Reorienting the Parish
The local parish is the environment that is best suited to take on the task of educating and supporting the laity to evangelize. In their pastoral plan for evangelization, the U.S. Bishops argue that this is the case “because the parish is where most Catholics experience the Church.” [USCCB, Go and Make Disciples, 12.] However, this will require some major adjustment for most parishes, which generally have an inward focus and are easily distracted. The hectic reality of parish life results in a focus more on maintaining the parish and its programs than exerting energy on outward mission. In addition, most parishes spend a lot of effort educating children, but have much less experience in teaching adults.
A parish cannot successfully support its members by creating some new program, but must become what Jane E. Regan calls an “evangelizing community.” This kind of parish is a gathering of people committed to the goals of accepting, living out, and sharing the Good News so that the world can be transformed. That commitment extends to adult faith formation and a transformative learning process in order to discover how to meet those goals. The U.S. Bishops continue:
A parish cannot successfully support its members by creating some new program, but must become what Jane E. Regan calls an “evangelizing community.” This kind of parish is a gathering of people committed to the goals of accepting, living out, and sharing the Good News so that the world can be transformed. That commitment extends to adult faith formation and a transformative learning process in order to discover how to meet those goals. The U.S. Bishops continue:
These goals assume that an evangelizing spirit will touch every dimension of Catholic parish life.... Every element of the parish must respond to the evangelical imperative—priests and religious, lay persons, staff, ministers, organizations, social clubs, parochial schools, and parish religious education programs. Otherwise, evangelization will be something a few people in the parish see as their ministry— rather than the reason for the parish’s existence and the objective of every ministry in the parish. [USCCB, Go and Make Disciples, 12.]
Parish programs and liturgical celebrations exist to support the laity in their work of evangelization, but without a strong sense of mission many parish programs have become ends in and of themselves.
Parish Obstacles
There are many common obstacles that can prevent parish communities from adequately supporting the laity’s call to evangelize. These obstacles include parishes’ tendency to orient themselves inward for self-preservation, difficulty in maintaining focus, limitations on contact with parishioners, and a reluctance to challenge parishioners.
Orientation
Many parishes are predominantly oriented inward to activities that occur within the parish walls, rather than outward to the mission field in the world. When this is the case, parish leaders see their role as fulfilling the needs of parishioners: providing sacraments, liturgies, classes, and pastoral care. It is not that these activities are bad, but it has become easy to forget what they are meant to accomplish and that the Church exists to evangelize.
One problem is the attitude and motivation of parish members, as Albert McClellan writes:
One problem is the attitude and motivation of parish members, as Albert McClellan writes:
At times the churches have regarded themselves as Noah’s ark of salvation, fortified camps, God’s minorities, spiritual fellowships, ecclesiastical societies, temples where God lives, family clubs, and in many other ways. These half-truth notions grow out of the experience of Christians in their environment. Most of these concepts are based on an understanding of the church as a place to go or an organization to belong to. These are “come structures” in contrast to “go structures.” [Albert McClellan, The New Times: A Prophetic Look at the Challenge to the Christian Church in the 1970s. Quoted in Marlene Wilson, How to Mobilize Church Volunteers , 17]
Church consultant Win Arn found in a survey of nearly one thousand Christian churches that they considered the church’s purpose to take care of their needs and the needs of their family. [Rick Warren, The Purpose Driven Church: Growth Without Compromising Your Message and Mission, 82.] Parishioners may come with wrong expectations, but parish leaders also often reinforce them. This occurs particularly with regard to money, ministry, and theological approaches.
Attitudes around money are one factor in socializing parishioners to experience their parish as inward-focused. Consumer culture can start people on the wrong foot, where a parish may be seen as yet another business to frequent. Contact with a parish is often initiated because one wants a church wedding or funeral, or for one’s child to receive baptism, first communion, or religious education. At Sunday Eucharist, members of the assembly may hope to be entertained by the music or the homily and give to the collection accordingly (probably deeming it worth much less than a movie). A pay-for-service relationship is established when the parish charges—or expects donations—for sacraments, home blessings, and religious education classes. Likewise, parish budgets generally cover costs within the parish, but do not include line items for sharing outside (or within) the parish. “Special collections” for causes outside the parish are considered separate contributions beyond what one would give to the parish. How would our parishes change if we thought of our collections as pooling the community’s money together to do the work of the gospel, wherever that might be, as early Christian communities did (Acts 2:32)?
Parish leaders—both lay and ordained—can also have an insular attitude with regard to ministry. Ministry is generally restricted to volunteer service within the parish itself, and extensive pastoral energy is spent in a spirit of scarcity, trying to fill volunteer positions (e.g., Eucharistic ministers). In these cases, the leader starts with the “slots,” sometimes intent on simply finding a warm body to fill the position. Guilt may be the predominant motivational factor for someone to accept a position. However, an approach based in a biblical understanding of stewardship and call requires that we start with the person, him or herself. We should help all parishioners discern how and where they are called to minister. Doing so means not limiting people to the list of parish ministries offered at the typical “ministry fairs” offered by many parishes, but suggests the creative challenge associated with true call and giftedness. “The church does not exist to be served,” writes Marlene Wilson, “but to provide and equip servants. As someone once said, ‘It is to be a launching pad, not a hangar.’” While some are called to minister within their parish, we must remember that most are not.
The underlying theological approaches a parish uses in its preaching and religious education also greatly affects its orientation inward or outward. The content of many catechetical resources, from children’s religious education to R.C.I.A., are overwhelmingly focused on teaching church doctrine. But teaching doctrine is not enough, as it does not likely result in Christians who can apply the values of the gospel in their daily lives. Religious education needs to be a life-long conversational process that intends to form people who can personally engage with God and the subtleties of the real world.
There is nothing wrong with dedicating time, money, and focus within the church itself, but ultimately all that effort should be for the purpose of fulfilling its mission. For us to become a truly evangelizing church, we must get to a point where our members are coming to our parishes to be sent back into the world to serve and are being effectively prepared to do that work.
Attitudes around money are one factor in socializing parishioners to experience their parish as inward-focused. Consumer culture can start people on the wrong foot, where a parish may be seen as yet another business to frequent. Contact with a parish is often initiated because one wants a church wedding or funeral, or for one’s child to receive baptism, first communion, or religious education. At Sunday Eucharist, members of the assembly may hope to be entertained by the music or the homily and give to the collection accordingly (probably deeming it worth much less than a movie). A pay-for-service relationship is established when the parish charges—or expects donations—for sacraments, home blessings, and religious education classes. Likewise, parish budgets generally cover costs within the parish, but do not include line items for sharing outside (or within) the parish. “Special collections” for causes outside the parish are considered separate contributions beyond what one would give to the parish. How would our parishes change if we thought of our collections as pooling the community’s money together to do the work of the gospel, wherever that might be, as early Christian communities did (Acts 2:32)?
Parish leaders—both lay and ordained—can also have an insular attitude with regard to ministry. Ministry is generally restricted to volunteer service within the parish itself, and extensive pastoral energy is spent in a spirit of scarcity, trying to fill volunteer positions (e.g., Eucharistic ministers). In these cases, the leader starts with the “slots,” sometimes intent on simply finding a warm body to fill the position. Guilt may be the predominant motivational factor for someone to accept a position. However, an approach based in a biblical understanding of stewardship and call requires that we start with the person, him or herself. We should help all parishioners discern how and where they are called to minister. Doing so means not limiting people to the list of parish ministries offered at the typical “ministry fairs” offered by many parishes, but suggests the creative challenge associated with true call and giftedness. “The church does not exist to be served,” writes Marlene Wilson, “but to provide and equip servants. As someone once said, ‘It is to be a launching pad, not a hangar.’” While some are called to minister within their parish, we must remember that most are not.
The underlying theological approaches a parish uses in its preaching and religious education also greatly affects its orientation inward or outward. The content of many catechetical resources, from children’s religious education to R.C.I.A., are overwhelmingly focused on teaching church doctrine. But teaching doctrine is not enough, as it does not likely result in Christians who can apply the values of the gospel in their daily lives. Religious education needs to be a life-long conversational process that intends to form people who can personally engage with God and the subtleties of the real world.
There is nothing wrong with dedicating time, money, and focus within the church itself, but ultimately all that effort should be for the purpose of fulfilling its mission. For us to become a truly evangelizing church, we must get to a point where our members are coming to our parishes to be sent back into the world to serve and are being effectively prepared to do that work.
Focus
A second obstacle a parish may have in embracing its role in supporting the laity is its ability to set and maintain a focus on the church’s mission of evangelization. Rick Warren shifted his focus from individual Christians to churches in The Purpose-Driven Church. In it he states that, “Every church is driven by something,” but often they do not have an awareness of what it is. What Catholics may most have to learn from Warren is his ability to intentionally focus on and clearly articulate the primacy of focus and purpose.
William Bausch describes some typical parish styles in his book The Total Parish Manual. The “Nothin’ Honey” parish offers perfunctory sacraments and not much more. The “Sherwin Williams” parish has “A little of this and a little of that but not much of anything... no sense of mission. One thin coat covers all.” The “Traditionalistic” parish has a strong hierarchy, little collaboration, and runs with a consumer mentality where parishioners come to get their needs met. Bausch also describes the “Chronic Fatigue Syndrome” parish:
William Bausch describes some typical parish styles in his book The Total Parish Manual. The “Nothin’ Honey” parish offers perfunctory sacraments and not much more. The “Sherwin Williams” parish has “A little of this and a little of that but not much of anything... no sense of mission. One thin coat covers all.” The “Traditionalistic” parish has a strong hierarchy, little collaboration, and runs with a consumer mentality where parishioners come to get their needs met. Bausch also describes the “Chronic Fatigue Syndrome” parish:
Here it’s parish life on the edge. Overactive, frantic, many activities, but no “center.” Everyone’s exhausted from running and doing all day long. Groups keep confronting each other because they all have the hall the same night at the same hour. An exciting place to be, but it will wear you down. Is anyone in charge?
Parishes meeting these common styles, with a range of activity from minimal to “frantic,” all define themselves by their programs, which is the root of the problem.
Many parishes take a program-based approach, which becomes their de-facto mission. Success is measured by the number of programs and activities being offered and the number of people involved in them. Parish leaders may regularly work hard to plan events, and then be disappointed that few attend. Parishes have a difficult time letting go of ministries that are past their natural lifetime, and bend over backwards trying to maintain them. “Healthy” ministries with big events may be little more than social groups. Individual programs may compete more than they work collaboratively. Parish resources are perceived as a zero-sum game, such that each group must compete for money (either directly from the budget or through fundraisers), volunteers, mass announcements, meeting rooms, and perhaps even bulletin space. Budgets are doled out to the separate programs, at times regardless of how well they advance the church’s mission. Program-based parishes also tend to predominantly focus on children and teenagers, with adult offerings often limited to programs for catechumens and candidates who will be receiving sacraments.
The program-based parish model makes it easy to forget the purpose of a parish, because everyone becomes so involved in activity. It is also subject to over-extension and can result in parish leaders being “interrupt-driven,” always addressing the next crisis that appears, rather than supporting a clear mission. For a parish to address evangelization effectively, it must embrace it as its clear purpose—not as a program—and keep its focus on that goal.
Many parishes take a program-based approach, which becomes their de-facto mission. Success is measured by the number of programs and activities being offered and the number of people involved in them. Parish leaders may regularly work hard to plan events, and then be disappointed that few attend. Parishes have a difficult time letting go of ministries that are past their natural lifetime, and bend over backwards trying to maintain them. “Healthy” ministries with big events may be little more than social groups. Individual programs may compete more than they work collaboratively. Parish resources are perceived as a zero-sum game, such that each group must compete for money (either directly from the budget or through fundraisers), volunteers, mass announcements, meeting rooms, and perhaps even bulletin space. Budgets are doled out to the separate programs, at times regardless of how well they advance the church’s mission. Program-based parishes also tend to predominantly focus on children and teenagers, with adult offerings often limited to programs for catechumens and candidates who will be receiving sacraments.
The program-based parish model makes it easy to forget the purpose of a parish, because everyone becomes so involved in activity. It is also subject to over-extension and can result in parish leaders being “interrupt-driven,” always addressing the next crisis that appears, rather than supporting a clear mission. For a parish to address evangelization effectively, it must embrace it as its clear purpose—not as a program—and keep its focus on that goal.
Contact
In the United States, only about one-third of Catholics today attend Sunday worship weekly, with many of the remaining two-thirds attending only on Christmas an Easter. Of those who attend liturgy, it is most likely the only contact they have with the parish. Preaching in Sunday liturgies is the extent of the education most adult Catholics receive in living out their faith. Bulletins distributed at Sunday liturgy are also a means of communication, although it is a common lament among parish leadership that few actually read them.
Many school-age children attend religious education programs on Sundays or through Catholic schools, sometimes with some minimal parental involvement. Religious education directed at adults is generally very limited. Programs for preparing adults to become Catholic or receive other sacraments of initiation are well developed, but involve a very small population. Annual parish missions, workshops, or classes may be offered, but generally attract a tiny percentage of the parish and are very limited in scope. Small groups that gather for prayer, Bible study, or other forms of faith sharing may also be available, but are rarely popular.
The problem with these low levels of contact is that they limit the parish’s ability to teach and support its members in their call to evangelize. The parish has a limited ability to communicate its message and do its own part to evangelize.
Parishes can increase the level of contact they have with their parishioners if they are intentional about it. First of all, the more relevant an activity is to one’s personal vocation, the more likely that person will attend. This means the parish would need to provide relevant content, effectively presented, and communicate adequately that it is available. The majority of Catholics who rarely attend liturgy could be convinced on major feast days or other times that dedicating more time to church is worthwhile. Meetings could be made more accessible by scheduling them at more convenient times, and providing childcare and/or meals.
Evangelization can also utilize more creative approaches outside the typical “program” approach Catholic parishes are accustomed to. This could include sending out formation materials to all registered parishioners (including students away at college) via postal or electronic mail, advertising in local newspapers, telephoning parishioners, making home visits, and providing web resources. Parish can also be taken out to where people are in the world, rather than requiring that people come to the parish plant. An excellent example of this is “Theology on Tap,” a program targeting young adults known for offering religious education and socialization in bars and pubs. Started by the Chicago archdiocese 27 years ago, the very successful program has since spread across the country.
However, in addition to making improvements we also need to accept some of the limitations parishes have with contact and better utilize the precious contact we do have. If evangelization is central to our identity as Christians, it must be addressed prominently in our liturgies and throughout everything that is done within the parish.
Many school-age children attend religious education programs on Sundays or through Catholic schools, sometimes with some minimal parental involvement. Religious education directed at adults is generally very limited. Programs for preparing adults to become Catholic or receive other sacraments of initiation are well developed, but involve a very small population. Annual parish missions, workshops, or classes may be offered, but generally attract a tiny percentage of the parish and are very limited in scope. Small groups that gather for prayer, Bible study, or other forms of faith sharing may also be available, but are rarely popular.
The problem with these low levels of contact is that they limit the parish’s ability to teach and support its members in their call to evangelize. The parish has a limited ability to communicate its message and do its own part to evangelize.
Parishes can increase the level of contact they have with their parishioners if they are intentional about it. First of all, the more relevant an activity is to one’s personal vocation, the more likely that person will attend. This means the parish would need to provide relevant content, effectively presented, and communicate adequately that it is available. The majority of Catholics who rarely attend liturgy could be convinced on major feast days or other times that dedicating more time to church is worthwhile. Meetings could be made more accessible by scheduling them at more convenient times, and providing childcare and/or meals.
Evangelization can also utilize more creative approaches outside the typical “program” approach Catholic parishes are accustomed to. This could include sending out formation materials to all registered parishioners (including students away at college) via postal or electronic mail, advertising in local newspapers, telephoning parishioners, making home visits, and providing web resources. Parish can also be taken out to where people are in the world, rather than requiring that people come to the parish plant. An excellent example of this is “Theology on Tap,” a program targeting young adults known for offering religious education and socialization in bars and pubs. Started by the Chicago archdiocese 27 years ago, the very successful program has since spread across the country.
However, in addition to making improvements we also need to accept some of the limitations parishes have with contact and better utilize the precious contact we do have. If evangelization is central to our identity as Christians, it must be addressed prominently in our liturgies and throughout everything that is done within the parish.
Reluctance to Offend
Many parishes avoid addressing controversial issues because they have a resistance to conflict. This kind of timidity is in some ways an extension of the first obstacle of internal orientation, characterized by fear of losing members or donations. It can also come from a mentality that the parish’s role should be to make everyone feel good (clearly not Jesus’ mission), and that conflict works counter to that intention.
This is particularly relevant to evangelization, as the call to discipleship is one that constantly challenges our way of living. The main challenge is in the way that we apply gospel values to our lives and the more specific a parish is in wrestling with those questions, the more helpful it is in supporting its parishioners in that effort. However, it may also make some of its members uncomfortable in the process.
Parishes should look to Jesus as a model regarding conflict. Jesus was not hesitant to speak his mind, and his words were much more controversial to his contemporary audiences than what we hear in most of our churches today. His message was so unpalatable to many that he was driven out of town to be thrown off a cliff (Lk. 4:28), threatened with stoning (Jn. 8:59, Jn. 10:31) and ultimately crucified. However, he was also extremely compassionate, understanding, and loving to all. Jesus attracted large crowds by preaching the totality of the Good News—the parts that are easy and the parts that are difficult. Parishes should not try to offend their members or be too presumptuous about how one should live the gospel, but they also should not be so timid that they shirk their responsibility to share the full gospel message and forward the mission of the church.
Overcoming the challenges of orientation, focus, contact, and a reluctance to offend are important steps toward a parish empowering its lay members to evangelize, but they are not enough. Next, we will look at “equipping ministry,” a framework around which a parish can organize its efforts.
This is particularly relevant to evangelization, as the call to discipleship is one that constantly challenges our way of living. The main challenge is in the way that we apply gospel values to our lives and the more specific a parish is in wrestling with those questions, the more helpful it is in supporting its parishioners in that effort. However, it may also make some of its members uncomfortable in the process.
Parishes should look to Jesus as a model regarding conflict. Jesus was not hesitant to speak his mind, and his words were much more controversial to his contemporary audiences than what we hear in most of our churches today. His message was so unpalatable to many that he was driven out of town to be thrown off a cliff (Lk. 4:28), threatened with stoning (Jn. 8:59, Jn. 10:31) and ultimately crucified. However, he was also extremely compassionate, understanding, and loving to all. Jesus attracted large crowds by preaching the totality of the Good News—the parts that are easy and the parts that are difficult. Parishes should not try to offend their members or be too presumptuous about how one should live the gospel, but they also should not be so timid that they shirk their responsibility to share the full gospel message and forward the mission of the church.
Overcoming the challenges of orientation, focus, contact, and a reluctance to offend are important steps toward a parish empowering its lay members to evangelize, but they are not enough. Next, we will look at “equipping ministry,” a framework around which a parish can organize its efforts.