Evangelization is the hot topic among the Personal Ordinariates today. How do the Ordinariates grow beyond a few large parishes and a set of early startups to truly fulfill the evangelical mission envisioned in Anglicanorum Coetibus and subsequent Church documents? In her first book, Forming Intentional Disciples, Sherry Weddell laid out a framework for effective evangelization. By the end of that book, it was clear the answer for Ordinariate parishes is to transform themselves into evangelizing communities. The challenge then is how parishes can accomplish this transformation.
Becoming a Parish of Intentional Disciples is a response to this need. If we were hoping for a how-to guide or an evangelization cookbook, we should have known better. Because every parish is different with its own history, community context, and personalities, something like that probably isn’t even possible! So Weddell and the Catherine of Sienna Institute (CSI) have given us the next best thing: a set of six case studies of parish transformation written by someone who was there on the ground leading the charge. Each case study presents the local challenges to becoming an evangelizing parish and how the parish overcame those challenges.
Sherry Weddell opens the book with her chapter, “The Generation of Saints,” an engaging account of the Catholic Revival in France following soon after the Protestant Reformation. She first reviews many of the details and personalities of the revival and then lays out lessons that we can learn and apply in our own day. Among these lessons, the leaders of the revival collaborated with each other rather than each one trying to go it alone. Further, they were creative in how they applied the rich traditions of the Catholic Church in their present moment. And they were prayerful and full of faith: they expected God to act!
Collaboration, creativity, prayer, and faith. These were the essential ingredients to the successful Catholic Revival in seventeenth century France. As the authors show in the following six case studies, they are also the essential ingredients to successful evangelization in our day.
Case Study 1: Praying It Forward. In the first case study, Deacon Keith Strohm, Director of Evangelism at Queen of the Rosary Catholic Church near Chicago, shares how he evangelized his parish community by forming prayer teams to go out into the surrounding neighborhoods to pray for the people who lived in each home. As the parish came alive and began to grow, Deacon Strohm realized that going out into the neighborhoods to pray was also strengthening the discipleship of the prayer teams. He writes, “the spiritual climate of our parish has changed — and that has had a positive impact on every other area of our mission.”
Case Study 2: Accepting Responsibility for the Evangelizing Mission. The second case study by Dominican Priest Fr Michael Fones describes a creative outreach approach developed at Holy Apostles Parish in Colorado Springs. The parish viewed each member as an “Apostle of Hope” responsible for the parish’s evangelizing mission. The parish organized itself into ministries, focus groups, and Apostles of Hope Coordination teams, all with the focus of sending out Apostles of Hope to reach out to members of the community who were in need. Critically, the measure of success was not just how many people were helped, but also how many parishioners were helping those people. And by that measure, the program was a success!
Case Study 3: Becoming a Mission-Driven Parish. Bobby Vidal, Evangelism Director at Saint Kateri Catholic Church in Santa Clarita, California, describes his experience helping a parish to transform from being a maintenance-driven community to a mission-oriented community. The transformation process, he found, required getting parishioners to examine how they talked about God, what they perceived to be the spiritual needs of their community, how parish organizational structures helped or hindered the evangelizing mission, and how the parish engaged with the secular world. The very process of answering these questions propelled the parish towards becoming the evangelizing community it was called to be.
Case Study 4: Making the Invisible Church Visible. Katherine Coolidge, a former pastoral associate and currently a CSI Coordinator, begins her chapter with the curious story of a church so hidden by a forest of trees that it could not be seen when parked on the street right in front of it. That image came to symbolize a parish that was invisible to the surrounding community. She describes multiple actions the parish took (including cutting down trees!) to make itself visible not only physically but also through parishioners’ changed lives.
Case Study 5: Evangelizing through Fireside Chats. Fr Chas Canoy relates how he began his ministry as pastor of St John the Evangelist in Jackson, Michigan by announcing he would be, in the words of Pope Francis, a shepherd “with the smell of the sheep.” To that end, he began going out into the community to visit parishioners in their homes. At first he visited just a dozen of the parish’s more than 2,000 families. Once people got the idea, then he asked for volunteers to host these visits and invite their neighbors to attend what came to be known as Fr Chas’ “fireside chats.” Over time, the fireside chats evolved to reach even more people and demographic segments within the community. Today, his fireside chats are simply a fact of life in Jackson!
Case Study 6: Transforming Youth Ministry to Grow Disciples. Jim Beckman, Director of Youth Leadership at Augustine Institute, describes his experience as a youth minister discovering that the old tried-and-true approaches to youth ministry were not working any more. He then found that the key to connecting with today’s young people is to develop a focus on discipleship. Beckman concludes by writing, “When we pursue discipleship-shaped youth ministry, we are getting to the heart of why we do youth ministry in the first place: to help young people encounter the love of God and become followers of Jesus Christ.”
Becoming a Parish of Intentional Disciples presents a set of hands-on case studies to guide Ordinariate pastors, deacons, and lay leaders as they seek to transform their parishes into the evangelizing communities needed to grow the Personal Ordinates. No single approach or process will work in every parish. But readers may be inspired by these case studies to try something similar in their own parishes or simply to be creative and find new solutions that work in their specific situations. Either way, this book is a must read for Ordinariate parish leaders everywhere.
Martin Fracker writes from Texas. This article first appeared in the February 2022 issue of the St. Peter's Rambler.