Rediscovering Our Apostolic Zeal: The Call to Be a Church on Mission

I wrote last week about our Diocese recently releasing a document entitled: “MAINTENANCE TO MISSION PASTORAL PLAN: Recalibrating our Structure to Move on Mission”. Writing about the plan, I mentioned that the Diocese of Superior had released pastoral plans in the past. These focused primarily on the shortage of priests our diocese was facing and how to organize the more than one hundred parishes in such a way that they could be served by a dwindling number of priests. The committee tasked with developing this latest plan realized that our diocese was not only facing a declining number of priests, but also a decreasing number of people in our pews and receiving the Sacraments. Thus this plan focuses more on this issue and our need to moving from simply maintaining parishes to guiding all of us to regain the zeal of the early missionaries who first brought the Catholic faith to northern Wisconsin. 

Last week I focused on the introductory letter to the pastoral plan that our Bishop wrote. The body of the pastoral plan is divided into six pillars that follow an introduction. We will look at the introduction and pillar one. 

The introduction lays out how a parish is defined in Canon Law or what we might refer to as “Church Law.” From the definition the Pastoral Plan highlights the word “stable.” For our purposes the word stable refers to a parish’s alignment with its mission. Each pillar is meant to assist a parish to reflect on whether or not it is living out its mission and focusing on “being on mission.” If a parish is not aligned with its mission and moving what it does to being mission focused, the question becomes whether or not it is truly “stable.”

To further assist parishes, parish leadership is being called to reflect on four questions:

• Where are we now?
• Where do we need to go?
• How do we get there?
• How do we know if we are succeeding?

Together these questions and the pillars that we will discuss in future weeks are meant to help parishes establish goals and a plan for moving forward. While some plans dioceses have published tell parishes exactly what they should look like, what programs they need to put in place, etc., our plan is meant to guide parishes to establish a plan that conforms to Diocesan policies but respects the diversity of parishes that are found across Northern Wisconsin. 

The first pillar in our Diocesan Plan is titled, “Church on Mission.” It reminds us that the Church’s mission is the great commission found at the end of the Gospel of Matthew, which sets out that the number one reason the Church exists is to evangelize. We read in the Pastoral Plan, “By extension we can say that everything that the Church does ought to be ordered toward that most fundamental end: drawing every soul in our geographical boundaries into ever-deeper relationship with God the Father, through His only begotten Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Reflecting on this first pillar we are being called to ask ourselves whether everything we do is so ordered to draw people into a greater relationship with Christ. If we find we have an activity or an event that is not ordered to this end, we would do well to ask ourselves why are we investing time and resources into maintaining it. This is the “where are we now” question. We also need to reflect on gaps we may have within the life of our parish. Again asking the question “where are we now?” Then we can start piecing together answers to the next questions in light of this first pillar.