Made for Mission. Tim Glemkowski
Here are the two basic hallmarks of a healthy, growing parish:
1) Everyone in the parish understands that the mission of the parish is to form disciples both of those in the pews and outside her walls.
2) Everyone has an abundantly clear understanding of how that happens in the parish and in their own lives using their unique gifts.
Being a healthy parish is about actually making these principles a reality in your parish. Growing parishes know that their mission as a parish is to form disciples. They have a clear understanding of how that happens, and they have been faithfully carrying out that mission for a decade, leading to culture change over time. Everything else — the programs you use, different outreaches, events, groups — is just tactics. Whatever tactics you use, you are learning how to imbue those two principles in everything you do as a parish.
That is it. It is that simple. But of course, “simple” does not mean easy, and becoming a healthy parish is not going to be easy. First and foremost, it requires that you adopt Christ’s own vision for the parish as your own. You must make the mission to form disciples central to everything that happens, but the mission cannot be just a statement on a website. It must also involve a strategic plan to get there. To create such a plan for our parishes, we need first of all to have a clear understanding of the current crisis in our Church. In the next chapter, we will look at the real crisis and how we as a Church can and should be addressing it.
Self-Diagnosis
Here is a simple quiz to help you see whether or not your parish is a “growing” parish. For each question, answer either (1) Strongly Disagree, (2) Somewhat Disagree, (3) Neutral, (4) Somewhat Agree, or (5) Strongly Agree.
1) Our parish has a shared vision and/or mission statement that focuses on the importance of discipleship for our community.
1 2 3 4 5
2) The vast majority of our regular parish community knows what our vision and/or mission as a parish is.
1 2 3 4 5
3) Our pastor has a leadership team that supports him in discipleship and evangelization efforts at a strategic level.
1 2 3 4 5
4) Our homilists regularly preach on the need for a relationship with Jesus.
1 2 3 4 5
5) Our parish has staff members available specifically for the work of evangelization and discipleship.
1 2 3 4 5
6) Our parish has evangelization opportunities readily available to everyone in our community.
1 2 3 4 5
7) Our parish has discipleship opportunities readily available to everyone in our community.
1 2 3 4 5
8) The vast majority of our parish community understands what it means to be a disciple of Jesus.
1 2 3 4 5
9) The vast majority of our parish community has attended an evangelization series and/or been a part of a discipleship small group.
1 2 3 4 5
10) Parishioners are encouraged to become leaders and provided with formation and training to do so multiple times a year.
1 2 3 4 5
Add up your totals. A score of 50 indicates a strong, growing parish, which is what we all want to be. A lower score shows that improvement is needed in certain areas if we want to become a strong, growing parish.
Every parish in the United States should be able to strongly agree to all 10 points in the self-diagnosis. These should just be simple hallmarks of any church that wants to form disciples. While this is not a “letter grade,” growing parishes will have scores well into the 40s. The goal of this book is to give you some simple tools so that in five years, you can answer “Strongly Agree” to all of the above. Before we can explore these tools, however, we need to look at the real crisis at hand, namely, the crisis of discipleship in our parishes. In the next chapter, we will take an in-depth look at this crisis to give you the information you need to turn your parish into a growing, healthy parish.
Chapter 3
Addressing the Real Crisis
The real crisis in the Church is not the priest shortage, dipping donations, or even the low percentage of Catholics who attend Sunday Mass. These are just symptoms of a deeper cultural problem. The crisis in the Church is our pervasive failure over multiple generations to form disciples.
What our parishes need is not just a few new ways of doing things; they need a complete overhaul of culture. That word, “culture,” is the sum total of the unspoken values, attitudes, biases, and behavioral norms of a group. It is the lens through which that group interprets reality, yet it remains largely unspoken. The culture of a parish is often felt long before it is understood or articulated. Whether we are aware of it or not, any visitor or newcomer to our community begins to feel the culture of the place before we have a chance to say a single thing about who we are and who we want to be.
Consider a positive example. Christ the King parish in Ann Arbor, Michigan, has long been known (to those who know of it) as one of the most vibrant parishes in the country. A 2009 article from Legatus Magazine details the religious vocations that grew out of the parish over a period of ten years: twenty priests, twenty-four seminarians, almost two dozen women in vows in religious orders, and ten women in formation in various orders.16
When I was in high school, my dad took a trip to Ann Arbor and attended Christ the King for Sunday Mass. I will never forget him coming home and describing the experience. He was blown away. He related how the depth of prayer, the devotion, the working of the Holy Spirit were tangible. Later, when my wife and I lived in Ann Arbor, I had a chance to attend Christ the King myself a few times. It did not disappoint! You can sense the culture of Christ the King as soon as you walk in. There is just something different there than in any other parish I have ever been to.
Often, when we cannot gain traction in trying to renew our parish, it is because we are bumping up against a cultural obstacle that we may not have known was there. Implicitly, operating the way we have for generations has defined the culture of our parishes in ways that can be unhealthy. We have formed Catholics in what it means to be the Church, and often this formation has missed the mark.
Many of our parishes have operated for a long time mainly as places for baptized Catholics to gather together (most) Sundays for Mass and to receive the sacraments. Whether we like it or not, this maintenance mindset in a parish creates a definite culture.
How can you begin to determine the current culture of your parish? Simply ask the following questions — ask them of yourself and of your parishioners:
• What does it mean to be a Catholic?
• What does it mean to be a member of this parish?
• Why does our parish exist?
Culture reflects our answers to these big questions, and everyone has an answer, whether they think they do or not. How do your parishioners answer these questions? That is your parish culture.
For years, the culture of our parishes has largely been fo cused inward, driven by the maintenance-mode model. Following the Second Vatican Council, with its radical call to go outward and re-Christify the world, too many parishes simply focused inward, enacting changes to the liturgy and governance, looking to parish membership and offertory as benchmarks of success. This emphasis is responsible for some of the decline we are seeing today. The maintenance model seemed to be all that was required of parishes when the secular culture largely supported religious practice. Yet this apparent vitality lulled us into a false sense of security. We mistook high levels of activity in our parishes for overall healthy cultures and never considered looking deeper to see if our parishes were really fulfilling their mission: to form disciples.
In