful-australian-manufacturing-company-has-a-daily-monastic-prayer-hour/news-story/7023d67f59d00cf0cca001ce17f05e88
18 May 2016 BAC Systems, Glendenning NSW.
Chapel, daily 'monastic break' for workers
Mr Walter Bachmann: Well worthy of follow up visit and interview
http://www.uscatholic.org/articles/201402/five-habits-highly-effective-parishes-28521
also March 2014 issue of U.S. Catholic Vol 79 no. 3 p12-17
Making a good first impression
Metrics matter
Faith formation is a family affair
Plucking people from the pews
Communicate the right message
“Change is never easy, but done in small doses and in baby steps, it can be done,” Fr Tom Sweetser S.J. of Milwaukee adds. “Every parish can do it. We now have permission from the Pope to think big and then carry changes out in small, creative ways. The little details will keep adding up until suddenly, the entire parish operation has a new focus.”
https://canadiancatholic.net/why-urgent-imperfect-evangelization-best-kind
17 June 2016 Josh Canning
Powerful parable about doing something now rather than taking a long time trying to perfect it first: 'Soup kitchens don’t wait for the best ingredients, they just feed people. Field hospitals don’t wait for the best medical supplies, they just treat people!'
https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/catholics-who-actually-read-the-bible-one-womans-online-ministry-43848?platform=hootsuite 21 Dec 2016 Mary Farrow
About Jenna Guizar, creative director of 'Blessed is She', an online ministry of accompaniment to women based on shared Scripture reflections. This collaborative ministry is still thriving, visit @blessedisshe_ on Instagram.
https://www.abc.net.au/religion/the-new-normal-pentecostalism-overtakes-anglicanism-in-sydney/10096616
26 Aug 2016 Paul Oslington
Reflection upon why Pentecostals are now more numerous than Anglicans, by attendance, in Australia:
An important difference is that Pentecostal ministers are also taught the leadership skills needed to grow churches. The commitment to further develop their skills is a marker of the contemporary Pentecostal ministry… The Sydney Anglican commitment to evangelism seems to me to be often undermined by an excessive and unhealthy need for church authorities to control the whole process… The thing that has struck me most about Pentecostal church meetings is that they are designed for attenders (including the leaders) to "do business with God." By contrast Sydney Anglican meetings are designed to transfer knowledge about God, which attendees will act upon later, perhaps in their daily quiet times… Pentecostal churches are full of wounded people, and churches are seen as hospitals for sinners.
https://www.amazon.com/Great-Catholic-Parishes-Essential-Practices/dp/1594714177
In 2012 and 2013, Bill Simon and his team studied 244 Catholic parishes to determine what made them exceptional. The study found that all of the parishes shared four foundational practices that led to a profound sense of belonging within their parish communities and a deepening commitment to discipleship:
https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/a-priests-stunning-theory-on-why-juarez-is-less-dangerous-now-71916?platform=hootsuite
22 Nov 2016 Barbara Bustamante
“When a parish adores God day and night, the city is transformed,” Fr. Patrico Hileman said, a priest responsible for establishing Perpetual Adoration chapels in Latin America.
https://tonymorganlive.com/2017/03/28/large-church-letting-staff-lead/?utm_campaign=The%20Unstuck%20Church&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=50539746&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-8jJtHFetkEBDeTdVDRe_Yz72PUbCwPpZvEzbHiMzWscgxXWNRZNB7xI-JkZCgM5Z_vioskn762j74OWFmHD6vQjB30Kg&_hsmi=50939794 28 Mar 2017 Tony Morgan
The challenge is this: control is the enemy of growth. Healthy, growing churches have a framework of accountability that empowers the pastor and paid staff to engage ministry unhindered. In other churches, holding on to a structure of many boards and committees is connected to a desire for lay people to be involved in the ministry. Particularly in traditional denominations, the level of engagement by lay people is measured by the number of people serving on boards and committees. The reality is rarely are any of those boards and committees engaging in actual ministry. Instead, their sole purpose is to govern the activity of staff and ministry teams. I’m a strong proponent of engaging lay people. I’d much rather that happen by equipping volunteers to do ministry rather than to attend committee meetings to talk about ministry.
https://careynieuwhof.com/9-signs-your-church-is-ready-to-reach-unchurched-people/?utm_content=bufferf9fef&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
approx. Aug 2017 Carey Nieuwhof
•Your main services engage teenagers
•People who attend your church actually know unchurched people
•Your attenders are prepared to be non-judgmental
•You're good with questions
•You're honest about your struggles
•You have easy, obvious, strategic and helpful steps for new people
•You've dumped all your assumptions
•Your 'outreach' isn't just a program
•You are flexible and adaptable
http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/letters/2016/documents/papa-francesco_20160319_pont-comm-america-latina.html
19 Mar 2016 Pope Francis
Often we have given in to the temptation of thinking that committed lay people are those dedicated to the works of the Church and/or the matters of the parish or the diocese, and we have reflected little on how to accompany baptized people in their public and daily life; on how in their daily activities, with the responsibilities they have, they are committed as Christians in public life. Without realizing it, we have generated a lay elite, believing that committed lay people are only those who work in the matters “of priests”, and we have forgotten, overlooked, the believers who very often burn out their hope in the daily struggle to live the faith. These are the situations that clericalism fails to notice, because it is more concerned with dominating spaces than with generating initiatives. Therefore we must recognize that lay people — through their reality, through their identity, for they are immersed in the heart of social, public and political life, participate in cultural forms that are constantly generated — need new forms of organization and of celebration of the faith. The current pace is so different (I do not say better or worse) than what we were living 30 years ago! “This challenges us to imagine innovative spaces and possibilities for prayer and communion which are more attractive and meaningful for city dwellers” (Evangelii Gaudium, n. 73). It is illogical and therefore impossible to think that we as pastors should have the monopoly on solutions for the multitude of challenges that contemporary life presents us. On the contrary, we must be on the side of our people, accompanying them in their search and encouraging the imagination capable of responding to the current set of problems. We must do this by discerning with our people and never for our people or without our people.
Ed. This is a major point. Consider how frequently we hold up as an ideal anyone who dedicates their whole life to ministry: priest, pastor, preacher, evangelist, religious. Just how often do we hold up the example of holy lay people taking God with them as they go about their daily work? https://www.thykingdomcome.global/resources/day-3-thanks-faith-frontline-emergency-service-workers-power-prayer-work
https://careynieuwhof.com/9-fresh-approaches-to-innovation-that-could-blow-your-mind/
Nov 2017 Carey Nieuwhof
If there’s one thing the church needs today, it’s more innovation in our methods.
The mission never changes, but frankly, the methods have to.
•Build your future around a product, not a person
•100x thinking
•Fly by instruments, ie you need to trust the data
•Crowd source ideas
•Identify your real competitor
•Create your own opposition before someone else does
•Test voraciously
•Rethink motivation
•Embrace failure
https://www.visionroom.com/4-must-haves-weekly-staff-meetings/
Nov 2017 Sam Rainer III
Prayer: Scripture for the upcoming week:
Ministry stories from the previous week:
Thank you cards to write
https://careynieuwhof.com/how-to-a-lose-first-time-guest-in-10-minutes-or-less/
Jun 2018 Carey Nieuwhof
•Have a bad online presence
•Make parking frustrating
•Under-greet guests
•Over-greet guests
•Make kids check-in complicated
•Keep your facility tired and dirty
•Confuse them
https://careynieuwhof.com/7-ways-to-build-teams-of-great-leaders-when-you-feel-like-you-have-no-awesome-people/
July 2018 Carey Nieuwhof
Start where you are
Look for the best leaders you can find
Look beyond your official structure
Resist the temptation to buy leaders
Cast a clear and compelling vision
Embrace excellence more than inclusion
Pray for more leaders
Inspiring Tweet from @frpatrickop 23 Dec 2018
About 20 years ago, my home parish, St. Clement of Rome, in suburban St. Louis started a Eucharistic Adoration chapel. It’s clearly been a fruitful chapel. (Image with 20 vocations, a mix of priestly and religious, all from the same parish in those years).
https://catholicherald.co.uk/dailyherald/2019/04/25/the-west-can-learn-a-lot-from-hungarys-pro-family-policies/
25 Apr 2019 C.C. Pecknold
“After we won the election in 2010 with a two-thirds majority, we decided to build a family-friendly country and to strengthen families raising children. We thought the opposition would be a partner in this, but since then there have been very few decisions in the field of family policy that they’ve supported. So if we had always taken the opposition’s opinion into account, Hungary would now be on the brink of collapse. There wouldn’t be such a comprehensive family-support system, a family-friendly tax system, a housing program, 800,000 new jobs, and many opportunities to create a balance between life and work. The socialists have driven our country into deep crisis before, and they would do it again. "
National Day of Prayer and Fasting, page on Australian revivals
https://www.nationaldayofprayer.org.au/revival/
Each of these events is worth studying.
There was a short lived Facebook report of a north-west NSW town that did the National Day of Prayer and Fasting as an inter-denominational event, and all of the participating churches reported a big upswing in attendances of new people afterwards.
This organisation may be able to recall which town it was, and which year it was (2017, 2018 or 2019)
In Patti Gallagher Mansfield's golden jubilee edition of 'As By A New Pentecost', in pages 23-25 she talks about a small parish in Czechoslovakia that had experienced the full spectrum of charismatic gifts as recorded in 1 Cor 12-14 for several centuries, and which St John XXIII visited while he was still a bishop. This parish inspired him, and as a consequence also inspired Vatican II. It is worthy of much greater study, even though the place was almost wiped out by the Nazis in 1938.
https://www.amazon.com/New-Pentecost-Patti-Gallagher-Mansfield/dp/1619565110
Instagram post @romawaterman around 7 Aug 2019
A week ago I had a strange dream that I feel was from the Lord. In the dream I had been asked to take a workshop to preach on something at a gathering. I could choose the topic. All the workshops running were packed. When it came to my turn it was also packed. The Lord put it on my heart to talk about the importance of family.
I began to share how I felt the Lord was highlighting that we needed to get back to the focus of investing in to our families. That all our preaching, travelling the world, our church meetings, and mandates… if our families were not integral to our call, the main focus of our lives, the most important part of our ministry – we were not truly fulfilling the call of God on our lives. I shared that we needed to get back to ministering to our kids first – before anything else!
At the end of the session, everyone had quietly left the room. No one was interested in knowing about that. Some people said 'Oh we already know that', and they were looking for another workshop where they could learn about receiving signs and wonders in their ministries.
I woke in the middle of the night and my heart was pounding. It was an awful feeling to share what's on your heart but no one wanted to hear it, but the fact that people did not find this topic as important as the miraculous and mystical made my heart physically hurt!
Even if you think you know it. How are your kids doing? Do they need you around more? Is it time for a shift?
Learn your rhythm- what God has called you to doesn't have to look the same as everyone else. Travelling slower doesn't mean less productivity. We are in this for the long haul, this is not a sprint – do now what will reveal a blessing later, whether you are 65 or 25.
..............................................................................................
The next blog-post in this cycle will be background reading resources for the sub theme 'Open to Reform'
#PlenaryCouncil #PlenaryCouncilTheme6
At the very end of the cycle I will put it all together in a printer friendly PDF.
It should be useful for choosing people to interview and lines of inquiry for research, and providing common language to talk about these ideas.
NB. I have not repeated the relevant material from the pre-requisite reading list which you can find here
Open to Renewal: Corporate/parish conversion, movements of grace
https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/newslocal/this-rare-successful-australian-manufacturing-company-has-a-daily-monastic-prayer-hour/news-story/7023d67f59d00cf0cca001ce17f05e88
18 May 2016 BAC Systems, Glendenning NSW.
Chapel, daily 'monastic break' for workers
Mr Walter Bachmann: Well worthy of follow up visit and interview
http://www.uscatholic.org/articles/201402/five-habits-highly-effective-parishes-28521
also March 2014 issue of U.S. Catholic Vol 79 no. 3 p12-17
Making a good first impression
Metrics matter
Faith formation is a family affair
Plucking people from the pews
Communicate the right message
“Change is never easy, but done in small doses and in baby steps, it can be done,” Fr Tom Sweetser S.J. of Milwaukee adds. “Every parish can do it. We now have permission from the Pope to think big and then carry changes out in small, creative ways. The little details will keep adding up until suddenly, the entire parish operation has a new focus.”
https://canadiancatholic.net/why-urgent-imperfect-evangelization-best-kind
17 June 2016 Josh Canning
Powerful parable about doing something now rather than taking a long time trying to perfect it first: 'Soup kitchens don’t wait for the best ingredients, they just feed people. Field hospitals don’t wait for the best medical supplies, they just treat people!'
https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/catholics-who-actually-read-the-bible-one-womans-online-ministry-43848?platform=hootsuite 21 Dec 2016 Mary Farrow
About Jenna Guizar, creative director of 'Blessed is She', an online ministry of accompaniment to women based on shared Scripture reflections. This collaborative ministry is still thriving, visit @blessedisshe_ on Instagram.
https://www.abc.net.au/religion/the-new-normal-pentecostalism-overtakes-anglicanism-in-sydney/10096616
26 Aug 2016 Paul Oslington
Reflection upon why Pentecostals are now more numerous than Anglicans, by attendance, in Australia:
An important difference is that Pentecostal ministers are also taught the leadership skills needed to grow churches. The commitment to further develop their skills is a marker of the contemporary Pentecostal ministry… The Sydney Anglican commitment to evangelism seems to me to be often undermined by an excessive and unhealthy need for church authorities to control the whole process… The thing that has struck me most about Pentecostal church meetings is that they are designed for attenders (including the leaders) to "do business with God." By contrast Sydney Anglican meetings are designed to transfer knowledge about God, which attendees will act upon later, perhaps in their daily quiet times… Pentecostal churches are full of wounded people, and churches are seen as hospitals for sinners.
https://www.amazon.com/Great-Catholic-Parishes-Essential-Practices/dp/1594714177
In 2012 and 2013, Bill Simon and his team studied 244 Catholic parishes to determine what made them exceptional. The study found that all of the parishes shared four foundational practices that led to a profound sense of belonging within their parish communities and a deepening commitment to discipleship:
- Share leadership by using clergy and lay staff with the best talents and skills to direct the community
- Foster spiritual maturity and plan for discipleship by offering a variety of formation programs and ministry opportunities to reach parishioners at differing points in their lives
- Excel on Sundays by dedicating significant time, energy, and money to liturgical celebrations that parishioners and visitors find welcoming
- Intentionally evangelize by challenging insiders to look outward and providing service programs, social events, global mission opportunities, and pastoral care at key sacramental moments that focus on inviting outsiders to deeper relationship with Christ and the Church.
https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/a-priests-stunning-theory-on-why-juarez-is-less-dangerous-now-71916?platform=hootsuite
22 Nov 2016 Barbara Bustamante
“When a parish adores God day and night, the city is transformed,” Fr. Patrico Hileman said, a priest responsible for establishing Perpetual Adoration chapels in Latin America.
https://tonymorganlive.com/2017/03/28/large-church-letting-staff-lead/?utm_campaign=The%20Unstuck%20Church&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=50539746&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-8jJtHFetkEBDeTdVDRe_Yz72PUbCwPpZvEzbHiMzWscgxXWNRZNB7xI-JkZCgM5Z_vioskn762j74OWFmHD6vQjB30Kg&_hsmi=50939794 28 Mar 2017 Tony Morgan
The challenge is this: control is the enemy of growth. Healthy, growing churches have a framework of accountability that empowers the pastor and paid staff to engage ministry unhindered. In other churches, holding on to a structure of many boards and committees is connected to a desire for lay people to be involved in the ministry. Particularly in traditional denominations, the level of engagement by lay people is measured by the number of people serving on boards and committees. The reality is rarely are any of those boards and committees engaging in actual ministry. Instead, their sole purpose is to govern the activity of staff and ministry teams. I’m a strong proponent of engaging lay people. I’d much rather that happen by equipping volunteers to do ministry rather than to attend committee meetings to talk about ministry.
https://careynieuwhof.com/9-signs-your-church-is-ready-to-reach-unchurched-people/?utm_content=bufferf9fef&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
approx. Aug 2017 Carey Nieuwhof
•Your main services engage teenagers
•People who attend your church actually know unchurched people
•Your attenders are prepared to be non-judgmental
•You're good with questions
•You're honest about your struggles
•You have easy, obvious, strategic and helpful steps for new people
•You've dumped all your assumptions
•Your 'outreach' isn't just a program
•You are flexible and adaptable
http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/letters/2016/documents/papa-francesco_20160319_pont-comm-america-latina.html
19 Mar 2016 Pope Francis
Often we have given in to the temptation of thinking that committed lay people are those dedicated to the works of the Church and/or the matters of the parish or the diocese, and we have reflected little on how to accompany baptized people in their public and daily life; on how in their daily activities, with the responsibilities they have, they are committed as Christians in public life. Without realizing it, we have generated a lay elite, believing that committed lay people are only those who work in the matters “of priests”, and we have forgotten, overlooked, the believers who very often burn out their hope in the daily struggle to live the faith. These are the situations that clericalism fails to notice, because it is more concerned with dominating spaces than with generating initiatives. Therefore we must recognize that lay people — through their reality, through their identity, for they are immersed in the heart of social, public and political life, participate in cultural forms that are constantly generated — need new forms of organization and of celebration of the faith. The current pace is so different (I do not say better or worse) than what we were living 30 years ago! “This challenges us to imagine innovative spaces and possibilities for prayer and communion which are more attractive and meaningful for city dwellers” (Evangelii Gaudium, n. 73). It is illogical and therefore impossible to think that we as pastors should have the monopoly on solutions for the multitude of challenges that contemporary life presents us. On the contrary, we must be on the side of our people, accompanying them in their search and encouraging the imagination capable of responding to the current set of problems. We must do this by discerning with our people and never for our people or without our people.
Ed. This is a major point. Consider how frequently we hold up as an ideal anyone who dedicates their whole life to ministry: priest, pastor, preacher, evangelist, religious. Just how often do we hold up the example of holy lay people taking God with them as they go about their daily work? https://www.thykingdomcome.global/resources/day-3-thanks-faith-frontline-emergency-service-workers-power-prayer-work
https://careynieuwhof.com/9-fresh-approaches-to-innovation-that-could-blow-your-mind/
Nov 2017 Carey Nieuwhof
If there’s one thing the church needs today, it’s more innovation in our methods.
The mission never changes, but frankly, the methods have to.
•Build your future around a product, not a person
•100x thinking
•Fly by instruments, ie you need to trust the data
•Crowd source ideas
•Identify your real competitor
•Create your own opposition before someone else does
•Test voraciously
•Rethink motivation
•Embrace failure
https://www.visionroom.com/4-must-haves-weekly-staff-meetings/
Nov 2017 Sam Rainer III
Prayer: Scripture for the upcoming week:
Ministry stories from the previous week:
Thank you cards to write
https://careynieuwhof.com/how-to-a-lose-first-time-guest-in-10-minutes-or-less/
Jun 2018 Carey Nieuwhof
•Have a bad online presence
•Make parking frustrating
•Under-greet guests
•Over-greet guests
•Make kids check-in complicated
•Keep your facility tired and dirty
•Confuse them
https://careynieuwhof.com/7-ways-to-build-teams-of-great-leaders-when-you-feel-like-you-have-no-awesome-people/
July 2018 Carey Nieuwhof
Start where you are
Look for the best leaders you can find
Look beyond your official structure
Resist the temptation to buy leaders
Cast a clear and compelling vision
Embrace excellence more than inclusion
Pray for more leaders
Inspiring Tweet from @frpatrickop 23 Dec 2018
About 20 years ago, my home parish, St. Clement of Rome, in suburban St. Louis started a Eucharistic Adoration chapel. It’s clearly been a fruitful chapel. (Image with 20 vocations, a mix of priestly and religious, all from the same parish in those years).
https://catholicherald.co.uk/dailyherald/2019/04/25/the-west-can-learn-a-lot-from-hungarys-pro-family-policies/
25 Apr 2019 C.C. Pecknold
“After we won the election in 2010 with a two-thirds majority, we decided to build a family-friendly country and to strengthen families raising children. We thought the opposition would be a partner in this, but since then there have been very few decisions in the field of family policy that they’ve supported. So if we had always taken the opposition’s opinion into account, Hungary would now be on the brink of collapse. There wouldn’t be such a comprehensive family-support system, a family-friendly tax system, a housing program, 800,000 new jobs, and many opportunities to create a balance between life and work. The socialists have driven our country into deep crisis before, and they would do it again. "
National Day of Prayer and Fasting, page on Australian revivals
https://www.nationaldayofprayer.org.au/revival/
Each of these events is worth studying.
There was a short lived Facebook report of a north-west NSW town that did the National Day of Prayer and Fasting as an inter-denominational event, and all of the participating churches reported a big upswing in attendances of new people afterwards.
This organisation may be able to recall which town it was, and which year it was (2017, 2018 or 2019)
In Patti Gallagher Mansfield's golden jubilee edition of 'As By A New Pentecost', in pages 23-25 she talks about a small parish in Czechoslovakia that had experienced the full spectrum of charismatic gifts as recorded in 1 Cor 12-14 for several centuries, and which St John XXIII visited while he was still a bishop. This parish inspired him, and as a consequence also inspired Vatican II. It is worthy of much greater study, even though the place was almost wiped out by the Nazis in 1938.
https://www.amazon.com/New-Pentecost-Patti-Gallagher-Mansfield/dp/1619565110
Instagram post @romawaterman around 7 Aug 2019
A week ago I had a strange dream that I feel was from the Lord. In the dream I had been asked to take a workshop to preach on something at a gathering. I could choose the topic. All the workshops running were packed. When it came to my turn it was also packed. The Lord put it on my heart to talk about the importance of family.
I began to share how I felt the Lord was highlighting that we needed to get back to the focus of investing in to our families. That all our preaching, travelling the world, our church meetings, and mandates… if our families were not integral to our call, the main focus of our lives, the most important part of our ministry – we were not truly fulfilling the call of God on our lives. I shared that we needed to get back to ministering to our kids first – before anything else!
At the end of the session, everyone had quietly left the room. No one was interested in knowing about that. Some people said 'Oh we already know that', and they were looking for another workshop where they could learn about receiving signs and wonders in their ministries.
I woke in the middle of the night and my heart was pounding. It was an awful feeling to share what's on your heart but no one wanted to hear it, but the fact that people did not find this topic as important as the miraculous and mystical made my heart physically hurt!
Even if you think you know it. How are your kids doing? Do they need you around more? Is it time for a shift?
Learn your rhythm- what God has called you to doesn't have to look the same as everyone else. Travelling slower doesn't mean less productivity. We are in this for the long haul, this is not a sprint – do now what will reveal a blessing later, whether you are 65 or 25.
..............................................................................................
The next blog-post in this cycle will be background reading resources for the sub theme 'Open to Reform'
#PlenaryCouncil #PlenaryCouncilTheme6
At the very end of the cycle I will put it all together in a printer friendly PDF.
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