28 April 2024

Our parish pastoral council met this past week for an extended meeting, which has become an annual event. The idea is to enjoy a meal together, take extra time for prayer, and have more time for envisioning ideas for our parish. We also invite extra staff and key ministry leads to join us for this meeting.

As in the past, at this meeting the parish council spent time reflecting on and discussing issues relating to our diocese’s move from maintenance to mission. In particular we continued to study our bishop’s pastoral letter on evangelization and this time also looked at a document produced from our diocese’s office of Evangelization and Missionary Discipleship titled, “Parish Discipleship Pathway.”

Our first order of business after our meal and prayer was to talk about what is a disciple. Father Dan, our associate, shared with us this quote from a book titled, Forming Intentional Disciples by Sherry Weddell. She writes:

“We have seen it happen over and over. The presence of a significant number of disciples changes everything: a parish’s spiritual tone, energy level, attendance, bottom line, and what parishioners ask of their leaders.

Disciples pray with passion. Disciples worship. Disciples love the church and serve her with energy and joy. Disciples give lavishly. Disciples hunger to learn more about their faith. Disciples fill every formation class in a parish or diocese. Disciples manifest charisms and discern vocations. They clamor to discern God’s call because they long to live it.

Disciples evangelize because they have really good news to share. Disciples share their faith with their children. Disciples care about the poor and issues of justice. Disciples take risks for the kingdom of God.”

The council members agreed, as I hope you would too, that we all want to belong to the parish she describes.

Next, we talked about where we see success or discipleship happening. The council members and guests were able to offer several examples. We see it happening with programs like I GOT TIME, OCIA (formally RCIA) – the program for people becoming Catholic or as adults receiving Confirmation or Eucharist, EC (Evangelical Catholic), and Revived, to name a few examples.

However, the council members and guests also agreed that we have a good deal of additional work that needs to be done in forming disciples. We talked about how as a parish, we need to be able to speak a common language of what it means to be a disciple. We talked about the need for us to have more opportunities for people to form relationships with others within our parish. Small groups were talked about a lot, and the importance they could play in the life of our parish. Friendships were spoken about. Council members and guests spoke about how many of us simply want to have friends who we can grow together with in faith, but also simply enjoy each other’s presence or company. This is especially in the crisis of loneliness and anxiety that has become an epidemic in our country.

While we didn’t leave the meeting with a concrete outline for our next steps, we now have some ideas of a direction we need to further discern. We want to look at what roadblocks might prevent us from being the parish spoken about in the quote for Sherry Weddell’s book and the next active steps we need to take as parish leaders. Of course, much more on this topic to come.

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