bearing witness in Asia

The intersection of Catholicism as the world’s largest Christian religion with the Asian continent, the home of two thirds of the world’s population and growing in political, cultural and economic influence, is just one of the realities that will be acknowledged at the Alpha Asia-Pacific regional gathering taking place in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, this month.

With a focus on the evangelising mission of the parish, I will be privileged to be speak at and be part of the gathering, learning of the diverse and emerging forms of mission in Asia with 450 leaders from 20 countries, including clergy and lay leaders from India, Indonesia and Singapore.

The Religions of Malaysia

The religiosity of Malaysia itself is heavily shaped by its geographical position between the ancient civilisations of India and China. The Strait of Malacca remains to this day one of the most important shipping lanes in the world, and for centuries has provided direct passage and safe harbour for merchant travelling between the Indian and Pacific oceans. This geography explains the significance of Penang, Malacca and Singapore as central ports and trading hubs along this route.

The activities of Indian and Chinese traders led to the dominance of Buddhism on the peninsula from the fourth century, with successive Buddhist kingdoms including the region within its domain. Islam was introduced to the peninsula in the thirteenth century from the Muslim port kingdom at Pasai, today’s Aceh in Indonesia, before Christian missionaries came onto the scene at the beginning of sixteenth century.

The Portuguese arrived in 1511 at Melaka, led by Alfonso d’Albuquerque, then came the Dutch a century later in 1641, and Britain in 1786 under the command of Sir Francis Light. It was the British who shaped and in a sure sense promoted the ethnic divisions that remain today in Malaysia, through a ‘divide and conquer’ strategy that brought in Chinese for the ports and mines, Indian labour for rubber plantations, and exercised a paternalistic approach that sought to restrain the Malays to agriculture as farmers and fisherman. It could be put that the division of political and economic influence by the British was designed to keep the Chinese out of politics, the Malays out of any role in the economy, while the Indians enjoyed neither political nor economic power.

Fast forward to today and two-thirds of Malaysia’s population remains Malay, one quarter Chinese and the remaining ten percent is largely Indian. While Islam is the defining essence of the Malay identity as enshrined in the Federal Constitution, the reality on the ground is a highly pluralistic and syncretic religiosity that presents challenges as well as opportunities for the Gospel which are well worth exploring.

Christianity in Asia

The life and affairs of the church in Europe, Latin America and Africa tend to dominate coverage of global Catholicism. However, Catholicism in Asia is no less noteworthy and will become increasingly significant for the world church, including the church in Australia, in the decades to come.

We have already seen an increasing Asian presence in our local churches, not only in our pews but also on the sanctuary. Clergy and religious from the Philippines, India, Vietnam, Korea, and other parts of the region have arrived to form an integral part of our church in Sydney and Australia.

Apart from the Philippines and Timor-Leste, Catholics in Asia are a religious minority—as are Christians more generally in the region.

There are an estimated 380 million Christians in Asia, representing 8 per cent of a total population of 4.5 billion. Hence, the faith is lived out without the supports of an extensive Christian presence or substantial institutional resources, and in full contact with the major Asian religions, dominant philosophies, and their adherents, including Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Taoists, and Shintoists.

Nonetheless, the vibrancy of Catholic and other Christian groups in Asia remains, as seen in the Syro-Malabar and Eastern Orthodox communities. The witness and evangelical energy of these churches are well known, not only in Asia but increasingly in our own dioceses.

Historical Influences

The lived situation of Catholics in Asia today and their outlook on evangelisation are deeply shaped by historical circumstances.

In many parts of Asia, Christianity is viewed as a product of European colonisation and therefore foreign to local culture. The impact of the missionary endeavours of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries looms large in this perception. Consider the British missionaries in Sri Lanka, the Portuguese and Dutch in India and Malacca, the Spanish in Philippines, the French in Vietnam, the Italians and other foreign missionaries in the history of Chinese Christianity.

However, what can be missed in the conventional affiliation of the Christian faith with western imperialism is that the Catholic and Protestant missionaries of these centuries were not always so neatly aligned with colonial administrations, or their trading partners.

For instance, the East India Company was long reluctant to admit Christian missionary organisations into their territories, on account of their tendency to upset the local social order and prevailing religious sensibilities. The patron saint of the east, St Francis Xavier, was himself often in conflict with the Portuguese authorities over their mistreatment and exploitation of indigenous groups.

Moreover, the misperception of Christianity in Asia as a late and artificial imposition from the west overlooks the presence of the Gospel in south and central Asia at the very origins of the church, millennia prior to the rise of modern colonial empires.

As is well known, St Thomas the Apostle arrived with Jewish traders in the south of India in the first century and thousands were baptised on the Coromandel and Malabar coasts.

The faith spread east in subsequent centuries, along the old Silk Road on which Nestorians travelled.

The famous Xi’an stele attests to the arrival of the Assyrian missionary Alopen in modern-day China in the seventh century, during a period of religious toleration under the T’ang dynasty, which saw the first Christian churches built at the emperor’s expense.

The collapse of that dynasty in the tenth century led to persecution of many religious groups and the near extinction of Christianity in that region for two centuries or so.

The Christian faith would not reappear in China with any significance until the time of the Mongols.

Then there is the figure of John of Montecorvino, an Italian Franciscan of the late thirteenth century, who evangelised thousands and went on to construct Catholic churches in the heart of Beijing.

The Challenge of National Religion

The situation of Catholics in Asia has also been shaped by rapid decolonisation that followed the Second World War, with these various independence movements leading not to secularism as has been the story in the West but to assertive forms of national religion in which ethnicity and religious identity have coalesced.

One thinks of the rise of Islamic nationalism in the region, Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism in Sri Lanka, and Hindu nationalism in India, which have placed Christian minorities under significant pressure and threat.

This is not to say that religious indifferentism and excessive individualism are not also present in Asia but the challenge of opposing religiosities with official backing is predominant in the minds of Asian Christians.

It is amidst these challenges that Catholics and other Christians demonstrate courageous witness to the Gospel in families, local networks, and worshipping communities.

As Pope John Paul II shared with the church in Asia, some 25 years after Paul VI’s landmark visit to the region, while the religious traditions of the ancient cultures of the East remain a challenge for the mission of evangelisation, the call to bring the Gospel to maturity in ways which are “fully Christian and fully Asian” remains before us.

This is because the Christian faith is not alien to these lands but an integral part of their history and indeed a vital force for their future.

leading change in the mission of Christ

This weekend I was glad to speak at the Ignite Conference 2022, a collaborative initiative of the Emmanuel Community and our Sydney Centre for Evangelisation in the Archdiocese of Sydney.

I addressed the theme of “leading change”, speaking to the personal and ecclesial aspects of moving our communities and ministries toward a genuine missionary stance. I touched on the role of charism in leading and responding to change, and the personal challenges that leadership evokes in the Church today and supports for a ministry that is both sustainable and fruitful for Christ’s mission.

I am conscious of the many different and varied contexts in which we lead, whether we exercise influence in our local parishes or dioceses, schools, ecclesial movements or other communities of faith. One consequence of this is that the responsibilities of leadership that we hold will differ and so will the particular dynamics of leading change.

However, what these forms of leadership will hold in common is that they will ultimately be concerned with exercising effective influence towards a particular goal. More specifically, as Catholic leaders our goal will be in related to proclaiming and witnessing to God’s love given to us in Jesus Christ and engage the task of bringing people into the encounter, surrender and the decision of faith. As leaders in the Church, we are called to be fruitful and make Christ’s life and mission powerfully present in our time with the people and communities that we serve. 

Leadership for mission, then, will not be primarily a rank or position but a choice and responsibility to actively serve a goal that is greater than ourselves.

Leadership Matters

Before examining the issues that arise when leading change in the Church, it is important to affirm that courageous leadership matters a great deal for the future of our Church and its presence in the world as a real sign and presence of Christ. 

In the Scriptures, Christ himself holds up leadership as essential to the continuation of his mission. Amidst the teeming crowds seeking out his help, Jesus still took the time to gather a group of leaders around him: forming, correcting and inspiring them; calling them into deeper discipleship; helping them to understand what impeded their leadership; and creating a culture of leadership as service.

We know that Jesus expressed compassion for people who did not have leaders: “He saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd” (Mk 6:34). Jesus was critical of those who exercised their leadership without a spirit of service, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. It will not be so among you…” (Matt. 20:25) and he rebuked those who evaded responsibility or led with impure motive, “They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others; but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them. They do all their deeds to be seen by others” (Matt. 23:4-5).

More positively, Jesus makes clear that all those who encounter him are given a commission to lead others to Him and to work toward the self-giving love, justice, forgiveness and abundance that marks God’s Kingdom. This pattern in Scripture is unmistakeable: those who experience a profound encounter with God are then given a mission to lead others to God.

As example, St Peter encounters Jesus in the miraculous catch and is called to follow Him and become a “fisher of men” (Matt. 4:19). Likewise, St Paul has a blinding encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus and is then called into God’s service in such a profound way that he proclaims, “Woe to me if I do not preach the Gospel!” (1 Cor. 9:16). Clearly, leadership matters and is expected of us in extending the mission of Christ in every age. 

Varieties of Leadership

It is important to affirm that the various forms of leadership that Christ gives to the Church for this mission do not compete with one another. Properly understood and exercised, these varieties of leadership and influence work together to build up the one Body of Christ.

For instance, our priests are most often responsible for the oversight, pastoral care and leadership of our parishes and chaplaincies. They teach the Catholic faith, sanctify through the sacraments and other rites of the Church and, in union with the bishop, build up the communion of the Church so it can be a convincing sign of Christ in the world.

We have consecrated men and women as well who express for the Church the primacy of the Holy Spirit in Christian life, a Spirit who manifests within the life of a specific religious order or community the fact that Christian discipleship is possible even in this way. These religious communities with their varied charisms and expressions remind us that diversity can be an expression of God’s life too.

There are also many lay leaders who lead and direct various pastoral works of the Church, who engage in ecclesial ministry in our parishes as youth ministers, sacramental coordinators, catechists, leaders of prayer groups and ministries, as well as in our Catholic schools, universities and other educational institutions. Lay people today oversee and lead our hospitals and healthcare facilities, welfare and social support services, and the Church’s outreach to the poor and vulnerable.

Then, there is the leading witness that all the baptised exercise in daily life, with the Spirit’s gifting we find described in the New Testament, particularly in Romans, 1 Corinthians and Ephesians. In his correspondence to the Christians at Ephesus, now the Izmir province in Turkey, St Paul writes, “The gifts He gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors, and some teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ” (Eph. 4:11-12). We are gifted differently and so will lead change differently. 

The apostles among us will be the visionaries who extend the Gospel, who can be found most often thinking and asking questions about the future and dreaming about what could be. They are our Peters, Priscillas and Aquillas.

Our prophets are those who prioritise listening to God, who enjoy time alone with God, who wait, listen and call people to obey God’s will, like Isaiah, Jeremiah and John the Baptist. Our prophets value holiness, obedience and God’s revelation. 

The evangelists among us enjoy talking to others about the life of Jesus and will have a primary concern to ensure new people are discovering and entering into Christ’s life and the Church. They enjoy discussions with those who are not Christians or far from the Church and are focused on inviting ‘outsiders’ in. 

In experience, many of the people in our communities tends to be shepherds. Shepherds enjoy one-on-one chats and helping others; they tend to lead with care, counsel, empathy and encouragement, much like Barnabas and James. They nurture and protect and are the caregivers of the community, focused on the interrelationships and spiritual maturity of God’s flock.

Our teachers are explainers of God’s truth and wisdom. They relish helping others understand the Gospel and the traditions and teachings of the Church and to apply this learning to their lives, much like Apollos and Philip. 

So, each of us are gifted in our own way, and each of us will tend to lead and indeed respond to change in accordance with our gifts and charisms. More often than not, we will lead change most effectively in our Church when we lead change alongside others who have different but complementary gifts to our own. 

For example, the visionary apostle often needs the presence of care that the shepherd brings so people are cared for rather than merely dragged along on a journey they are not accustomed to or comfortable with, and apostles also need prophets alongside them, so they are attentive to God and not acting purely on their own strength.

In my experience, when leading change in the Church, and specifically in our parishes, we will be challenged by leading change among a high proportion of ‘shepherds’, people who are the caregivers in community and prize stability and the interrelationships of a community. The great gift of shepherds is that they like to be with people in their lives, their brokenness and pain, and are highly empathetic. However, shepherds can also have difficulty moving people from that stage of life to the next stages of discipleship – to conversion of life, repentance and transformation. Shepherds may lack the confidence to challenge people to move forward, for fear that the person will be angry or upset with them. 

Similarly, leading change with ‘shepherds’ can be challenging because people gifted in this way tend to value stability and have a natural desire to avoid any negative impact on others. In light of this, shepherds usually benefit from having an apostle or evangelist alongside them to keep the mission moving forward, or else a prophet by their side to ensure the truth is spoken and people are being called to conversion, even when it is hard. 

However, the great gift of shepherds to the Church and leaders of change is that they can teach those who may be apostles or evangelists, who like movement and are eager to embrace ‘the new’ or untried, to minimise pain in the process of change and to be more attentive to the impact change can have on a community and their networks of relationship. 

The Need to Lead Change

Having recognised the different ways in which people will lead according to their gifts, we turn to the specific challenge of leading change. Change is a fact occurring around us and within us, and indeed there is no growth personally or for the Church as a whole without change. 

Take the challenge of change among our parishes for instance. Whether one is a priest, deacon, lay leader in parish ministry or a youth leader, the plain fact is that our parishes have not grown in roughly seven decades in Australia, since at least the 1950s. The majority of our parishes in Australia continue to decline each and every year. If our purpose as a Church is to evangelise, to proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the people of this time, place and culture, then we cannot keep doing what we’ve always done and expect a different result.

When our local communities have been declining for decades, it is going to be inevitable that there will be a small amount of people who love how we do things as Church and as leaders in the Church, and a whole community out there who don’t.

If we want to be more effective in reaching people for Christ, we are called to re-evaluate. We are called to re-evaluate not the Gospel – the life of Jesus himself who remains the same yesterday, today and forever (Hebrews 13:8) – but the ways, methods and expressions by which we bring this Gospel or ‘Good News’ closer to the people of our time. In short, all of us as leaders need to confront the challenge of changing how we do things to be ever more faithful and fruitful to Christ. 

Whether we are wrestling with declining numbers in our pews; changing priorities, expectations or demographics within our Catholic schools; changes perhaps in the available resources at your disposal or personnel or volunteers for shared ministry and service; or responding to new developments in the life of our Church or within the wider community, good leadership in the Church today means leading change. In fact, it can be said that if we as leaders in the Church are not leading change, we are probably not leading at all. By very definition, to lead means taking a team, a ministry, a community, and ourselves from one point to another. 

We have been tasked by Christ to grow the Church, to ‘go, make disciples of all nations’ (Matthew 28:19). When the landscape of faith in Australia is changing – when less people are close to the Church or Gospel than in previous generations, when more people claim no religious affiliation – we cannot afford to read off old maps. We are called to renew and change our approaches to evangelisation and outreach for the sake of the Gospel. This has been the pattern for the Church throughout the ages – adapting itself time and again to better proclaim and witness to the abiding Gospel and in full contact with the circumstances of its time.

It can be sobering for our communities, ministries and organisations to realise that they are perfectly structured and set up to achieve the results they are currently getting. If we want something other than the status quo, then we have to be prepared to change. Too often in Christian life we want God to do something new while we remain the same!

Leading change means making decisions about which direction our ministry or community should go, changing practices and methods to better fulfil our mission, reflecting on how to take others with us in that change, how to respond to the inevitable challenges and even resistance we can encounter in leading change, and how to sustain ourselves spiritually and otherwise throughout this process.

Preparing for Change

For many of us seeking to lead change in the Church – whether that change is big or small – we will inevitably find ourselves caught between an experience of a call and desire for renewal and the weight of church culture towards maintaining the status quo. In such an environment, it is important we do not become discouraged or disillusioned in the process of leading the growth and renewed vitality we all want to see in the Church.

It is worth noting that when we see people ‘burn out’ or become disillusioned in Church ministry, or even in their careers or vocations for that matter, it often has much less to do with how that person deals with the changes in their external environment and much more to do with how a person deals with themselves in the midst of that environment. After all, as the COVID-19 pandemic and our life more broadly will teach us, the only thing over which we can exert much control is our response to change, not the circumstances that surround us.  

So leading change is inherently challenging and self-implicating as it will test our character, what we value and believe within, how we respond to difficulties, relate with others, and understand ourselves before God. 

In leading change in the Church, it is always helpful to remind ourselves from the outset that the mission of our parish, diocese, or ministry does not all depend on us and that the Holy Spirit is always the primary agent of evangelisation, the one who bears the fruit and gives the growth, with whom we cooperate rather than substitute. It is equally important that we as leaders do not ‘spiritualise’ a lack of effort or fruitfulness in our ministry, and that we dedicate ourselves to making the very most of the gifts God has given us to serve God’s purposes. This means reflecting on and attending to a few key strategies so we can lead change well. 

Articulating our Reality

One of the practical things we can do in leading change well is to understand the landscape we are seeking to shape and influence. This is important because we want to build new approaches and strategies for mission on firm ‘rock’ rather than sand so to speak.

One of the best preparations for leading change in any organisation or community of the Church is to establish a clear view of reality, a firm and foundational understanding of the dynamics at play in a given scenario. This is especially important when the community or ministry we are trying to grow or change is complex or in crisis, which some would argue describes the current state of the Church. 

As an analogy, when a building is on fire or some other unexpected event occurs, the role of the leader is to give a clear account of what has taken place, working together with allies to convey this clear picture of reality. When the spokesman or woman comes forward to share what happened before a burning shop front, they exercise leadership simply by the act of describing reality for those trying to make sense of the scene (and without having done very much else!).

In a world of ‘fake news’ and fast online opinions, it is important to recognise a significant part of mature leadership is seeing the circumstances or situation we seeking to impact with clarity and depth. In other words, leading change involves doing some ‘homework’ or research and taking care and time to establish the facts. Leaders who have only half of the facts in hand or tend to be reactive or impulsive in response to situations can lead change that can be ineffective or even damaging. Their intent can be good, but their impact can be terrible. As the saying goes, “for every complex problem there are solutions that are simple, clear and wrong”. For a community as complex and important as the Church, there are few if any ‘silver bullets’ and this means engaging the full complexity of a scene rather than only the parts we want to see. 

For instance, when leaders turn to address the reality of declining Mass attendance in our Church, it can be all too tempting to put this at the feet of poor preaching, bad music and unfriendly people. It is true that these internal factors can discourage people’s engagement with our parishes and addressing these issues is pivotal. However, the reality is that people’s disengagement can also be the result of external factors, chief among them sport or other personal priorities at the weekend, or an unsupportive spouse or children. In short, disengagement from worship can be influenced by factors which have little to do with the experience of the parish in the pews as such.

How we define a pastoral problem and understand its causes will shape the responses we pursue in leading change. Building solutions on oversimplified, only partial or erroneous understandings of the present can lead to poor responses or, at the very least, incomplete ones that may not bear the full fruit we want to see.

Casting Vision

Complementing a firm grasp of the current reality is the need for leaders of mission to cast and unpack with their people a compelling vision of what the future could look like if change was realised and to bring others into this vision of a better future.

Again, as example, here in the Archdiocese of Sydney the key change we have identified as being at the heart of increased participation in worship, growing income and resources for our parishes, and increased support of volunteers and parish personnel is the growth of personal discipleship. Parishes change and grow only when people change and grow. 

However, in casting this vision with our parishes we were conscious that if nobody in our parishes, or Church agencies for that matter, talks about what Christian discipleship looks like, it becomes difficult for people to begin to walk on that road. As Sherry Weddell notes, “Unfortunately, most of us are not spiritual geniuses. If nobody around us ever talks about a given idea, we are no more likely to think of it spontaneously than we are to suddenly invent a new primary colour. To the extent we don’t talk explicitly with one another about discipleship, we make it very, very difficult for most Catholics to think about discipleship” (Sherry Weddell, Forming Intentional Disciples). It is difficult to believe in and live something that you have never heard anyone talk about.

In the same way, reviewing our local parishes, youth groups, ministries and communities will remain a theory unless we have clear and consistent leadership that communicates a vision and inspires the engagement of the whole community in that vision for Christ. 

In forming our vision, Pope Francis has called us repeatedly to expand our vision beyond a narrow concern for self-preservation and to embrace a vision of evangelisation, reaching out beyond ourselves to seek out all those who are lost. If we are leading a ministry or community today and outreach to those who are not Christians or are otherwise far from the Church is not part of its vision, the lifespan of that ministry or community is already limited before it has even begun.

A clear vision for evangelisation – for making “missionary disciples” as Pope Francis puts it – is a necessity to maintain even what we have as local communities of faith. This is obvious enough in the struggle to maintain our ministries, our giving and even, in some parishes and ministries, our hope. More positively, when we bring new people to Jesus and the Church it plants energy and life in our communities.

While we as communities and ministries can naturally tend to focus on the flock or the sheep we do have, there is an increasing recognition that the sheep are not having ‘baby sheep’ and that we will have to learn a new skill set in this age which is actually an ancient one. We need to learn to ‘fish’ like the first disciples of Jesus and cast our nets far, rather than ‘making do’ with a slowly diminishing flock. Leading change in such a way that attends to the unchurched and those far from the Gospel aligns with the saving mission of Jesus who comes not for the righteous but for sinners, who places the needs of the outcast and ailing even before his own flock, a focus that, paradoxically, renews the flock and reminds the sheep of what it means to follow Him. 

Addressing Resistance

Having talked about the importance of a clear view of the pastoral reality and casting a compelling vision for a preferred future, one of the realities for all leaders who are leading change is the likelihood of resistance. Change always sounds great until people start to experience it! 

When we encounter resistance to change that we as leaders have either proposed or introduced, it can be helpful to realise the source of that resistance is not usually a lack of vision but in fact too many visions. As noted earlier, all of our people will have a different experience and perspective of Christian life – some will be apostles who are open and eager to break new ground, others are teachers who want their community to be primarily a school of faith where people learn and think, while others envision the Church as called primarily to offer the embrace of a sheepfold, to privilege care and nurturance of the flock.

The upshot of all these perspectives is that some in our communities will find proposals for change that might propose unnecessary, alarming or a threat, as misdirected, or wasteful of time and money. Unless it is a really terrible idea, we will usually have some supporters, alongside a good number of people in the ‘middle’ who prefer a ‘wait and see’ approach, while the remainder will be indifferent, resistant or opposed.

In managing such community dynamics as leaders of change, we should be careful not to treat these cohorts the same. Time and again, it has been shown that giving too much oxygen to the vocal minority who tend to oppose change can take up enormous amounts of limited energy for little gain and these negative forces can drag others in the ‘middle‘ with them. In experience, leaders of change often focus on investing in and galvanising the ‘supporters’ for the change, the ‘early adopters’ who can influence and engage those in the ‘middle’ toward greater openness and engagement with the intended change.

This is not to say that we should entirely ignore the voices of those who oppose change as there is usually some aspect of truth that can be found even in those who might be most resistant. It is important to remember in leading change that behind every program or initiative that has had its day, or from which we need to move on, close or amend, there are real people and convictions. One of the proper responsibilities of leading change is to minimise the pain of change and to ensure as many people are included in the new direction or approaches that we pursue. 

Sustaining Our Leadership

I wanted to conclude by addressing the issue of resilience in leading change as burn out, disillusionment and discouragement can impact upon many leaders in the Church seeking to move a community or ministry group from one point to another. Our reactions to the criticisms we might face or the challenges we might endure will often force us to face up to our inner motives; those things that are of ultimate value to us; even our beliefs about God, ourselves and others. 

However, leadership is not a journey that is meant to be travelled alone and the necessary supports of a regular sacramental life and constant prayer, professional supervision, the company and understanding of peers, and some form of mentoring or coaching can also help us and save us unnecessary pain. As it is said, ‘self-experience can a brutal teacher’ and learning from others who can mentor and guide us from their own experience of change can save us unnecessary hardship.

We also need to develop a clear sense of the boundaries of our responsibilities – what is within our control and influence, and what is beyond it and for which we need not take responsibility. A reliance on prayer and a healthy surrender to grace and the providence of God in our daily efforts can give us the confidence to lead boldly while remaining open and humble before God and others, a spirit that echoes the trust of Christ in the Father and the great saints who were led by the Spirit, exercised their gifts and were ultimately faithful, even in trial and tribulation, to God’s purposes.

I close with this encouragement from the First Letter of St Peter, which reminds us, “Whoever serves must do so with the strength that God supplies, so that God may be glorified in all things through Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 4:11). This divine life is the source of all authentic change in our Church and the source of our joy in our cooperation with God in leading change.

making and forming disciples

The address below was given at the invitation of Divine Renovation Australasia, a ministry focused on the renewal of Catholic parishes by recovering the primacy of evangelisation.

It is exciting to see here in Australia and in New Zealand so many parish and diocesan leaders embracing not only the need for the renewal of our parishes but recognising the urgency of that task.

We are at a critical moment as a Church in the West. We know this from the realities on the ground in our parishes, and the trends of decline we have seen across our dioceses, trends that have been only accelerated by the pandemic.

We also know as leaders who care about our communities that we shape the life and mission of the Church by our participation in it. We play our role in the project of parish renewal by 1) our dependence on the Holy Spirit who guides us into the truth, allows us to proclaim Jesus is Lord, who bestows the Church with a great variety of gifts and charisms, and 2) our personal and active commitment to labour in hope toward that vision and task that Jesus gives us – to “go make disciples”.

We were privileged to host Dr Mary Healy in Sydney online just recently, and she reminded us that this “go” proclaimed by Jesus was not an instruction to set up a church, get some programs on the shelf, and put out some fliers. It is a commission to go out to the lost, to disciple people and bring them to the feet of Jesus in the power of the Spirit, the Spirit who enables us to be faithful to Jesus in the present.

In fact, one of my favourite images of the Church is that given by the poet John O’Donohue. It is of ‘hands clasping hands going back in time to hold the hand of Jesus who holds the hand of God’. So we are all a part of this continuing story of the Church, a story which has always been of an existing community of faith into which others are incorporated. It turns out that evangelisation is our Great Tradition.

We can say that the future of our Church depends on the Holy Spirit and, importantly, those who currently don’t believe. Without the Spirit we are left to our own meagre resources. Without a genuine commitment to evangelisation in our parishes, we risk becoming a Church content to grow old and smaller, rather than a Church that moves forwards.

In fact, one of the characteristics of our Christian hope – our ‘birth right’ as the baptised – is that hope never leaves us where we are. We give evidence to our hope by the courageous commitment to reform and renew our own lives and our communities; we “live” hope by affirming that decline and death are not the last word and that the Holy Spirit can open doors and bring about more possibilities than we can imagine.  

Already today, hundreds of Catholics in our parishes, chaplaincies and movements in Australia recognise this need for renewal, earnestly desire that their own discipleship and that of their parishes becomes ever more missionary, are committed not just to talking about evangelisation while keeping everything the same, but to make those changes in our practice so we can be more faithful and fruitful.

I think more and more Catholics in Australia want to see the personal and spiritual change in our parishes that we have experienced ourselves. Our parishes are where the mystery of Jesus is already present and at work – it is a gift that is calling for our response.

Fundamental Questions

So our vision and purpose as parishes is clear. We have a task that embraces all of us – whether as a priest, religious, or lay leader: to bring people into an encounter with Jesus, to the surrender and the decision of faith.

However, before launching out into this project of renewal, we have to make a fundamental decision ourselves. I’d propose this as a first step in the journey of renewal.

I think there are at least two questions we need to ask ourselves before we attempt anything as demanding and challenging as parish renewal, to be able to face the challenges and even the resistance that change can bring.

The questions are these: ‘Do I believe Jesus is who He says He is?’, and ‘Do I believe His message is true?’

Those two questions are usually enough to get us going and keep us going in mission when our energy is low or at the times when parish renewal can seem hard or even overwhelming. They are questions that ressource or reground our energies in a vision bigger than our own – in what God desires for our parishes, the liberating truth of the Gospel, a truth to which we need to first give ourselves if we are to be convincing witnesses.

So that’s one of the first things I wanted to share with you – that this project of parish renewal is radically self-implicating, demanding faith and commitment not simply from others but from our own deep wells. Are we also willing to changed and to live as the Church we are looking for? So often we want God to do something new while we stay the same.

So it’s important to bear in mind that whenever we talk about the conversion of parishes we are talking about the conversion and renewal of people.

In seeking to transform the culture of our parishes for evangelisation, we have to realise that culture isn’t the starting point but is the end-product of individuals living out holiness, community and mission. And that begins with discipleship or people making a personal, conscious decision to follow Jesus with their whole lives, in and through His Church.

So if you want to build a new Catholic culture in your parish, you have to start with forming disciples, and that project has much to do with helping individuals to discover a living and personal faith in the midst of the Church.

Casting Vision

It can seem obvious but the second step we need to take is to cast a vision of discipleship which people can embrace, aspire to and grow within. As Sherry Weddell remarks if nobody in our parish talks about what discipleship looks like, it becomes difficult for people to begin to walk on that road:

Unfortunately, most of us are not spiritual geniuses. If nobody around us ever talks about a given idea, we are no more likely to think of it spontaneously than we are to suddenly invent a new primary colour. To the extent we don’t talk explicitly with one another about discipleship, we make it very, very difficult for most Catholics to think about discipleship” (Weddell, Forming Intentional Disciples, 56).

It is difficult to believe in and live something that you have never heard anyone talk about or unpack as the goal of following Jesus and our involvement in the life of the Church. Sometimes we suspect that ‘showing up to Church’ can be for some an exercise in ‘ticking boxes’ rather than expressing a living relationship, a more extrinsic routine rather than an interior desire.

Do our people know that a disciple is one who has encountered Jesus personally in the midst of the Church, who has surrendered his or her life to His way, and made the decision to live by His teaching in all aspect of life?  It is one of the curiosities of our Catholic culture that we don’t tend to talk about our relationship with God except in the confessional or perhaps in spiritual direction.

However, if we fail to cast a vision of discipleship in our parishes it is not without consequence. The fact is we are all going somewhere, whether we know it or not, and will arrive at a destination in life. The road that we are currently on will lead to a destination, and we generally don’t drift in good directions.

There are physical paths that lead to physical locations, and roads and highways that lead to certain destinations. There is a dietary path that leads to predictable health outcomes. There are financial paths that lead to financial destinations. There are relationship paths that lead to relational destinations. In fact, parents have an interest in who their young adults are dating for this reason. They enquire about their relationships not so much because they are interested in whether their child is happy in the relationship now (though they certainly hope they are). They are more interested where that relationship will take their child, whether that relationship will take them in the right direction.

So all of us are on the way to somewhere and that applies to our spiritual life as well. Unfortunately we have seen the impact of too many Catholics staying on a path of ignorance of the faith or merely routine behaviour and too many parishes comfortable on the path to decline. We have seen too many Catholics disengage from the Church altogether and even from any living relationship to Jesus himself, not necessarily because they are bad people but far too often because they never actually knew a personal relationship with Jesus was even possible. They were never given a destination that made the journey worthwhile.

We need to implant a clear vision of discipleship in our parishes because, biblically speaking, we reap what we sow. It is this life of discipleship which remains still today too obscure for too many of our people.

Naming the Challenges

In the light of that challenge, a third step as parish communities is to name the ‘gap’ between this vision of life changing discipleship that Jesus gives and our current realities and strategies.

I was reminded of this need to honestly name our current pastoral realities by Fr James Mallon on Twitter, when he shared an observation by G.K. Chesterton: “It isn’t that they can’t see the solution. It is that they can’t see the problem”.

One of the tasks that parish renewal demands is a clear recognition of the discipleship dilemma we face – a familiar story of declining engagement, decreasing giving and participation, a lack of manifest charisms and fruit, and the implications of this trend for our future as a Church and as local parishes.

Another way of saying this is, if you don’t define the problem, then people aren’t going to want the solution.

In effect, as leaders we have to elicit the desire for change. No change is likely when there is no desire for change, and there is no desire for change if we are perfectly comfortable with gentle decline and an ever ageing community.  

In a world and Church already heavy with demands, busyness and division, we can be tempted to prefer ‘the peace of a graveyard’ rather than welcome the disruption and the change that evangelisation demands.

However, as someone once said, the difference between where we are and where God wants us to be is often the pain we are unwilling to bear (that is, the pain of change). Recognising where we are, as individuals and parishes, can be a painful confrontation and truth but the Paschal Mystery reminds us that this truth, even painful as it may be, is the place of grace and the beginning of transformation.

The plain fact is that comfort and complacency has never moved anyone closer to being a saint, and comfort and complacency have never helped a parish grow. On the desire that should animate and sustain our efforts at renewal, I’m reminded of the words of St John Henry Newman who recalls for us our deepest purpose: “holiness rather than peace”.

Now being honest and truthful about the situation of our parishes or perhaps a ministry does not mean pointing the finger, blaming people, priests or parishioners, for the circumstances in which our parishes find themselves. In truth, the decline of our parishes is often decades old with a myriad of complex causes, some that fall at our own feet as a Church and others that are well beyond our control.

However, we do have a calling and responsibility to respond to God where we are placed. We do not have the first word in evangelisation or the last word, but we do have a word. Our task, in this generation, is to start clearly identifying the obstacles that are preventing growth and missionary discipleship and to take the steps that might enable it.

An Example

As an example, one of the challenges that we face, a part of our present reality, is the cultural circumstances of the West, a context in which some may know of Jesus but in which the majority of Australians and Kiwis, including some of our own flock, do not know Him personally.

Now as Catholics we believe that the full life of every person and community can be unlocked only by this encounter with Christ. However, the stark reality is that Christian faith remains for most a vague background influence, well short of having any actual explicit or personal claim on their lives.

How can we begin to understand this and so respond to our times?

If we consider the long arc of Western history at least, our story begins in a pre-Christian world, a world soaked through with divinity, with many gods, a whole pantheon of divine influences and spiritual forces. Think the Roman Empire before the coming of Jesus.

People understood themselves as living in an enchanted world where both the divine and demonic were at play. The world and the self was considered porous, open to the transcendent, and life was vulnerable to the incursion of the sacred, and life involved successfully navigating these forces by various means (e.g. potions, chants, charms).

Then comes Christ and with His believers, the development of a Christian culture which is creedal and monotheistic with its sacred texts and virtues. Christ proclaims and embodies within himself a Kingdom of justice and mercy, and this faith shapes the entire character of Western culture (e.g. in contrast to a cyclic understanding of life as in the East and in oriental religion and philosophies, with provide no incentive to such a thing as social justice, the Christian schema proclaims a trajectory of life that reaches a fulfilment, an end which is shaped by our response rather than being inevitable or fatalistic).

However, today we experience the challenge of following and proclaiming Jesus in a post-Christian culture (influenced by the Enlightenment), a culture which is not a religious ‘year zero’ or pre-Christian, that has not entirely thrown off the vision of the Kingdom, that still carries the Christian Kingdom dream of equality and justice and mercy, but wants this Kingdom without the King.

Post-Christian culture might want to even deconstruct the gifts and traditions of Christian faith but yet it cannot quite shrug off the ache and discontent that remains. To echo the English writer Julian Barnes: “We don’t believe in God, but we miss him”.

In a sense, like the crying onlookers in France amidst the ashes of Notre Dame Cathedral, we remain resistant to religion but are still haunted by our Christian origins.

So when the current culture speaks about equality or justice today, it is not necessarily that we are talking about the same thing. There is a secular schema of salvation that has not lost the Kingdom dream that was planted by the Christian faith, but it wants this dream without the authority or the influence of Christ. We want progress without presence, to continue the Christian project without Christ, feasting on the fruit of the Christian proposal while forgetting its source.

Many today look for and feel some sort of transcendent power in technology or even politics, but it is all disenchanted power, while the deeper desires remain. In fact, the current COVID-19 crisis has confronted many with this yearning without Someone to encounter, and when it becomes all too much it can end in disastrous consequences.

So, within the Christian inheritance that underpins our cultural moorings, evangelisation will be about connecting many of the innate desires that people carry with them today and revealing to them their fulfilment in Christ who literally makes sense of the world in which they live. It cannot be taken for granted that people know the kerygma, the essential story of Jesus himself, but we can proclaim it with confidence that Christ still speaks to and meets the deepest desires and questions of humanity today as he asks us “Who do you say I am?” and beseeches “Come, follow me”.

A new evangelisation must be centred in the proclamation of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection as it touches on our culture and lives today, on Christ who is ‘always news’, who is always contemporaneous in the Spirit rather than being an artefact of our cultural history.

Implications

Moving to practicing evangelisation in this culture milieu, one of the gifts that Divine Renovation has offered Catholic parishes in recent years is the reminder that we can no longer rely on a pastoral approach that assumes the sacraments will simply ‘take care of it’.

As the new General Directory of Catechesis exhorts the Church, “A process of missionary conversion must be begun that is not limited to maintaining the status quo or guaranteeing the administration of sacraments, but presses forward in the direction of evangelisation” (General Directory of Catechesis 300).

If we do not take up the task of evangelising those ‘far’ from the Church and those who are near but may be only ‘sacramentalised’ and not yet evangelised, we risk neglecting our duty to awaken in each person that active and personal faith, that fertile soil, in which the grace of the sacraments can takes root and bears fruit.

This point was explicitly made by the Congregation of Clergy when it spoke a word to our bishops and priests:

Not infrequently, pastoral agents receive the request for the reception of the sacraments with great doubts about the faith intention of those who demand them… With different but widespread accents, there is a certain danger: either ritualism devoid of faith for lack of interiority or by social custom and tradition; or danger of a privatization of the faith, reduced to the inner space of one’s own conscience and feelings. In both cases the reciprocity between faith and sacraments is harmed (Congregation for Clergy, The Reciprocity Between Faith and Sacraments in the Sacramental Economy 9; my emphasis).

So mere administration of the sacraments without attention to supportive processes of evangelisation is not enough. As Canadian Catholic evangelist Marcel le Jeune keenly observes, most fallen-away Catholics in our Church have left the active reception of the sacraments because something non-sacramental was missing. So, we need to aim to replace that missing item – in most cases, it is relationship.

There is an important perspective here that we need to keep in mind, especially for those of us who have been committed to parish life for decades, who have worked hard at the frontline with various programs, strategies, courses and events.

We are called to remember that while good and helpful, all these programs, courses and events are only proxies or the means for the evangelising relationships by which people come to faith in the midst of the Church. This is because it is not programs that make disciples, but disciples that make disciples.

To make the point, we have so many great resources in hand and available to us today, more than any other generation of Christian believers. Consider St Paul who did not even have the four Gospels in hand as he embarked on his apostolic mission across the Mediterranean.

However, St Paul had people – disciples making disciples. He had Barnabas, John Mark, Silas, Timothy, Erastus, Aristarchus, Gaius, Trophimus, Tychicus and Luke. We may need programs and materials as a kind of crutch or support but we need to be mindful about allowing these supports to replace the relationships. A good program with unevangelised leaders is not going to convert anything.

Another way of saying this is that if you build the Church, you rarely get disciples. If you make disciples, you always get the Church. Now focusing on disciple-making relationships within the parish takes the longest time and investment, but it is also the shortest route to creating missionary parishes. Any other path, focusing on program after program for example, will not see the fruit we hope to see.

A Pathway of Discipleship

Finally, a positive step we can take, which the experience of growing Catholic parishes has affirmed, is the importance of clearly communicating or making it or making it very explicit what people can do to grow in relationship to Jesus and the journey in the parish that will help them to grow in this relationship.

For example, what is on the on-ramp, or shallow end of the people, through which people in your church might start the discipleship journey? How do people actually get connected to the group and what is a strategy for this connection, rather than merely hoping they will hang around long enough to connect?

As it’s been observed: “Imagine a ladder with all the lower rungs removed. It wouldn’t be very useful for climbing. Sometimes churchworld can seem like that. The churchpeople are on the top of the ladder. With the lower rungs removed, the unchurched are left with no chance of climbing up. We churchpeople can make it difficult for the unchurched to come to church, even when they want to” (Fr Michael White and Tom Corcoran, ChurchMoney, 105). 

A pathway helps identify the ‘rungs on the ladder’, to support people take a next step in faith, rather than expecting them to work it out for themselves.

Your pathway might begin with the need to have an invitational strategy for newcomers to be drawn into an encounter with the Gospel and community via an initiative such as Alpha which explores life and the Christian faith. Following this initial encounter, participants can then be encouraged to join the organising team for such a course or otherwise join a small group in the parish to connect more deeply with others in community. They might join a bible study in order to deepen the faith they have discovered. As a next step, the parish might then encourage participants to commit to active mission in the form of service to others; for example, to become involved in a parish ministry or share their God-given talents in social outreach to the wider community.

Such a discipleship pathway enables your ministry to determine where people are on the journey of faith and how to move them to the next step in faith in the context of parish ministries. This avoids treating or assuming everyone is at the same stage of faith.

We know that churches and ministries that have an explicit pathway for discipleship have a much higher rate of conversion than those that do not, than those who are more haphazard in their outreach and overloaded with group upon group, programs upon programs.

If we had all the money, people and resources we needed, we would not need a strategy. But in our parishes we need to discern and articulate clear pathways by which people come to faith, just as we ourselves have taken steps to arrive where we find ourselves today. 

Conclusion

So in this time together, I hope you have been encouraged and challenged in this mission of evangelisation which has become as important and urgent as ever.

In the midst of the conversation that the Church in Australia and indeed the Church worldwide is having about its future, it is people like yourselves at the frontline of our parishes that will shape the future of our Church by your leadership and witness.

When we cast a vision of discipleship, of the full Christian life to our people; proclaim the life, death and resurrection of Jesus as it touches upon the world today; develop the discipleship of our own people so that programs and resources become effective and attractive; and when we explicitly articulate a path of spiritual growth open to all, we begin to see the promise of parish renewal come to real life.

discerning the Church with the Church at the fifth Plenary Council of Australia

This Sunday the fifth Plenary Council of Australian will commence, a historic opportunity for the Catholic Church in Australia to renew its commitment to the mission of Jesus Christ in this ‘Great South Land of the Holy Spirit’.

Throughout the past three years, an exhaustive consultation process has been conducted toward this ecclesial gathering which will convene for two assemblies, the first of which will be held online due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and a second assembly to be held in Sydney, the setting in which the Catholic Church was first established in this country.

As a member of the preparatory Executive Committee for the Plenary Council and co-author of its Instrumentum Laboris or working document, it has been a privilege to reflect on the process and principles of synodality over this time and upon the many thousands of submissions offered toward this nation-wide process of discernment taking place within our Church.

Given the serious opportunity that the Plenary Council represents – to renew the Church in Australia its spiritual life as well as its social mission – and its nature as a concrete expression of the synodality to which Pope Francis invites the whole Church, it is helpful to identify hermeneutical principles that can assist us enter into that genuine discernment of which the Pope has spoken with frequency and conviction.[1]

This brief reflection and the principles articulated within it are offered as a lens through which to consider the matters of the Plenary Council for the renewal of the Church in Australia from the perspective of ecclesial faith. It seeks to support the task of ‘discerning the Church withthe Church’ as it were, as a positive contribution to the Plenary Council, its delegates and those with an interest in this ecclesial gathering.

Foundations

As shared earlier this month by Pope Francis in his address to the faithful of Rome, the process of synodality involves ‘interrogating Revelation according to a pilgrim hermeneutic that knows how to safeguard the journey begun in the Acts of the Apostles”.[2] This process of synodality or ‘journeying together’ is led by the Holy Spirit who is received by the whole Church, all the faithful as the People of God and the ministry of bishops in collegiality with one another and the Bishop of Rome.

It demands an authentic discernment that “cultivate[s] an attitude of listening, growing in the freedom of relinquishing one’s own point of view (when it is shown to be partial and insufficient), to assume that of God.”[3] This instinct of faith is developed by our growing openness as the baptised to the Word received in the Scriptures, the tradition of the Church as received from the Apostles, and in ‘the sense of all the faithful’ today as we seek to ‘tradition’ God’s loving outreach to humanity in Christ in the present.

Hence, the hermeneutical principles that follow treat the Plenary Council not as a mere ‘gathering of opinions’ as Pope Francis has cautioned against[4], even less as the subject of ecclesiastical political science, but as an event of faith that responds to God’s revelation. It approaches the Plenary Council as a concrete expression of synodality that arises from the nature of the Church itself: as a communion that depends upon its life and vitality on listening and responding to the mission of Christ given to us; in the words of the International Theological Commission, “as the People of God journeying together and gathering in assembly, summoned by the Lord Jesus in the power of the Holy Spirit to proclaim the Gospel”.[5]

The principles, while not exhaustive, recognise the specific mandate of the Plenary Council to consider the ways in which the Church in Australia can most faithfully and fruitfully practice its mission amid the challenges and prospects of our time.  As well, they draw from the Instrumentum Laboris or preparatory document for the Council that was itself the result of the listening and dialogue process and submissions received since Pentecost 2018 and working papers developed by discernment and writing groups that followed.[6] While not exhaustive, the principles also seek to take into account those provided in the recent Vademecum or guide for local churches in listening and discernment, produced by the Secretary General for the Synod of Bishops ahead of the universal Synod to take place in 2023.[7]

Some Hermeneutical Principles

  1. Deliberations at the Plenary Council should bear in mind the expressed purpose of the Council which is “to decide what seems opportune for the increase of faith, the organisation of common pastoral action, and the regulation of morals and of the common ecclesiastical discipline which is to be observed, promoted and protected”.[8] This means that the function of the Plenary Council is not todefine or determine articles of faith (what Catholics are to believe) nor can it legislate on matters of discipline which the Holy See has reserved to itself. Some matters that may be raised will belong to the universal tradition and teaching of the Catholic Church. They are, in that sense, beyond the capacity of the Church in Australia to change. This does not mean that they cannot be discussed; only that they cannot be decided upon by the Church in Australia. However, a Plenary Council can pass legislation regulating how doctrine is to be taught, how worship is to be regulated and how governance is to be better exercised in practice. It is these concrete matters that the Council can consider in benefit to the Church’s missionary mandate.

  2. The Plenary Council in Australia takes place within the life of the communion of the Catholic Church, which is universal. The Plenary Council preparations and celebration invites discernment and a response to the fundamental question as to ‘what God is asking of us in Australia at this time’. This discernment is undertaken by Catholics in Australia conscious of our communion with all the local Churches scattered throughout the world and in communion, together with them, with the Church of Rome. It is this ‘communion of churches’ which constitutes the Catholic Church of which the Church in Australia is a concrete manifestation.

  3. As identified by the Second Vatican Council, critical to the exercise of ecclesial discernment is the duty of “scrutinising the signs of the times and of interpreting them in the light of the Gospel”(Gaudium et Spes 4). The opportunities and challenges for the Catholic Church in Australia are discernible through a variety of sources, including those submissions made as part of preparations for the Council, the significant insights of pastoral research in Australia offered by our National Centre for Pastoral Research, the experiences and testimony of local communities of faith, the insights of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse and the subsequent governance review, and the social, political and cultural realities of wider Australian society to which the Church cannot be indifferent.[9] This demands a Christian realism, as the Instrumentum Laboris for the Council affirms, for “we are a people of hope, not dismissive of the failures, not blind to the challenges, not complacent about the future, but confident that because it is the Lord’s Church of which we are a part we can move forward with trusting faith”.[10] By faith we hold that the ‘light of the Gospel’ that guides our response to these complex realities is found in and communicated by the Church, through the Word of God and the Church’s living tradition which includes its body of teaching, worship and practices.

  4. The deliberations of the Plenary Council should bear in mind that synodality is lived out in service of the Church’s mission of evangelisation. The Plenary Council and its proposals provide an opportunity to witness to, and orient the Church in Australia toward, an ecclesial way of being that is a prophetic example for Australian society, addressing the prospects for the deepening of discipleship and strengthening of our evangelising mission in this context. It is this mission of evangelisation that is to be the guiding criteria for the Church’s renewal and the fruit of the Church’s synodality par excellence.[11]

  5. The Plenary Council in its preparations and forthcoming celebration invites us to be attentive to the sensus fidei which is the gift of the Holy Spirit given to all the faithful and an instinct for the truth of the Gospel. This instinct, informed by the Holy Spirit in Scripture and tradition, enables the Church to recognise and endorse authentic Christian doctrine and practice, to receive more deeply and to transmit more effectively and faithfully the Catholic faith. All the Catholic faithful play an active and critical role in this articulation and development so that ‘the Tradition that comes from the apostles makes progress in the Church, with the help of the Holy Spirit’ (Dei Verbum 8). It is the Holy Spirit who allows us to be anchored in our faith and move at the same time. In this ‘journeying together’ of the whole Church in fidelity to Christ it is the particular charism and ministry of the bishops to discern whether opinions which are present among the people of God, and which may seem to be the sensus fidelium, actually correspond to the truth of the Tradition received from the Apostles.[12]

  6. In its dialogue, the Plenary Council and its participants can recognise two inseparable elements in Pope Francis’ vision of the Church in discernment, “episcopal collegiality within an entirely synodal Church”.[13]The synodality of the whole Church is that in which “the faithful people, the college of bishops, the Bishop of Rome [are] all listening to each other, and all listening to the Holy Spirit, the ‘Spirit of truth’ Jn 14:17], in order to know what he ‘says to the Churches’”[14]; while episcopal collegiality refers to the role that bishops, as a college and as successors of the Apostles, in communion with each other and with the Bishop of Rome, act as “authentic guardians, interpreters and witnesses of the faith of the whole Church, which they need to discern carefully from the changing currents of public opinion”.[15] In short, the magisterium must sense with the Church as a whole where the Spirit’s inspiration is leading, with the bishops serving as a listening and learning body of teachers, attentive to the sense of faith throughout the Church, as well as discharging an apostolic commission to authentically interpret what is true to and advantageous for the faith.

  7. A consensus of the submissions made to the Plenary Council is that, in its deepest sense, the renewal of the Church demands and depends upon the ongoing conversion of all of its members. Our hope and future as a Church in Australia cannot be found outside our need for God and our repentance for the ways in which members of our Church have failed to be faithful to its call. By the correction of those flaws introduced by its members and by the increase in the Church’s faithfulness to the mission given to her by Christ, the Church becomes more of itself as a sacrament or effective sign of God’s presence in the world. As such, every renewal of the Church essentially consists in “an increase of fidelity to her own calling… Christ summons the Church as she goes her pilgrim way… to that continual reformation of which she always has need, in so far as she is a human institution here on earth”.[16]

  8. A consequence of this dynamic of ecclesial renewal is that consideration of the Church‘s structures cannot be separated from the personal conversion of those who form the Church and who shape the way in which those structures build up the Church and its mission or otherwise. As recognised by Pope Francis, “There are ecclesial structures which can hamper efforts at evangelization, yet even good structures are only helpful when there is a life constantly driving, sustaining and assessing them.”[17] The Vademecum for the Synod on Synodality affirms this very point, “The conversion and renewal of structures will come about only through the on-going conversion and renewal of all the members of the Body of Christ”.[18]
  9. In discernment of proposals of renewal, the Plenary Council in Australia should avoid the temptation of a “new pelagianism” which attempts to correct problems and reduce difficulties and tensions within the Church by relying on bureaucratic and administrative reforms.[19] As underscored by Pope Francis to the Church in Germany, it is the encounter with Christ and the irruption of the Holy Spirit within hearts and structures that renews the entire body of the Church, not the mere reorganisation of existing realities.[20]

  10. Ecclesiological assumptions underpinning proposals for renewal should be taken into consideration by the Plenary Council and its delegates in the discernment of change, as there are a variety of ways in which the concept of ‘renewal’ can be engaged. For some, ‘renewal’ will refer to a process whereby something is corrected which was in error; for others, it represents a return to past forms; while for still others it has the character of growth or development, an account which assumes continuity, that our present conditions as a reflection of where the past naturally tended. Different understandings of the identity and mission of the Church will produce varying proposals of the way in which ‘renewal’ might be realised, including by excision, addition, revival, accommodation, development or a combination of these approaches.[21] Identifying these fundamental ecclesiologies can support the dialogue and discernment of change.

  11. In the study of proposals, critical distinctions also need to be made at the Plenary Council regarding the nature of the matter under discussion. As the Instrumentum Laboris emphasised in acknowledging the range of issues which are troubling Catholics in Australia at this time, it is prudent to ask whether the matter of discussion is “man-made” law or custom which can be modified or even abandoned, or if the matter is a moral absolute, fidelity to which is essential to the Church’s response to Christ and His teaching.[22]

  12. A key concern for the Plenary Council in discussions will be to ensure that nothing in the Church’s preaching or witness is lacking in mercy, while at the same time remaining faithful to all that the Lord has given to us in the Church’s doctrinal and moral teachings. The Instrumentum Laboris and working papers that informed it describe this concern as constituting “one of the great contemporary pastoral and catechetical challenges for the Church in Australia”.[23] Pope Francis’s teaching in Evangelii Gaudium on what he calls the “art of accompaniment” offers essential guidance toward this end.[24]

Conclusion

These principles seek to offer a lens through which matters of the Plenary Council in Australia can be considered from the perspective of Catholic faith and as informed by the process of listening and dialogue as synthesised through its Instrumentum Laboris or working document.

Informed by the purpose of the Plenary Council and the nature of the Church as a communion, inspired and led by the Holy Spirit, they are also presented with the Christian realism that, as St John Henry Newman affirmed, “truth is the daughter of time”.[25] That is, there will be tensions or issues that arise from the fifth Plenary Council that will be left open for future synthesis and require discernment well past its two forthcoming assemblies. 

However, it is with great hope and anticipation that we as Catholics in Australia enter into this fifth Plenary Council in our short history, with a common desire that the Church in Australia experiences a greater conversion under the influence of the Spirit of Christ and is renewed and ultimately better equipped to proclaim the unchanging Gospel with new ardour and vitality.

The Catholic tradition is none other than the Church’s reception of Jesus through time under the guidance of this Holy Spirit and in this time of challenge and opportunity for the Church in Australia it is incumbent upon us to seek out, receive and now voice in the days ahead what this Spirit is saying to the churches (Rev 2:7).

[1] See, for instance, Chapter 9 of Pope Francis’ Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation to Young People, Christus Vivit, https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_exhortations/documents/papa-francesco_esortazione-ap_20190325_christus-vivit.html

[2] Pope Francis, Address to the Faithful of the Diocese of Rome, 18 September, 2021.

[3] Pope Francis, Address to Bishops Ordained Over the Past Year, 14 September, 2017: https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2017/september/documents/papa-francesco_20170914_nuovi-vescovi.html

[4] Pope Francis, Address to the Faithful of the Diocese of Rome, 18 September, 2021: https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/it/speeches/2021/september/documents/20210918-fedeli-diocesiroma.html

[5] International Theological Commission, “Synodality in the Life and Mission of the Church” n.70:  https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/cti_documents/rc_cti_20180302_sinodalita_en.html.

[6] A summary of the nation-wide consultation process, the six papers that resulted from discussion of these submissions and the Instrumentum Laboris can be found on the website for the Plenary Council: https://plenarycouncil.catholic.org.au 

[7] Secretary General for the Synod of Bishops, Vademecum for the Synod on Synodality: Official Handbook for Listening and Discernment in Local Churches: First Phase [October 2021 – April 2022] in Dioceses and Bishops’ Conferences Leading up to the Assembly of Bishops in Synod in October 2023: https://www.synod.va/en/news/vademecum-for-the-synod-on-synodality.html

[8] Code of Canon Law 445.

[9] The report on governance within the Church, commissioned by the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference and Catholic Religious Australia, entitled The Light of the Southern Cross: Promoting Co-Responsible Governance in the Catholic Church in Australia is available online at: https://www.catholicreligious.org.au/light-from-the-southern-cross. The initial response of the Australian Bishops to the report can be found at: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1okB3jSsJ4dYAt_0GzrIJyVZS2l1cZBtC/view

[10] Instrumentum Laboris for the Plenary Council in Australia 51: available at https://plenarycouncil.catholic.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/PC-IL-210902-online.pdf

[11] Pope Francis, Letter to the Pilgrim People of God in Germany, 29 June, 2020: http://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/it/letters/2019/documents/papa-francesco_20190629_lettera-fedeligermania.html

[12] International Theological Commission, “Sensus Fidei in the Life of the Church”, n77. https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/cti_documents/rc_cti_20140610_sensus-fidei_en.html#_ftn84

[13] Pope Francis, Address Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Institution of the Synod of Bishops, https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2015/october/documents/papa-francesco_20151017_50-anniversario-sinodo.html

[14] Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium 171, repeated in his Address Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Institution of the Synod of Bishops.

[15] Pope Francis, Address Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Institution of the Synod of Bishops; Instrumentum Laboris 31.

[16] Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium 26. Instrumentum Laboris 55; 61.

[17] Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium 26; Instrumentum Laboris 64.

[18] Secretary General for the Synod of Bishops, Vademecum for the Synod on Synodality.

[19] Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium 11.

[20] Pope Francis, Letter to the Pilgrim People of God in Germany; see also Evangelii Gaudium, 94; Instrumentum Laboris 62.

[21] See John O’Malley, “Reform, Historical Consciousness and Vatican II’s Aggiornamento”, Theological Studies 32 (1971): 573-601; and also Ormond Rush, Still Interpreting Vatican II: Some Hermeneutical Principles, 72-75 for a summary of O’Malley’s taxonomy of renewal.

[22] Instrumentum Laboris 39.

[23] Instrumentum Laboris 40.

[24] See Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium 169-173.

[25] John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1878).

the Spirit of the Risen Christ

Paschal CandleWe celebrate the Ascension of Christ and approach the Feast of Pentecost in the light of the Resurrection. Christ is risen. Truly, He is risen!

The readings in these past weeks of Eastertide have focused our attention on the appearance of the risen Jesus before the disciples, the first followers left distraught by the death of Jesus and struggling to come to terms with his rising.

The post-Resurrection narratives describe the disciples as “astounded” (Lk 24:22), “slow of heart” (Lk 24:25), “startled”, “terrified” (Lk 24:37), “disbelieving” (Lk 24:41) and “afraid” (Mk 16:8) as they grapple with this revelation – that Jesus is alive and walks among them in glory. In contrast to the authors of the Gospel who were writing decades after the Resurrection and knew how the story would end, the first disciples as contemporaries of Jesus did not yet have that same privilege nor did they possess that same confidence. Their experience of God’s revelation, of the new world signalled by an empty tomb, was far more hesitant if not uncertain. Salvation history was still unfolding before their very eyes.

PentecostAs we learn from the Acts of the Apostles, it is the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, promised to them by Jesus at his Ascension, that marks a new chapter in the disciples’ faith.

It is this Spirit that empowers the once frightened disciples to ‘go out’ into an unpredictable and even unknown world with courage and the conviction that life has conquered death in Jesus Christ. It is in the Risen Jesus that the promises of God had been fulfilled and it was his Spirit that made of the first disciples, and the apostolic generations to come, bold witnesses and bearers of this good news “to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8).

In short, it is the Holy Spirit at Pentecost that inserts the disciples more deeply into this mystery of Jesus, that leads his followers to receive, live by and share in word and witness the truth of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection.

Being Christian Today

As Christians of the twenty-first century we can find ourselves feeling at times a bit like the first disciples of the Gospel narratives. We can encounter Jesus and yet harbour doubts or feel our vulnerabilities in a world no more certain or secure than that of other ages.

We know from personal experience that our discipleship is a pilgrimage, that it is the work of a lifetime to grow in holiness and understanding. In the course of this time, we learn to hand over our lives ever more fully to what God has accomplished on the Cross and on the third day. The new covenant comes to us as a grace but also sets before us the life-long project of accepting this new beginning by our conversion to Christ, “in living his mysteries, in making our own his example, his thoughts, and behaviour” (Pope Benedict XVI). Today we can find ourselves “slow of heart”, “disbelieving” and “afraid” standing before this call to conversion, reluctant to make that surrender to the Holy Spirit and to take that decision for Christ that faith entails.

COVID-19It happens that in these past months the experience of surrender has come to us. A global pandemic has left us dependent upon and yet strangely cautious of others, all at once. Individuals and entire communities are now vulnerable to a terrible scourge, originating on a distant horizon, that has brought life as we know it – in our homes, schools, workplaces and churches – to a collective and sudden halt. This global disruption is a striking reminder for us as Christians, and others besides, that we are not masters of our own world.

Our fundamental vulnerability to life’s contingencies can be a particularly startling experience for a culture that feeds on and even profits from the illusion of control. In this day there are no lack of techniques, products or technologies that offer, for a price, a sense of self-sufficiency or that cast self-willed autonomy as the way to personal fulfilment.

As Christians we live by a very different story. This story is one in which our origin, life and destiny cannot be imagined apart from the mystery of Jesus Christ, crucified and risen – nor can our culture, the economy or the future of the world itself for that matter. Our identity and the very meaning of our life arise from and depend upon the presence of another. It is by the Spirit that we encounter this Christ, the light of the world, with us “always, to the end of the age” (Mt 28:20).

It is our surrender to this Holy Spirit, who has been “poured out” so we can “both see and hear” (Acts 2:33), that enables us to receive God’s presence and power in our joys and our sufferings, to proclaim Christ in the face of opposition, to serve the poor with the love of Christ, and that offers us the virtue of hope for our future. In the language of Luke in the Acts of the Apostles, it is new life in the Spirit that enables “the young to see visions” and “the old to dream dreams” (Acts 2:17).

As Christians we undertake a pilgrimage of discipleship that is not simply arduous but that is good and through which we are led to be ambassadors for Christ and of service to others. What the Gospels make clear is that we cannot walk or serve as witnesses in this world or aspire to the next without the power of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God who has been a part of the world’s story, and our story, from its very beginnings.

A Spirit-Filled Tradition

GenesisAs we pray and reflect on the role of the Holy Spirit in the world, we find this life-giving presence in the opening verses of the Hebrew Scriptures. Here we see the Spirit of God at the beginnings of creation as it “sweep[s] over the face of the waters” (Gen 1:2).

Through this Spirit, God brings the world into being – night and day, sea and land, every living creature, humankind in his image and according to his likeness.

Reflecting on God’s creation in the thirteenth century, Saint Bonaventure would posit that it is the love in God that is so great and fruitful that God makes a gift of this divine love beyond Himself. In other words, the love that God is spills over into creation. It is this breath of Yahweh that communicates life in the world.

However, the spirit of God does not stop at a single act of creation. Throughout the Hebrew Scriptures it is the Judaic sense of rûaḥ or ‘breath of wind’ which signifies God’s power, a spirit that continuously and constantly acts in and upon human history.

This spirit of God causes humanity to act so that God’s plan in history can be fulfilled. It is God’s Spirit that empowers God’s people – persons such as Joseph, the example of faith; David, shepherd and king; Moses and Joshua, leaders of the people; the prophets and elders – to accomplish His mighty works.

ChristThis spirit-filled history of salvation continues into the New Testament where the revelation of God comes to fulfilment in Jesus Christ. Jesus’ entire life unfolds under the sign of the Spirit.

It is by the Spirit that the young Mary conceives Jesus (Lk 1:35). It is the Holy Spirit that descends upon Jesus at his baptism in the Jordan, anointing him as the Beloved Son of the Father (Lk 3:22).

It is the Spirit that leads Jesus into the desert for fasting and prayer prior to his public ministry (Lk 4:1) and it is Jesus who will act through the Spirit, healing the sick (Lk 6:19), preaching and praying for his disciples and for the salvation of the world.

It is Jesus who sanctifies the ordinary things of this world – water, oil, bread and wine – by the power of the Holy Spirit. He renders all things holy, directs God’s gifts toward God’s glory, to the praise of his Father.

Finally it is the Risen Jesus, the glorified Lord, who gives the Spirit, the Advocate (Jn 16:7), to the disciples, to the Church, to continue and make present his truth, his Word, his teaching, his way, his life in the midst of the world.

The Holy Spirit and the Believer

If this is the ‘biography’ of the Holy Spirit, of God’s creative and redemptive power, what are the signs of the Holy Spirit in our time and in our world? What is more, what difference does the Spirit make to the world of our experience?

First and foremost the difference that the Spirit makes in our world is mediated in and through the lives of the Christian faithful and through the community of Christians, the Church.

The Holy Spirit is truly present in the world in each Christian baptised in the name of the Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We are confirmed in faith by the Spirit’s action and anointing, and receive the Eucharist, Christ’s body, by the invocation of the Holy Spirit.

By this sacramental initiation into the Church, we are made anew in Christ by the Holy Spirit. As St Paul declares of our Christian life, “no one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit” (1 Cor 12:3).

St PaulThis Spirit comes to each one of us as a gift but also as a challenge to the ongoing conversion of our heart and mind. As the source and giver of all holiness, we implore the Spirit to keep us in grace and remove those artificial obstacles, habits and ways of thinking that prevent us from living fully in and for Christ. As St Paul writes in the Letter to the Romans, our baptism in Christ calls us to live no longer by the flesh, by the material things or selfish desires of this world, but to live according to the Spirit (Rom 8:5). It is for this new life that the Spirit of God dwells in us, the very same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead (Rom 8:11).

In our Christian living, we are no longer beholden to a spirit of slavery or have need to fall back into fear (Rom 8:15). We have received a spirit of adoption, become sons and daughters of God. It is the Holy Spirit that bestows upon us the eyes of faith, the capacity to see others not as we would see them but as Christ sees them, to see the world as God looks upon the world. We appreciate what is positive in others and in the whole of creation, to welcome it and prize it as a gift from God. The Spirit teaches us to ‘make room’ for the other and to bear one another’s burdens with gentleness (Gal 6:2).

The Spirit also enables us as Christians to have the mind of Christ (1 Cor 2:16). We are endowed with the ability to respond to Christ’s words and open our minds to the understanding of his death and resurrection. In this way the Spirit keeps us faithful to Jesus in the present, activating and guiding our discernment to speak and act as Christians in the world so that this world reflects more and more of God’s Kingdom, the “fullness of life” that God intends for us and all creation (Jn 10:10).

The Spirit is particularly manifest in the world in the gifts that have been endowed upon each of the baptised. In addition to the gifts and fruits of the Spirit outlined in the writings of St Paul, which are gifts given for us to keep, the Holy Spirit also bestows charisms, special abilities for others, that enable us to be powerful channels of God’s love and redeeming presence in the world. Whether extraordinary charisms, like healing, or ordinary charisms, like administration, these are to be used in charity or service to build up the Church for the sake of our world (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 798-801).

We see the Spirit at work in the lives of the faithful, in such charisms as hospitality, of intercessory prayer, leadership and knowledge, the discernment of spirits, charisms of teaching and wisdom, and service and poverty among others. Received through Baptism and Confirmation, these charisms empower the People of God to have an impact on the world that surpasses their natural, human abilities. These are graces freely given by God, that call to be discerned among the whole People of God to actively help spread the faith, the Good News as missionary, Spirit-filled disciples.

SaintsOf course, the fruits and gifts of the Holy Spirit are especially manifest in the saints. These ‘bright patterns of holiness’ remind us that Christian sanctity is not just an ideal or possibility but a reality in concrete persons and the concrete conditions of the world. This cloud of witnesses, these Christian exemplars, are models of holiness who have responded to the needs, challenges and opportunities of their time. These saints allowed themselves to be filled with the Spirit. In the pattern of Mary, “full of grace” the saints give birth or expression to Christ in the world.

The diversity of their holy lives attests to the creativity of the Holy Spirit, each saint demonstrating that Christian holiness can be lived even in ‘this’ way. No doubt the Holy Spirit, agent of evangelisation and soul of the Church, is making news saints in our time who will open up new and fruitful ways for responding to the Gospel in the future, who will be new manifestations of the Spirit of Christ alive, illuminating the world.

The Holy Spirit and the Church

As evident in the communion of saints and those first disciples gathered in the Upper Room, a primary way the Holy Spirit acts in the world is to bring the Church into being.

22.4.2010: south wall, Sant'Apollinare Nuovo, RavennaThe Church, as the third-century theologian St Hippolytus affirmed, is “the place where the Spirit flourishes”. The Church is the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit animating and bringing to life and holiness its members through the Word and sacraments, the ministry of the ordained (our bishops, priests and deacons), the various gifts and charisms of the faithful of every rank, the varieties of religious orders and ecclesial movements that express the Spirit’s power and anointing.

So integral is the connection between the Holy Spirit and the Church that St Irenaeus would proclaim as early as the second century, “for where the Church is, there also is God’s Spirit, and where the Spirit of God is, there are also the Church and all grace” (Book III, Against Heresies).

A particular aspect of the Spirit in the Church is its role as principle of unity, enabling all people to be one and the unity to be a multitude. The Spirit gathers what has been scattered, overcomes division and unites difference. It brings into communion the People of God, a people of every culture, nation, tongue and tribe, in the one body of Christ.

Like a soul is to the body, the Holy Spirit binds all the members of the body of Christ to its Head and to one another. This unity is one of the ways in which the Church gives witness to Jesus Christ, through whom “God was pleased to reconcile… all things” (Col 1:20). As we have learned from our history, a lack of unity within the Church or poor witness seriously impairs the ability of the world to see the Church as the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit, as a source and expression of God’s love.

Therefore, to be fruitful in its evangelising mission, the Church privileges unity which will be not the product of our efforts or structures alone but the fruit of our common docility to the Holy Spirit. Just as St Paul entreated the community at Ephesus centuries ago, so too are we to make “every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (Eph 4:4).

Not only does the Spirit make the Church one, it also leads the Church to be faithful, in ever deeper adherence to Christ. As identified by John’s Gospel, the Spirit guides the ecclesial community “into all the truth” of God’s revelation (Jn 16:12).

The Church Fathers of the third and fourth century were themselves conscious of a tradition or communication of the Holy Spirit that ensured the unity of the faith in the churches spread far and wide across the ancient Mediterranean. It was the Holy Spirit promised and given to the Church by Jesus that ensured the faithful transmission of the faith.

The Church remains today as it was then, ‘apostolic’ in its Spirit-inspired efforts to be faithful to the Gospel and to interpret it as Good News for the world. In this task, the bishops as successors of the apostles have a particular charism, to serve as the visible principle and foundation of unity in the particular churches and to exercise a special competence within the Church to ‘test all things and hold fast to that which is good’ (Lumen Gentium 12).

It is important to note here that the Spirit also enables the fidelity and adherence of the Church to Christ through the personal conversion of all the faithful, the reading of Scripture and immersion in the tradition, the initiative of local communities, parishes, families and groups, the teaching, sanctifying and pastoral government of our priests, the apostolate of our religious, whether obscure or well-known, and the birth of new movements and forms of evangelisation that are fresh signs of the Spirit active in the world. In the end, the Church is no less than the world as those who believe in Christ and who live by and engage this world by the influence and promptings of the Spirit.

‘Receive the Holy Spirit’ 

FraAngelicoAs the Feast of the Ascension brings us to reflect on our Christian pilgrimage in this world and to the next, we do not have a choice between God and the world. As Christians, we choose God by choosing the world as it really is in Him. We choose God by working toward the transformation of the world as disciples, empowered by the Holy Spirit who inspires true freedom and furthers God’s plan of salvation.

In human lives transformed, in the works of justice and mercy that express Christ’s love, the prayer and worship that reveal his glory, in outreach to and inclusion of the poor and vulnerable that reveal his heart, the Spirit moves the world toward its fulfilment.

By the Spirit each of us are sharers in Christ’s mission and we are inspired by a constant and healthy unease in the world to make all things new in Him. As Christ himself beseeches each one of us “receive the Holy Spirit” (John 20:22), the spirit of truth, love and holiness that leads us home to God.

our faith and His sacraments

IMG_0003In the wake of the worldwide spread of COVID-19 and the limitations it places on human interaction and activity, the ability for Catholics to physically gather for liturgy comes under increasing threat. It is worth noting as attendance at churches thins and may well be prohibited into the future in some jurisdictions, there may be an increased appreciation for something that that has been taken away by these circumstances. Once precautions surrounding the Mass are lifted many may return to our parishes, including those whose participation has been infrequent or irregular.

As the source and summit of our faith, the Eucharist is fundamental to our Catholic faith and constitutive of our identity and our mission in the world as a sign and reality of Christ’s presence. Hence it is no wonder that the concern of many of the faithful is their access to the sacraments in this time when the coronavirus has cast a wide shadow over so many realities that have been taken for granted.

This inextricable relationship of sacraments to our faith was at the heart of a document published by the International Theological Commission (ITC) just over one week ago with the authorisation of Pope Francis. The ITC serves as a body of theologians and scholars who advise the Pope and the Church. The document they produced had a somewhat obscure name which hints at the technical nature of its content: The Reciprocity Between Faith and Sacraments in the Sacramental Economy.

Despite its somewhat academic character this document has significant implications for all Catholics as well as the pastoral practice of our parishes. To call it a landmark document would not be putting it too strongly. While the Catholic media focused on what the document had to say about marriage, specifically the sacramental status of a marriage between two “baptised non-believers”, the ITC acknowledged its discussion of the relationship between faith and sacraments had much broader implications.

james-coleman-694177-unsplashThis includes for we Australians. While the number of marriages in our Church has declined sharply over the years, the number of families and children who continue to seek the Sacraments of Initiation in our parishes remain substantial, in their many thousands.

Such demand seems like good news. But like the movement of quicksand, the longer we watch of this sacramental journey, the more likely we are to experience that sinking feeling as the promised fruits of these sacramental encounters struggle to manifest themselves in the real lives, desires and commitments of recipients. To put it plainly, despite the potent grace of the sacraments and numbers seeking them, we are not seeing a blossoming of committed disciples in the Church.

We do not see, as Fr James Mallon describes, a deluge of Catholics with a personal relationship with Jesus, who are actively sharing their faith with others, open to the gifts of the Holy Spirit, with knowledge and love of the Scriptures, and of basic Catholic theology, with a daily prayer life, the experience of real Christian community, a commitment to Sunday Eucharist and the frequent practice of Reconciliation, and who serve in ministry while seeing their lives as a mission field (Fr Mallon, Divine Renovation Guidebook, 59).

Jesus ChristSo, what explains this phenomenon which sees thousands ‘sacramentalised’ but few appearing to be ‘evangelised’, that is, become intentional and life-long disciples of Jesus Christ? It cannot a deficiency of the sacraments in which we encounter the power and presence of Christ himself.

The ITC answers this question with explosive clarity: our Church holds that without a personal faith – yes, a personal relationship with Jesus – the sacraments fail to bear their full fruit. As St John Paul II proclaimed decades ago, “It is necessary to awaken again in believers a full relationship with Christ, mankind’s only Saviour. Only from a personal relationship with Jesus can an effective evangelisation develop” (L’Osservatore Romano, Dec 23, 1992). Without this personal faith, the ITC document affirms that the sacraments are likely to appear only as an external symbol or an empty rite – or even risk “slipping into a magical gesture” (57).

The sacraments nourish a life of faith in Jesus Christ. However – and significantly – they are not meant to replace it. The sacraments are given to us to grow in the life and mission of Christ. However, for some, it is what they do instead of grow. Without personal faith, a culture of “sacramental automatism” (69) can develop, a purely ‘outward faith’ bereft of understanding and prayer, with dire consequences for the spiritual vitality and mission of our faith communities and for the salvation of those who receive (1 Cor. 11:29).

Rather than an expression of “elitist sacramental scepticism” (181), the need to raise and talk about the personal faith of those receiving the sacraments arises from the pastoral concern and experience of pastors and parish leaders ‘on the ground’. The ITC recognises “not infrequently pastoral agents receive the request for the reception of the sacraments with great doubts about the faith intention of those who demand them” (9).

These doubts are reasonable given the largely secularised social environment in which we now live, in which even the possibility of a personal relationship with God or a commitment to a dedicated Christian life, including its moral demands, is given little credence or is not even desired, even by parents who seek the sacraments for their children.

Liturgy 6We know that reception of the sacraments can be treated as a mere social custom, a family tradition practiced without intention, or else sought for purposes other than itself. Whether it is driven by a desire for enrolment in Catholic schools, a bending to family pressure or social conformity, thousands continue to seek out sacraments in our parishes but often little else. Not only this, but the mixed motivations behind the demand for Baptism can be known, accepted or even encouraged by our silence on the matter. If this pattern persists, we risk nothing less than “a ritualism devoid of faith” (9).

It is challenging that despite the doubts held about the personal faith and discipleship of those who present for the sacraments, in practice we have often simply assumed that the sacraments will ‘take care of it’. The upshot has been a neglect of our duty to awaken in each person that active and personal faith, that fertile soil, in which the grace of the sacraments can actually take root and bear fruit. It is this complacency that this new document decries.

Unless people come to faith, come to relationship with Jesus Christ, the likelihood that the sacraments will bear the fruit they are intended to bear is severely diminished. Our Catholic tradition, echoed by St Thomas Aquinas, makes a distinction between the ‘virtue of faith’ (virtus fidei) which is a capacity to believe that is placed within us by Baptism, and the actus fidei, the explicit personal act of faith that is at the heart of discipleship, a ‘yes’ to that which has been given. Analogously, we might fill our cars with fuel that provides the capacity for movement, but without turning on the ignition no progress is made.

In our Australian parishes there is no lack of those who have been ‘done’ but not discipled, those who have been baptised but have never performed a personal act of faith, involving their understanding and will.

Prayer 1_2Of course, this is not to say the efficacy of the sacraments depends on the one who receives. Baptism, for instance, confers a real “sacramental character” as God’s grace is truly given. But what baptism places within us is a capacity to believe. It cannot be a substitute for an active response, the ‘act of faith’ on the part of the graced subject. A sacrament can be valid but for it to be fruitful, it must be received in faith for “God makes the acceptance of this gift dependent on the cooperation of the recipients” (32). As St Augustine put it, God ‘did not will to save us without us’.

The Reciprocity Between Faith and Sacraments in the Sacramental Economy is a landmark document for all of us: pastors, sacramental coordinators, RCIA teams and those in our parishes hard at work seeking to facilitate the personal conversion of the baptised and the evangelisation of those who do not yet belong to our faith.

It encourages us to place again the sacraments in the context of living faith, nourishing not merely a belief in God in a general way but in a truly personal way in the midst of the Church. A new evangelisation calls us to nourish a Catholic faith by the bold proclamation of the kerygma, the incarnation, passion and resurrection of Jesus Christ who is “the author and perfecter of our faith” (Hebrews 12:2). This is the faith of our Church that the sacraments nourish.

a plenary council in practice

rawpixel-761491-unsplashIt is now eight months since the road to Plenary Council 2020 was formally opened at Pentecost 2018. It will be the first Plenary Council that the Church in Australia has held in over eighty years and comes at a time when the challenges for and to the Catholic faith – and so the allied possibilities for reform – are multiple. Consider parish decline, the shape of Catholic education, failures of governance, and the future of religious freedom alone.

There are many who have taken up the Plenary Council with great faith, enthusiasm and hopeful anticipation. Indeed, over 30,000 people have engaged with the Plenary Council process across the country to date. In my own Diocese of Broken Bay the local response from communities has been overwhelming and the Diocese has registered the fourth highest number of responses (exceeded only by the Brisbane, Melbourne and Perth archdioceses) and the highest number of responses in Australia in proportion to the number of its parishes.

It can be acknowledged that some have lent their voice and insights to the process with reserve, with a natural scepticism borne of experience or lingering questions regarding what, if anything, is truly possible. Others will choose to be bystanders on the road to 2020, content to watch the process unfold without contribution. This non-engagement can express reticence about the value of dialogue within the Church per se, unclarity as to the purpose or implications of the Plenary Council, or a detachment from the broader Church, perhaps in preference for local concerns or resignation to the status quo.

james-coleman-694177-unsplashUnderlining these reactions to the Plenary Council will be varying understandings of the Church itself and of the possibilities for reform. Contrasting ecclesiologies about the best way in which the Church can exercise its mission are certainly not new. Polarisation has been an increasing mark of Catholic exchange particularly since the Second Vatican Council and intensified in the ‘phase of disillusionment’ that followed. These divisions about the way forwards for the Church have been inflamed by the Church’s waning influence in the Australian community and the search for a response to a loss of credibility and public voice over past decades which risks for the Church what Greg Sheridan has described as ‘complete strategic irrelevance’ (‘Christian churches drifting too far from the marketplace of ideas’, The Australian, 4/6/2016). The resulting ecclesial tensions and ideological rifts will inevitably spill over to shape people’s expectations and engagement with the Plenary Council as an initiative of the Church, explicitly geared as it is towards reform.

However, it is because of these ecclesial divisions and differences, rather than despite them, that the Plenary Council matters. To be clear, the Plenary Council is not an ecumenical council that will define or determine articles of faith (what we are to believe) nor can it legislate on matters of discipline which the Holy See has reserved to itself. It will not deliver an entirely ‘new’ Church which has no connection to its past, nor should it seek to do so. It is an organ of governance that can assist the Church to live God’s mission more faithfully as “a sacrament or instrumental sign of intimate union with God and of the unity of all humanity” (Lumen Gentium 1).

PEC2Towards this end what the Plenary Council will do and is doing is generating a significant, even if for some unsettling, conversation about the way in which the Church can best practice its mission in Christ into the future. A Plenary Council can, for example, pass legislation regulating how doctrine is to be taught, how worship is to be regulated and how governance is to occur in practice. It is to these matters that diverse input is needed for the benefit of the Church’s missionary mandate.

The Plenary Council is a call to focus as a communion of faith on the ways in which we are summoned by God through the action of the Holy Spirit to live the life and mission of Christ in contemporary Australian society. This includes those ways in which the Church is called to be a sign of contradiction in the world, to collaborate towards the common good with others of good will, and to serve as a leaven transforming the world from within.

One of the chief reservations that has been expressed about the Plenary Council is that initiating dialogue about the future of the Church in Australia will encourage false or unrealistic expectations. As the saying goes, ‘expectations can be premeditated resentments’ when reality does not conform to our hope or our views have lost connection with our tradition. This makes it even more important to clarify the nature and procedure of a Plenary Council so there are good reasons for our hope, not magical thinking that will leave us disappointed.

As already noted, a Plenary Council is not a vehicle by which dogma or doctrines pertaining to faith and morals are reshaped or changed. The purpose of a Plenary Council is to ensure that provision is made for the pastoral needs of the people of God and so, with regard for the universal law of the Church, it is ‘to decide what seems opportune for the increase of faith, the organisation of common pastoral action, and the regulation of morals and of the common ecclesiastical discipline which is to be observed, promoted and protected’ (Canon 445).

dev-222588-unsplashUnder present canon law, the decisions of the Council are made by bishops by nature of their episcopal ordination as successors of the Apostles. However, it would be mistaken to read this exercise of authority as an isolated act for in casting their deliberative vote the bishops are required to be attentive to the counsel of the people in their dioceses and at the Council sessions themselves. The magisterium must sense with the Church as a whole where the Spirit’s inspiration is leading. Lay delegates at the Council will have a consultative vote, namely a real vote which will be written and tallied and is to be considered seriously by those with a deliberative vote. So it is that the bishops are obliged to make decisions on the basis of their careful discernment of the work of the Holy Spirit in the minds and hearts of the People of God, recognising that the sense of the faith of the faithful – what is known as the sensus fidelium – is a source of the Church’s life and learning as it pilgrims through history.

To elaborate, the sensus fidelium is that gift of the Holy Spirit which enables the whole Church to receive and to transmit the Catholic faith effectively and faithfully. The lay faithful as living and active members of the Church contribute to this instinct of faith and are not merely passive recipients of what the hierarchy teach and theologians explain. As such it is reasonable that appropriate dispensations may well be sought from the Holy See to ensure representation of laity at the Council sessions is maximised (this matter has been discussed by the Executive Committee and Bishops Commission for the Council). Following the sharing of a sense of faith and the weighing of the issues and viewpoints raised, it is to the magisterium of the bishops to judge with authority whether opinions which are present among the People of God, and which may seem to be the sensus fidelium, actually correspond to the truth of the tradition received from the Apostles.

It is theologically important to affirm that individual views and opinions shared through Plenary Council sessions across Australia bring real perspective and insight to the Church’s situation, borne of concrete contexts. As it has been remarked, given that dialogue within the Church is not an ingrained habit or cultural norm for many of us as Catholics, some ‘will probably speak clumsily, angrily or shallowly the first time around. It is only over time that we eventually learn what we most deeply want to say.’ It is also true that the views of individuals need to be brought into conversation with the whole Church as a body of the faithful – hence the need for mutual listening and shared dialogue in the formation of an agenda for the Plenary Council. This dialogue is a requirement because it is in the lives of the faithful that the Word of God is lived and expressed. In discerning and taking decisions at the Council, the bishops are called to be a listening and learning body of teachers as well as discharging an apostolic commission to authentically interpret what is true to and advantageous for the faith.

Considering what has been shared, the concern that a Plenary Council would change Catholic doctrine under pressure of populism is unfounded and does not align with the reality, purpose or mandate of such a Council.

paul-keiffer-789203-unsplashNor does it represent the intent of the listening process underway until Lent 2019. The thousands upon thousands of submissions and voices they represent will shape the major themes that will constitute the agenda of the Plenary Council. Naturally in the abundance of data received will be conflicting interpretations of what has been revealed in Jesus, the Scriptures and our Catholic tradition and varied proposals on how best to incarnate the Gospel in our present situation and our future. This interpretive maelstrom is not a new experience for the Church (think of the disputes of Saints Peter and Paul, and the divergences of the Pauline and Johannine communities).

However, what is new in the submissions toward Plenary Council 2020 are concrete situations and questions of this moment of history for which we need to invoke and involve the Spirit’s gift of understanding. The preparations for a Plenary Council in 2020 require a sounding of the lived experience of faith and the Church among people today because we cannot seek to grow the Church as the body of Christ by closing the door against reality, as messy or vexed as that reality can be. Dialogue as a means of ecclesial discernment expresses the intrinsic relationship between the magisterium as a teaching office and the sensus fidei as a grace of the present. It affirms our faith in the capacity of the whole Church to attend to the Spirit’s guidance into ‘all the truth’ (Jn 16:13).

As I see it we are compelled to engage at this time in rigorous conversation about the future of our parishes, where the percentage of participation is declining to single digits across the nation; the role of Catholic education in the mission of the Church as enrolment numbers decline in a number of jurisdictions; the effective proclamation of and witness to the faith in a pluralistic environment; the quality of leadership – ordained and lay – required for the exercise of the Church’s mission in a new era and in address of social and political developments; the charisms of all the baptised which remain largely inactive and are yet to be fully engaged, and our continued development of a healthy, safe and missionary ecclesial culture. It is no secret that it is our personal and shared discipleship that stands as the deepest source of renewal across these varied aspects of the Church’s life.

As such, the Plenary Council will not give rise to a ‘church of preferences’ but rather provides the opportunity, if we take it, to better equip the Church in Australia to proclaim the unchanging Gospel in new and vital ways. Our Catholic tradition is none other than the Church’s reception of Jesus through time under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. In this time of challenge and opportunity for the Church it is incumbent upon us to seek out, receive and then voice what this Spirit is saying to the churches (Rev 2:7).

 

bridging the gap: from youth ministry to adult discipleship

It was a privilege to present a workshop at the Australian Catholic Youth Ministry Convention 2018, held in the Diocese of Parramatta this past weekend. It was inspiring to be with youth ministers and leaders who are shaping the Church through their witness and initiative, from all sectors of the Church in Australia. Below is a summary of the workshop shared and I hope it’s of interest and encouragement in the ongoing work of renewal as we anticipate next month’s Synod on Youth.

This ACYMCworkshop will extend the theme of ‘missionary discipleship’ to consider how youth ministry can support young people to move and grow from participation in youth ministry to exercise their discipleship as adults in broader parish and community life. If youth ministry gathers for the purpose of sending out, how can our ministries best prepare young people for that future? One of the claims of this workshop is that if we can identify the issues of our moment, and we know the destination at which we want to arrive, then this will shape the steps we can take to get there. If our purpose is sending young people out into mission, into the full life of the Church and world, then how does our youth ministry best prepare them for that future?

The Discipleship Dilemma

As Pope Francis encourages, it is important to begin with a frank assessment of where we are as Church because “realities are more important than ideas” (EG 231-233; LS 110, 201). We cannot grow by holding the door closed against reality. A renewed future begins on the basis of the present. When we reflect on how best to lead young people into adult discipleship, we could reasonably ask how well our entire Church leads and makes disciples of all its members.

We know that the Church is called by God to work towards the transformation of the world so that it reflects more and more of God’s Kingdom or God’s reign. This Kingdom comes about when people encounter Jesus, surrender, and make the decision to follow – when they become his disciples and go out to transform the world.  However, if this is the purpose of the Church, bringing about the Kingdom and making and forming disciples, we have to admit that we are not bearing the fruit we would like to see. More and more of our people, both young and old, continue to disengage from the Church, and we acknowledge the confronting reality that in the current climate some will question if the Church has anything worthwhile to say or be less inclined to be explicit in their faith. Another challenge presents itself in our parishes. If we were to measure how many of the hundreds who receive the sacraments in our local parishes each year, pass through our sacramental life in initiation or from week to week, and emerge on the other side as missionary disciples, the result would be less than ideal. There is something amiss. Where is the fruit?

The reasons for our decline have become clearer over time. At heart, we have a discipleship dilemma. When it comes to a personal and active relationship with Jesus Christ, many Catholic communities have taken a pastoral approach that assumes the sacraments will simply ‘take care of it’ and that is simply not true. We have neglected our duty to awaken in each person that active and personal faith, that fertile soil, in which the grace of the sacraments can actually take root and bear fruit. To make the point, “baptisms, confessions, weddings, funerals, daily devotions, anointing, and adoration. It’s all good stuff, it’s how some Catholics grow spiritually. For others, it’s what they do instead of grow . . . For certain, the sacraments give us grace to put us in right relationship to God and his life in our soul, nourishing and strengthening us for our discipleship walk. But they’re not mean to replace it’”.[1] This is not to discount the centrality of the sacraments or to deny the place that devotions have in the Catholic life. But it is to say that people can be ‘sacramentalised’ without being evangelised. It is entirely possible to undertake a routine of religious custom and practice without a personal and responsive relationship to Jesus Christ.

The sacraments do indeed give us the capacity to believe – the virtue of faith – but without a personal ‘yes’ – an act of faith – it remains a ‘bound’ sacrament. Like a car full of fuel, if we never turn the key or press the accelerator, we do not move forwards and we are not changed. Our personal ‘yes’ is the spark which enables grace to bear real fruit in our lives. Writing of youth, John Paul II recognised this same dilemma, “A certain number of children baptised in infancy come for catechesis in the parish without receiving any other initiation into the faith and still without any explicit personal attachment to Jesus Christ; they only have the capacity to believe placed within them by Baptism and the presence of the Holy Spirit.”[2] We know that children and youth who have no explicit personal attachment to Jesus are likely to grow up to be adults with no personal attachment to Jesus, unless that relationship is introduced into their life through a process of evangelisation.

Our Catholic tradition affirms this very point – that the sacraments do not replace personal discipleship. Vatican II’s Sacrosanctum Concilium affirms that the sacraments presume a living faith amidst its people.[3] The Catechism of the Catholic Church tells us explicitly, “The sacred liturgy does not exhaust the entire activity of the Church: it must be preceded by evangelisation, faith, and conversion”.[4] The Second Vatican Council and the Catechism affirm the Eucharist as “the source and summit of the Christian life” (CCC 1324). When there is no Christian life, no trace or intention of Christian living, then in fact the Eucharist can be neither source nor summit of anything. Outside of the context of discipleship, the Eucharist can be reduced to an object of piety or mere consumption rather than a relationship that invites a Jesus-shaped life. Finally, Jesus himself gives us a Great Commission “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, [and then] baptise them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teach them to obey everything that I have commanded you” (Matt. 28:19). We could say that the mission of the Church is not sacraments but disciples which the sacraments nourish. Unless people become disciples, the grace of the sacraments bears little fruit.

It is important to recognise that the young people in our care are already being shaped and formed by this culture of sacramental routine, marked by a lack of fruit and the gentle decline in living faith. To render this concrete, take the typical experience of a Church-attending youth. They might intuit from the pews that parish participation is declining (in fact, the total percentage of Mass attendance nears single digits across the country) and will gain a quick sense that very few of their peers attend Eucharist on any given weekend (about 5% of all aged 20-34 in fact).[5] They would know too well that few of their peers’ families are engaging with the Church, and they may not witness many or any new people coming into the Church at Easter (perhaps a handful each year, while dozens more walk out the back door at the same time). They might recognise that while many receive the sacraments they are not seeing the fruit of a change in lives, that there is something missing and church attendance doesn’t seem to make a great difference to people’s lives. They may hear a little about the Church, history, or even morality, but they may not hear much about Jesus or hear the story of Jesus’ life shared clearly (when preaching is poor or misaligned). They may never have witnessed an adult actually speak about how Jesus has changed their life or heard conversations among adults about Jesus (even though a culture of testimony lies at the heart of evangelisation, for consumer churches have preferences while missionary churches have stories of how Jesus has changed their life).

These are some of the basic experiences that young people may encounter in our faith communities. The risk is unless we are casting in our youth ministries an alternative vision for what adult discipleship looks like, our young people may not receive any other image of adult life in the Church and therefore be given little sense of a positive future. We have a deep sense that we are called to do more than lead young people into adult communities which show little life in themselves, repeat the outcomes or trends of decline we have experienced in past generations of Catholics in Australia.

If our adult community and the cultures of our parish communities have forgotten what ‘normal’ looks like, it is the prophetic role of youth ministry to recover a new norm by equipping young people to move from a faith that can be customary, inherited or barren to a faith which is intentional (not routine), personal (not merely the faith of my family but a faith truly my own), and fruitful (there are signs of concrete change in our life for discipleship is not an invisible phenomenon, it shows up in the pigment of our life). In looking at change from one culture to another, we note that it is not the cultural norm in Catholicism to even talk about Jesus, let alone his fruit or work in our life, and those who do are viewed as Protestant or a spiritual pretender.[6] We have forgotten what ‘normal’ looks like. Youth ministry can play a part in the gradual transformation of our Church culture, to place again a full and living discipleship to Jesus before young people, as the heart of what we do and who we are as Catholics.

We can consider the radical difference that youth ministry can make to the Church in this way – via the analogy of what makes a good school. We know that a lack of academic opportunity is passed on or transmitted from generation to generation and, as such, students from lower socio-economic backgrounds often do not perform as well as they could. However, some education systems (e.g. those in Shanghai and Korea but sadly not Australia) are able to lift these students well beyond their statistical likelihood of poor academic performance, enabling these young people to perform and excel at their full potential. Quite simply, good schools and teachers make a difference to the capacities and lives of their students. They can break the cycle of ignorance and disadvantage. In a similar way, we know that ignorance of the faith is passed on or transmitted from generation to generation, and that many of our people start their journey in the Church ‘disadvantaged’ by low religious literacy and low or no commitment to practice, including little enthusiasm for sacrificial discipleship or evangelisation of others. The aim of good parishes, schools and youth ministries is to lift people out of this religious rut and support them to grow in faith and discipleship above and beyond what their background might have equipped them for. If our communities are not equipping our young people for living discipleship, then perhaps it is our ministry that can make that difference. I wanted to start on the note of realism, with recognition of what we are sending our young people into, and a note of possibility of what youth ministry can do within the wider life of the Church and within a Catholic culture desperately in need of renewal.

Youth Ministry

Having named the discipleship dilemma in our wider Church, which impacts upon the future of young people in faith, we now turn to focus on the reality of youth ministry itself. What is the status quo or state of play in youth ministry today?

Some of the significant dilemmas we are confronting include a ‘drop off’ after a time in parish groups and during senior high school among youth. For young adults, the decline in participation can set in during the post-school years, in the years of university or the first years of work. We sense that many of those aged between 25-35 years are being lost to the Church’s life, and other young adults are left hungry and even look back to youth ministry to serve their needs after the age of 30. These real experiences expose a gap and need in our approach to youth ministry, with many asking, ‘to whom shall we go?’ As it stands, we see young adults graduate from youth groups, a small number emerge as spiritual entrepreneurs who have learned to fend for themselves, but many more become ‘lost’ or drifters within the life of the Church, and a silent majority of young adults, I fear, slip into the routine culture of the crowd or disappear from the life of the Church altogether. Young people will continue to leave the scene as groups dwindle and their social support fades in the Church, or they will ‘hang on’ to their youth experience for dear life and risk a sort of extended adolescence well into their thirties with the crisis of vocation that can accompany being lost. If people are feeling lost in their thirties, it is saying something about how we are or are not preparing young people in youth ministry for a lasting life of faith.

The Causes of Decline

What is it about youth ministries that can lead to the disengaged, unchurched and the lost? We have an opportunity to make a real difference with those we do encounter but we do not always quite hit the mark. Some of the limited outcomes we see in youth ministry can be related to the purpose for which they exist. Take these four examples, keeping in view that a problem well recognised is a problem half solved.

The social but not spiritual group. There will be youth groups that exist for their own social value and are perhaps more an exercise in demography rather than discipleship. The parish decides it is good to have a youth group or a school a new youth team of sorts, so they establish one and the community feels better for it because we are ‘doing something for youth’. In short, the group exists for its own sake rather than for others. It will inevitably become insular, cliquey and decline, rather than outreach and grow, operating from a consumption model (‘this group is about me’) rather than of outreach and apostolic intent. It can often be marked by a sense that if the group gets any larger they will lose their intimate sense of community. The members do not intentionally reject ‘new’ people, but their present relationships are so intimate that any newcomer can find it difficult to break into the group. Especially when small, these social groups can stunt personal growth rather than enable it, especially if a group is populated with young people with nowhere else to go. Of course, the Church is there for all people, most especially the poor in spirit and circumstance, but if youth groups or ministries are not as broad and refective as the surrounding community, it can serve as a refuge from the world rather than a launching pad for faith in the world.

Youth groups as a retention strategy. Sometimes groups can be formed or used as a remedy for the declining participation that takes place after the sacraments of initiation. After all, who doesn’t want to ‘keep the kids in church’. However, such group can have short futures as they will tend to focus on behaviour modification (turning up to Mass or staying in Church) rather than discipleship. What they do not realise is that when people become disciples – encounter Jesus, surrender their life to him, and make the decision to follow – they will go to Mass for the rest of their lives. We want people to fall in love, not merely fall in line. If a group is simply about retaining members, then youth leaders will need to constantly come up with new and gimmicky ideas to retain the current membership and ‘get them to Mass’ but never address the deeper ‘why’ that might sustain them for a lifetime of faith. Groups that are established or see themselves merely as a retention strategy aim for the short-term but are unable to take the longer view with the usual outcomes of steady decline as the novelties and techniques wear thin.

Youth ministry as catechesis. Another reality for youth ministry can be an exclusive focus on catechesis, on teaching young people the facts about Catholicism and learning content, even when young people may not have a relationship with Jesus (i.e. have not even been evangelised). When we think about the word ‘catechesis’ itself (κατήχησις) as it is found in the Gospel of Luke 1:4, 1 Corinthians 14:19 and Galatians 6:6 it means ‘to sound out’ or to ‘echo the teaching’. It is like standing at the entrance of a cave and speaking out and hearing a voice coming back. When we catechise young people, we are speaking into their lives. We are giving them faith and knowledge, and what we seek is for that faith and knowledge to resound back, echo back upon its reception. However, the only way we can hear an echo is if there is a cave, if there is a space to speak into. If we were to run out and shout at a brick wall, we are not going to hear an echo as there is no space to absorb and reverberate what is being shared. So, we need to bring people to a living and transformative encounter with Jesus first, to create space within them for the Gospel, before we can teach or learning can take place. It has been pointed out that in the history of our Church, we have so often confused indifference with ignorance. People often do not care, have no space for the Gospel, but we think they simply do not have enough information so we catechise them and yet we wonder why nothing is sinking in. It is like trying to plant seeds in concrete! If we continue to prepare and form young people in this same way – only catechise – then we will continue to arrive at the same results, with young people unprepared for a life of adult faith because we never evangelised, made and formed them as disciples.

Finally, youth ministry as a process of duplicating groups. One other response to the disengagement of young adults from the Church we can see is the simple duplication of the same youth groups and structures for an older cohort. However, the question then is ‘where should that process end?’ Should we have groups for those aged 30-35 and then for those 40-45 years of age or would we presume and prepare at some stage their integration and leadership in the wider Christian community?

We can see how some of the outcomes we are seeing in youth ministry with drop off or disengagement can be shaped by our starting points or understanding of what our purpose is as a ministry of the Church. All these four models or tendencies within youth ministries miss the mark, which is to make disciples who have encountered, surrendered and made the decision of faith. More positively, if we do make disciples of young people, they will naturally yearn to be with other Christians (be social), they will live their life within the Church, even through thick and thin, because of their personal relationship and love of Jesus (they will be retained), they will be open to learning (catechesis) and be sustained as adults in older years with a genuine heart for Christ (experience spiritual conviction, not simply repeat behaviours). However, if we begin with other starting points, we cannot expect to see the fruit we are called to bring to life.

Toward Renewal

Moving forwards then, how might we make and form disciples, so they can graduate from youth groups and experience genuine personal and spiritual change that will last? Jesus invites us, through his command to Peter, “to go and bear fruit that will last” (John 15:16). As shared earlier, I think our youth ministries can create a new path and be the change and difference that our wider Church so sorely needs.

We can see the difference youth ministries can be through what are called ‘Berkana loops’ which are simply a helpful companion in thinking through how change and growth come about.

Berkana Loops

When our youth ministries first get off the ground, we can enjoy growth and excitement as the life cycle begins. Our group can be thriving, and we are good stewards of this growth. However, at some point things in the group can begin to plateau, perhaps because we have become comfortable and established, or we are not gaining new members or enthusiasm begins to wane. We start to lose significance or momentum.

When things begin to decline, we enter a ‘hospice’ stage where we are caring for a group in decline. However, as things plateau, there are some who see what is going on and what is not working, they might see what is lacking through a sort of ‘holy discontent’, and can begin to ask questions about impact or methods, and they begin to think of a new way forward. They recognise that God’s mission is greater than our existing methods which are no longer bearing fruit as they might have at other times.

These innovators might feel isolated in their hunger for a new form of engaging young people until they connect with others who have discerned a similar hunger, need or possibility. Now a network of innovators emerges, and they begin connecting on a regular basis. They begin to take action and become a community of practice, as a new possibility continues to emerge and build. With time, space, resources, expertise or by building new skills a new reality and a new way of mission or outreach comes into being.

There will be some stewards of youth ministry who are called to ‘sit by the bedside’ and accompany youth groups to their end, perhaps because that is their charism or they do not quite muster the courage or imagination to change and adapt. Sometimes youth ministries do have their time and naturally come to their end. However, others might make the transition from an old to a new way of doing things which has been led and created by others. When we recognise what is missing in our wider Church and some of our youth ministry – a focus on discipleship – we can put those missing pieces in place with the young people in our care.

Raising Discipleship

So, how do we raise discipleship among new generations that will last into adulthood? Firstly, our own witness is essential. Our witness demonstrates what a new life in Christ looks like. If our own Church attendance and involvement in the life of the Church does make a difference in how we live, if we are actively learning a style of life steered by love, it provokes a response from the young people in our care and opens a path of curiosity, trust and dialogue.

It is important to underscore that it is not our youth programs that make disciples; it is disciples that make disciples. Courses, programs and materials are only as good as the people using them. Without disciples to run a program, they do little good. It is not that we do not appreciate good materials. However, as it has been said, in the history of the life of the Church we did not have good materials. We had people. We had disciples making disciples. Right now, due to a lack of disciples, we may need the materials as a kind of crutch but we need to be careful about allowing them to replace the relationships.

Our witness enables us to then credibly proclaim the Gospel, most centrally the kerygma which is the kernel of the Gospel that centres on Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. The kerygma refers to the basic truths of our Christian faith, the core message of the Christian faith to which all believers are called to assent and proclaim. Pope Paul VI declared, “There is no true evangelisation if the name, the teaching, the life, the promises, the Kingdom and the mystery of Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God are not proclaimed”.[7] This is the kerygma. It is explicit and focused entirely on the person and saving message of Jesus Christ.

We have to tell this Great Story of Jesus if it is to be known. The heart of evangelisation in youth ministry is to announce who Jesus is, the Son of God, the Word made flesh, the man who is God, who died for our sins and was raised on the third day. It is to announce the Good News of the Risen Christ who is with us even now and opens up for us the way to life without end. Evangelising youth ministries proclaim Jesus’ ascension, his seating at the right hand of the Father as King, and his sending forth of the Holy Spirit. It is this Spirit which reveals Christ and even enables us to say ‘Jesus is Lord’ and it is this Spirit who empowers the Church, who empowers us, to be faithful to Christ’s mission in our own lives and in this moment of the world’s history. Ultimately, this Good News of Christ calls us to conversion, to repent and believe in this Gospel, calling for a change of life in the light of what God has done and is doing in Jesus Christ whose life we share by baptism, the anointing of the Holy Spirit, in communion with his mystical body in the Eucharist, and by our communion with His body, the Church.

We are called to bring young people to a transformational encounter with this Jesus, connecting his story with our life. Again, the power of our initial witness and then proclamation has a lot to do with our own transformation and encounter, our own conversion. Pope Francis notes, “A true missionary who never ceases to be a disciple, knows that Jesus walks with him, speaks to him, breathes with him, works with him. He senses Jesus alive with him, in the midst of his missionary enterprise… a person who is not convinced, enthusiastic, certain, and in love, will convince nobody”.[8] Hence, how are you telling the Great Story of Jesus in your ministry? We are called to share that Jesus’ mission was to bring about the Kingdom marked by abundance and that we, as his disciples, are called to do the same, bringing the world’s limitation to divine possibility, that is, to the fullness of life (John 10:10).

This is the kind of vision of discipleship we need to proclaim. The American author Sherry Weddell remarks that if nobody talks about what discipleship looks like, it becomes difficult for people to begin to walk on that road, “Unfortunately, most of us are not spiritual geniuses. If nobody around us ever talks about a given idea, we are no more likely to think of it spontaneously than we are to suddenly invent a new primary colour. To the extent we don’t talk explicitly with one another about discipleship, we make it very, very difficult for most Catholics to think about discipleship”.[9] It is difficult to believe in and live something that you have never heard anyone talk about or that you have seen very others, including older adults, live with joy. We must witness, tell the story of Jesus, and cast a vision of discipleship, of personal and spiritual change, as the ultimate fruit of all other gifts in the Church, including the sacraments and our ministries to the young.[10]

In casting that vision of discipleship we need to be committed and resolute because other understandings of youth ministry can be cast at us (e.g. youth ministry as the social group, the retention strategy, as catechesis or duplication). A great example of resoluteness in holding and living our vision is illustrated by SouthWest Airlines, a low-fare carrier in the U.S. that seeks to ‘democratise’ air travel. Humour is a core dimension of its vision (e.g. the on-board announcements, “Would someone put out the cat?”; “We will be serving dinner on this flight and dessert if everyone behaves themselves”). Nevertheless, the airline received a complaint about their style, from a customer who regarded it as unprofessional and improper for an airline company. On receipt of a complaint, we could probably assume the line of management that would follow (i.e. a letter comes into the central office, the director of customer service rings the branch manager and asks them to ‘tone it down’, before sending the customer some form of compensation e.g. a meal voucher or a free fare). However, Southwest Airlines did not do this. Instead, they sent this customer a short letter with just four words on it. It read: “We will miss you.” The airline does not compromise on its vision and stands by the fact that there are many other uninteresting and boring airlines that customers are well free to choose. So it is with us in our vision of discipleship – it is the very reason for which the entire Church exists, is non-negotiable, and is that image of life that will support the young to live their faith into adulthood, as they come to know themselves as witnesses to the reign or Kingdom of God.

A further step in accompaniment of the young must be to assist them to actually live in that direction. Take for example the rich young man who encounters Jesus. It is not enough for this young man to meet Jesus, but he is then invited to sell all that he has – in other words to start living in the right direction (Mk 10:17-31). We can learn this principle also from the gift of marriage. We can encounter another person, get to know them, and even develop a personal relationship with them. However, to be married someone has to make the decision to ask and a decision to say ‘yes’. It is the same for discipleship – we are called to assist young people to make decisions that set them in the right direction. After all, we are all going somewhere, whether we know it or not, and will arrive at a destination in life.

The road that we are currently on will lead to a destination, and we generally do not drift in good directions. There are physical paths that lead to predictable locations, and physical roads and physical highways that lead to predictable destinations. There is a dietary path that leads to a predictably physical destination. There are financial paths that lead to predictable financial destinations. There are relationship paths that lead to predictable relational destinations. In fact, parents often ask their children questions about who they are dating for this reason. They are not so interested in whether their child is happy in the relationship now (though they hope they are). They are more interested where that relationship will take their child, whether that relationship will take them in the right direction.

As you know for the young people in your care they can in fact be completely content and satisfied and still be heading in the wrong direction. It is akin to driving on the road. You can be perfectly content in the car but become lost and you never know the precise moment you became lost, otherwise you would not have taken that turn. You can be a hundred metres past where you need to be and by the time you realise it, it is too late. It can cost you ten minutes. In life, if you are content but headed in the wrong direction and don’t know it, it can cost you years. It is often our nature to think ‘now is now’ and ‘later is later’ but everything we do has a consequence and will be connected. Biblically speaking, we reap what we sow. All our steps lead somewhere, so what we do everyday matters more than what we do once in a while when it comes to our ultimate direction in life.

mapleleafThe poet Gerard Manly Hopkins developed this term ‘inscape’ for the individual structure of a living being (like a tree or a leaf), an inner structure which results from the history of this being, an inner design made by the tree through its life in the way it has responded to life. We are much the same, our life is a work of art and all the good and the bad, conflicts and sufferings, troubles and happiness in our life all add up to something, all produce this inner structure, and this is what we are judged on, our encounter with Jesus and the direction that we chose to live.  We are judged not on small incidentals (eating meat on Fridays) but rather the whole structure of our life – all that we wanted to do, tried to do, our relationships. This all adds up to our identity which God knows. Hence the value of youth ministers as spiritual guides who can help the next generation to be in touch with the whole direction and meaning of their life as a whole, what it is all adding up to and to encourage them to develop in this direction and not another.

We need, in fact, to develop an intentional culture of mentorship if young people are to grow and make decisions on the way to a lasting and adult faith. Why do young people need you as a mentor? Part of the reason is because experience is a rough teacher and it costs time. As shared by a Christian evangelist, Andy Stanley, ‘Perhaps you’ve heard someone make the argument that experience is the best teacher. That may be true, but that’s only half the truth. Experience is often a brutal teacher. Experience eats up your most valuable commodity: time. Learning from experience can eat up years. It can steal an entire stage of life. Experience can leave scars, inescapable memories, and regret. Sure, we all live and learn. But living and learning don’t erase regret. And regret is more than memory. It is more than cerebral. It’s emotional. Regret has the potential to create powerful emotions – emotions with the potential to drive a person right back to the behaviour that created the regret to begin with. If regret can be avoided, it should be’. Life will throw enough hardship at us by itself. We can avoid unnecessary pain and regret by learning from the experience of others. We need to reach back to those a stage of life behind us and make it easier for that next generation to encounter Christ and to live for him because people develop best when they see what their value being lived out in other Christians. We know hypocrisy discourages faith and good witness raises it up.

In creating that culture, I also want to invite youth ministers not to underestimate their capacity to be a spiritual mentor for others, regardless of their age or history. As a Carthusian monk once penned, our years of age tell us only this, “that the earth has gone around the sun so many times since I came into this world. That is the normal measure of what the world calls time.”[11] However, there is another ‘age’ which is measured by the time we have spent in the life of Christ, the spiritual growth and progress we have made in our time of faith. The mentorship of youth ministers for young people in their care honours our Christian faith as nothing less than a life being passed on, for our tradition of witness is ‘hand clasping hands stretching back in time until they hold the hand of Jesus who holds the hand of God’.[12]

The qualities youth leaders can develop as mentors to support and nourish the discipleship of the young are well spelt out by the preparatory document for the forthcoming Synod on Youth to be held in October 2018. It helpfully shares:

“The young people of the Pre-synodal Meeting accurately detail the profile of the mentor: ‘a faithful Christian who engages with the Church and the world; someone who constantly seeks holiness; is a confidant without judgement; actively listens to the needs of young people and responds in kind; is deeply loving and self-aware; acknowledges their limits and knows the joys and sorrows of the spiritual journey’. For young people, it is particularly important that mentors recognise their own humanity and fallibility: ‘Sometimes mentors are put on a pedestal, and when they fall, the devastation may impact young people’s abilities to continue to engage with the Church’. They also add that ‘mentors should not lead young people as passive followers, but walk alongside them, allowing them to be active participants in the journey. They should respect the freedom that comes with a young person’s process of discernment and equip them with tools to do so effectively. Mentors should believe wholeheartedly in a young person’s ability to participate in the life of the Church. They should nurture the seeds of faith in young people, without expecting to immediately see the fruits of the work of the Holy Spirit. This role is not and cannot be limited to priests and religious, but the laity should also be empowered to take on such a role. All such mentors should benefit from being well-formed, and engage in ongoing formation”.[13]

While it can appear that we are looking for ‘Jesus on a good day’, all of us can bring something of our imperfect selves and the treasure of our life and experiences of the world to those in our care. However, if we are going to support young people to healthily progress through youth groups and to become adult disciples, we will also need adult or older mentors in the lives of young people. As we shared, if a young person never sees or hears an adult talk about their relationship with Jesus, how would they know this relationship is even possible? As noted by Everett Fritz, we want young people to learn to participate in the world of adults, but our youth culture has largely removed adults from mentoring roles with teenagers. “As a result, teens are growing up in a peer-dominated culture. As they grow into adulthood, they have difficulty assimilating into the adult world and into the responsibilities and expectations that come with being an adult.”[14] While peer to peer ministry has its place, in clarifying our life direction, we should not only seek advice from people who share the same season of life, because it is akin to asking for directions of someone who has never been where you want to go.

We have a rich biblical tradition of older mentors investing in younger mentees including Moses and Joshua, Elijah and Elisha, Paul and Timothy and Titus, and Jesus and his disciples. Adults bring a unique blend of experiences, insights, conflict, choices, health challenges, convictions, and even failures and struggles to believe. Having adult mentors and witnesses in the midst of youth ministry, and a variety of adults, is essential if talk of discipleship and the Church is going to be meaningful in real-life ways. As it has been said, our faith is ever one generation away from its silence if it is not passed on, from one generation to the next.

Conclusion

How might we better prepare young people for adult discipleship in our age? We can begin to acknowledge the discipleship dilemma we are experiencing as a Church, seek to create and innovate a new way with others that learns from these limitations, provide a living witness to a life in Christ wholly given over and surrendered, proclaim the Great Story of Jesus, cast a vision of the discipleship he asks of us, accompany young people to live in that direction, and include mentors, both peers and adults, in the normal practice of youth ministry. I propose that it is these foundations, applied to local contexts, that can resource young people to live a Christian life beyond the confines of youth ministry, to grow into adult disciples and agents of renewal in our Church.

References:

[1] Fr Michael White and Tom Corcoran, Rebuilt: Awakening the Faithful, Reaching the Lost, Making Church Matter (Ave Maria Press: Notre Dame, Indiana, 2013), 77.

[2] John Paul II, Catechesi Tradendae 19.

[3] Vatican II, Sacrosanctum Concilium 59.

[4] Catechism of the Catholic Church #1072.

[5] Robert Dixon, Stephen Reid and Marilyn Chee, Mass Attendance in Australia: A Critical Moment. A Report Based on the National Count of Attendance, the National Church Life Survey and the Australian Census (Melbourne: ACBC Pastoral Research Office, 2013), 2-3.

[6] Cf. Sherry Weddell, Forming Intentional Disciples (Our Sunday Visitor: Huntington, Indiana, 2012), 63.

[7] Pope Paul VI, Evangelii Nuntiandi 22.

[8] Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium 266.

[9] Weddell, Forming Intentional Disciples, 56.

[10] A disciple can be defined as one who has encountered Jesus, surrendered their life, and made the decision to follow, or be understood by its expression as provided by Fr James Mallon, as one who has a personal relationship with Jesus, shares faith with others, is open to the gift of the Holy Spirit, has a daily prayer life, with commitment to Eucharist and Reconciliation, can pray spontaneously out loud when asked, and sees their life as a mission field. Cf. Fr James Mallon, Divine Renovation Guidebook: A Step-by-Step Manual for Transforming Your Parish (Novalis: Toronto, Ontario, 2016), 159.

[11] A Carthusian, They Speak by Silences (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1955), 38-9.

[12] John Shea, An Experience Named Spirit as cited in Robert A. Ludwig, Reconstructing Catholicism: For a New Generation (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock, 2000), 61.

[13] Instrumentum Laboris for Synod 2018, 132.

[14] Everett Fritz, The Art of Forming Young Disciples: Why Youth Ministries Aren’t Working and What to Do About It (Sophia Institute Press: Manchester, New Hampshire, 2018), 46.

young in christ: thoughts on synod 2018

SynodI was grateful to be part of a workshop this week hosted by the Australian Catholic Youth Council in North Sydney. It drew together a select group of parish and diocesan youth leaders in conversation with Australia’s delegates for the October Synod on youth, Archbishop Anthony Fisher OP and Bishop Mark Edwards OMI, as well as Archbishop Comensoli.

It was a great source of learning and uplifting to meet young leaders who are exercising what can only be described as remarkable spiritual entrepreneurship within the Church in Australia. Amidst the polarisations that can mark our Church these are the young witnesses bringing fresh heart to our faith, with the bold humility well described by an ancient apologist – ‘we others, we speak little, but we live’.

The fifteenth ordinary general assembly will focus on young people, faith and vocational discernment between 3-28 October 2018. The Synod and its outcomes will provide a telling insight into the Church’s approach to evangelisation at this time. This is because our commitment to reach out to the young reflects our commitment to reach out to all those who are unchurched or weighing up if the Catholic faith might still be central or relevant to the everyday project of their lives.

The reality of disengagement and even disaffiliation from the Church on the part of young people will always be a confrontation as it suggests something about ourselves – about our capacity for relationships of discipleship with young people both personally and as a community of faith.

The conspicuous absence of young people from many of our communities, worshipping life and ordinary ministries says something about our ability to enter into their experience of life, to grasp their sensibilities, and recognise their questions and searching as filled with promise and as authentic, a way of approaching God rather than an affront or the hubris of disobedience. The uneven journey of young people within the Church throws light on our ability to dialogue with those unlike ourselves and on our capacity to suggest compelling and personal forms of holiness amid a host of unsatisfying cultural placebos. Fundamentally, the presence or otherwise of young people in our Christian community reflects our ability to witness to and proclaim the Gospel as a way of life, as an invitation to fall in love rather than an obligation to fall in line.

Recognising the Reality

Youth MassAs the Church in Australia considers its future, it is imperative to understand the interactions and experiences that comprise young people’s lives for these provide the building blocks for renewed mission with and to young people. While the Catholic faith may today occupy less surface space in Australian culture, the rise of dedicated disciples within promises to bring new depths to our Christian living and cultural impact, and encourage the whole Church in its mission to the concrete people of each generation.

While the national survey and report findings (‘Called to Fullness of Life and Love’) produced by the Australian Catholic bishops ahead of the Synod did tend to underrepresent young people weakly attached to the Church, and overrepresent young adults who are highly involved, it nevertheless stands as a valuable and significant window into the experience of young Australians with regards faith and the Church.

Affirmed by the survey is the primary influence on young people of family and friends. These two natural influences can nurture, support and raise up faith. Each can also lead young people toward disaffiliation. This phenomenon can occur, for instance, when young people feel forced to attend Church with family members, perceive hypocrisy in the lives of those closest to them, come forward from situations which may not mirror a Christian understanding of marriage and family (e.g. a third of all births in Australia are now ex-nuptial births[1]) or when they are not supported by peers who value faith or religious practice.

bishops_surveyChallengingly, among Australian Catholic youth the influence of Church or religious leaders in their key decisions and directions is thin, identified as significant by just 11% of those surveyed and aged between 16-18 years. This meek influence might be explained by a lack of personal relationship amongst some clergy and young people, the broader collapse of the Church’s credibility in the light of the sexual abuse crisis, and the real struggle of Church leaders to listen or ‘hold’ the questions that young people are asking of the Church. On this score, young Australian Catholics rated their experience of being listened at a modest 5.9 out of 10.[2]

A number of young people have expressed their weariness at being disregarded within our faith communities because of their youth or else being catechised without the opportunity to enter into genuine dialogue about the issues of faith and belief that are significant to them. It is certainly true that when the Church appears more concerned with behaviour modification than a personal encounter with the young in Christ, our ecclesial influence will wane and the potential for accompaniment will give way to alienation.

The reason that our influence – and therefore our listening – matters a great deal is because young Catholics are actively deciding whether faith and the Church will be a part of their life and future, and they are making these decisions from early adolescence. Disaffiliation is not a choice that is made with haste. As it has been suggested, it often mirrors the breakdown of any significant relationship – it happens one ‘chip’ at a time until one partner has had enough and ultimately decides it is ‘done’.[3] Provocations toward a final decision against the Church or Catholic faith can include a struggle with or disagreement with a particular Church teaching or teachings, a negative interaction with a Church leader or faith community, a process of steady emancipation from parents or grandparents committed to practice, and the accumulation of uninspired or wearisome experiences of the Church over time. Hence, the reported sense of relief for young people when they leave.[4]

Embracing the total picture of the reality of young people vis-à-vis the Church also means acknowledging those who remain engaged with the life and mission of the Church, of whom diversity remains a mark. Some young adults in the Australian survey passionately engage with traditional Catholic expressions of prayer and liturgy. Some want clarity of Church teaching amidst confusion and the cacophony of the blogosphere, while others seek less catechesis and dogmatism and more personal concern. Others shared their negative experiences when they have tried to promote Church teaching and practice in their own schools and parishes, and a lack of effective support in their practice of parish ministry, while others expressed their difficulty with the Church’s understanding of sexuality and relationships.[5]

Given the range of influences on young people, within and outside the Church, and their mixed experiences of faith, there is no one answer for the complexity of these situations, at least not without doing violence to the personal condition and circumstance of each young person which is the very subject of our evangelising mission.

Vocational Discernment

yobrek_021Positively, when Australian youth were asked how the Church can be of help to them, the responses actively invited our communities to provide guidance, to assist and counsel young people in their anxieties, personal challenges, understanding of sexuality and relationship issues.[6] As the meaning and direction of life is not uncovered in a single moment, it is incumbent upon the Church to journey with young lives in realising their own dignity and personal mission, both of which express a fundamental call to holiness.

The Synod’s preparatory document acknowledges that condescension and judgement are not helpful in this project. It also insists that mutual encounter rather than one-sided prescription will be the way in which we discover a personal form of holy living, “No vocation, especially within the Church, can be placed outside [the] outgoing dynamism of dialogue”.[7] This is because our vocational horizon is not “a pre-determined fate, a task to be carried out, a ready-made script . . . God takes seriously the freedom He has given to human beings and responding to his call is a commitment that requires work, imagination, audacity, willingness to make progress also by trial and error”.[8] Accompaniment and an apprenticeship in the life of faith are essential to growth in holiness, pursued by a state of life and also in professional life.

In Evangelii Gaudium, Pope Francis has already advised “The pace of this accompaniment must be steady and reassuring, reflecting our closeness and our compassionate gaze which also heals, liberates and encourages growth in the Christian life”.[9] Accompaniment demands patience but can be sustained with the assurance that it has an immediate purpose, “To accompany them would be counterproductive if it became a sort of therapy supporting their self-absorption and ceased to be a pilgrimage with Christ to the Father . . .  Genuine spiritual accompaniment always begins and flourishes in the context of service to the mission of evangelisation.”[10]

Picture4Frustratingly for many, the accompaniment urgently desired by young Australian Catholics and urged by Pope Francis cannot be found neatly contained within a package or program. It demands in fact an entire culture of ecclesial life in which discernment is a norm and in regular evidence. When genuine discernment is not practiced in our sacramental programs, leading to fruitless reception, when RCIA processes teach people about Catholicism but neglect to train them to live as disciples, when parish pastoral councils and parish groups are more focused on ‘who will do it?’ rather than ‘where are we going?’, the offer of accompaniment to young people will appear more like false advertising than the expression of a community fully open to what God wants for the Church. The preparatory document for the Synod minces no words, “We cannot expect our offer of pastoral accompaniment towards vocational discernment to be credible to young people, unless we show that we are able to practice discernment in the ordinary life of the Church”.[1]

Conclusion

If disaffiliation from Catholic faith and the Church is a process that unfolds over time, and the reasons that people leave contain the reasons they might return, then we must commit ourselves to the patient and thoroughgoing work of creating cultures in which accompaniment is not reserved for a select few or the ‘super spiritual’ but is the ordinary experience of young people in their contact with the Church.

As set out in the preparations for the Synod, it will demand of our communities mature disciples who are faithful Christians engaged with the Church and the wider world, who constantly seek holiness, can be a confidant without judgement, who actively listen to needs and respond in kind, are deeply loving and self-aware, and who can acknowledge their own limits and know the joy and sorrows of the spiritual journey.[12] In confronting the challenges and listening to the hopes of the young, we pray that the October Synod will prompt this depth of conversion in each of us as witnesses to God’s mission.

 

[1] Australian Institute of Family Studies, Snapshots of Family Relationships 2008.

[2] Dantis, Trudy and Reid, Stephen, Called to Fullness of Life and Love: National Report on the Australian Catholic Bishops’ Youth Survey 2017 (Pastoral Research Office, 2018), 30.

[3] McCarty, Robert J., and Vitek, John M. Going, Going, Gone: The Dynamics of Disaffiliation in Young Catholics (2017), 11.

[4] Ibid., 27.

[5] Dantis and Reid, 34-36.

[6] Dantis and Reid, 41.

[7] Instrumentum Laboris for the Synod 2018, 140.

[8] Instrumentum Laboris for the Synod 2018, 121.

[9] Evangelii Gaudium 169.

[10] Evangelii Gaudium 170;173.

[11] Instrumentum Laboris for the Synod 2018, 139.

[12] Instrumentum Laboris for the Synod 2018, 132.

proclaim 2018: parishes for the unchurched and lost

IMG_6330Held in Brisbane for the first time in its short history, Proclaim Conference 2018 gathered more than 600 participants from 12-14 July to discuss parish evangelisation with its theme drawn from John’s Gospel, “Make your home in me”. Keynote speakers over the three days included Archbishop Mark Coleridge, Cardinal John Dew from Wellington, Ron Huntley of the Divine Renovation network, Karolina Gunsser from Citipointe Church in Redcliffe, and Lana Turvey-Collins from the national facilitation team for the Plenary Council.

With a renewed process for workshops that encouraged shorter inputs and extended dialogue, and discussion panels on each day, the conversations were broad and, for the most part, unguarded. From the urgency of God’s mission, to the inseparability of evangelisation from the person of Jesus, and of the parish from the unchurched, to the health or otherwise toxicity of our parish cultures, and the ongoing experience of the sexual abuse crisis, participants were given nourishment and challenge for their pastoral practice.

I was privileged to facilitate four workshops and participate in a panel on ‘culture change, parish renewal and evangelisation’ together with Sally Hood of ACU Campus Ministry, Ron Huntley, and Andrea Dean of the Office for the Participation of Women. Below is a summary of my brief workshop input which looked at the connection of parish life to the unchurched.

Horizons of Parish Renewal 

IMG_6316As a former ‘outsider’ to the Church it has taken some twenty years to learn to live as a baptised person and still the learning continues. Through my own faith experience I have come to believe that the parish is essential to Christian growth and discipleship. Indeed, if we did not have parishes we would have to invent them – local communities of faith gathered around the Word and Eucharist where faith is given shape and social support, fostered into discipleship and then enters the world through our living witness.

Together with the family and school, the parish is where the majority of people encounter the Church and it is where the vast majority of clergy will live out their life’s vocation. So the health and vitality of the parish matters to all of us, not only in respect of our common life but also for our personal faith.

However, part of the challenge is that when our parishes have not grown in roughly six or seven decades in Australia (since at least the 1950s), it is inevitable that there will be a small amount of people who love how we do things and a whole community who don’t.

In the face of this reality, this workshop addresses parish evangelisation through four horizons toward which I think our parishes and parish ministries are called to move. Perhaps we may never fully arrive in our own local community, but these horizon lines can orient us toward our mission. A horizon places everything in its foreground into a context or perspective, shedding light and offering clarity for the journey we are on. We may need to shift our stance or be alert to rocks in our own harbour stifling our way but we are assured of making progress if we have the courage “to appreciate small things inside large horizons” (Pope Francis). I offer here four horizons that I hope shed light on your current parish practice and supply steps toward an evangelising culture within parish life.

Clarity on the Mission of our Parish

The first horizon to which we can move is clarity on the mission of our parishes. Even as a brute fact of survival, we can affirm that the future of our parishes depends on those who currently do not believe. There is no future without the lost or unchurched.

Evangelisation is a necessity to maintain even what we have as local communities of faith. This is obvious enough in the struggle to maintain our ministries, our giving and even, in some parishes, our hope. More positively, when we bring others to Jesus and the Church it plants energy and life in our communities. We know this from the small trickle of people who enjoin our community through the RCIA, who come to personal faith in the midst of the Church.

More importantly, however, a focus on those who are unchurched neatly aligns with Jesus who comes not for the righteous but for sinners, who places the needs of the outcast and ailing before his own flock.

In the Gospel of Luke, we witness Jesus walking through the town of Jericho and reach out to Zacchaeus, a tax collector for the Roman establishment. Jesus steps into Zacchaeus’ house as a guest of a sinner, scandalises the watching crowd, and rejoices in Zacchaeus’ conversion, declaring “Today salvation has come to this house… for the Son of Man has come to seek out and to save the lost” (Luke 19:9-10). We see this a pattern throughout his ministry – Jesus challenges the insiders and he comforts the outsiders.

The ecclesiology lesson we draw from Jesus’ ministry can be summarised in this way (from Sean Sears, pastor at Grace Church in Boston): the Church is not for Christians. The Church is Christians and it is for those who are not.

Crowd-People-Walking-Business-BlurryThe Church is not for ourselves. In Pope Francis’ language, our community is called to be a ‘field hospital’ serving those who most need help now, the wounded and the lost. This is the antithesis of the self-referential Church. We are called to leave the ninety-nine to find the one, or in our Australian reality, leave the one to find the ninety-nine.

The likely challenge we can feel is that as essential as this outward focus is to our survival, as faithful as it is to the mission of Jesus himself, as urgent as this mission is to our health and growth, when we start changing things in the parish to better reach out, accompany and actively welcome outsiders (whether that’s through our Mass times, our language, our carparks, or our own position in the pews), people start to become uneasy precisely because it is not about them.

Change always sound great until people start to experience it. We can call for reform but are not always open to our own conversion. The reality for our Church is that any change will tend to be a ‘big change’ because of the weight of our Church culture toward maintaining the status quo. In our ecclesial culture there tends to always be a reason not to change, and yet we experience so little fruit on the collective vine as parish participation rates in Australia decline to near 11%.

When we proclaim that our parish is not about us but about the unchurched, some of us in community can feel a little like the older brother in the parable of the Prodigal Son. The older brother has been utterly loyal and committed and served his Father’s house all this time. However, when he realises it is not about him but the one who has been lost, the older brother struggles to rejoice at the one who had not earned his welcome but whom the Father nevertheless embraces and lavishes upon with love.

We know in the mind of Jesus that the older brother is just as lost because everything the Father has is for the older brother too. What the Father seeks from his first son is a largeness of heart to rejoice when the lost are saved, a heart for his youngest son who was dead but is now alive.

In the culture of our parishes it is all too easy for the people inside the church to become a higher priority than reaching those outside the church. This is understandable to some extent as the ‘insiders’ keep things running, they lead our ministries and yes they pay the bills. However, for fear of making these insiders unhappy, our parishes tend to hold on to programs even if these seeds are bearing no fruit on account of the toxicity of the soil or culture in which they are hosted. This can keep our house small and our family brooding or even bitter rather than welcoming and marked by the charity that the Gospel demands.

In contrast, if we do as Jesus invites us to do and seek out and reach the lost and the unchurched, the life of the ‘older brother’ is also renewed. So, it is for our parishes: outward focused churches create the healthiest insiders.

Picture1In fact, inward looking churches create consumers with preferences, while outward looking churches create missionaries with larger hearts and stories to tell, stories about how Jesus has changed their life. This is the heart of an evangelised parish culture – one beggar telling another beggar how he found bread.

What are the concrete signs that we have moved toward this first horizon, clarity on the mission of the parish? It is that we should expect to encounter more people who have made a mess of some aspect of their past. If we find ourselves working with these people in our parishes, it is a sign we are doing something right.

We sometimes think we need to go out and make people Christians and then bring them to Church. We often want to ‘clean’ the fish before we ‘catch’ them but that’s not how fishing works. What we want to do is to bring them into our community in the complexity of their situations, create environments which are compelling and faith filled, and offer accompaniment that treats their wounds with the balm of mercy, spiritual counsel and ecclesial belonging so they can begin to walk with Christ, experience in time his sacramental life and live out his apostolate as Christ’s disciples.

As the saying goes, we will be most like Jesus when we are spending increasing time with people farthest from him. In a word, if everyone in our parish is comfortable with who is showing up (if it is all ‘older brother’ and none of the lost) then our front doors are probably not wide enough.

Recognising God’s Mission is Greater than our Methods 

The second grand horizon or vista to which we can move is recognition that God’s mission is always greater than our methods, no matter how we currently do things. If we focus anew on the unchurched for health, growth and to be faithful to Jesus’ mission, then we will need to change our practices (e.g. if we preach to the unchurched we are likely to speak to everyone).

download-1A classic example of the need to prioritise our mission over method can be found in the story of Kodak, the photography business established at the turn of the twentieth century, with the expressed purpose of preserving memories which is a seemingly indestructible mission.

However, by the 1990s Kodak were sideline players in a growing digital market and by 2012 they had filed for bankruptcy. And yet, in 1975 they had every opportunity and capacity to change and grow. In fact, Kodak created the first digital camera but dropped the project for fear that it would threaten its existing film business. Kodak was more wedded to its method than its mission.

In a similar vein, in the U.S. 90% of heart patients who are told to change their lifestyle habits or die, choose death over change! (Fast Company Report, 2005)

Parishes that choose their current methods over their mission will die, as what got us here as communities will not always take us where we need to go. If the landscape of faith has changed, and our parishes are still reading off the same maps, our parishes are going to get lost along the way.

What, then, are the methods, programs and practices that no longer serve our parish life and growth? For example, it is clear that we have been catechising and sacramentalising the unevangelised. This practice has borne little fruit over the past decades. As well, we often focus on welcome in our parishes which is certainly important. However, without a practical strategy for invitation there may be less and less people to welcome.

We need to stop setting the bar too low for ministries that matter and nurture strengths based ministry rather than engage in desperate recruitment of anyone who might be available (e.g. a bulletin notice from my own parish for musicians noted, almost as an afterthought, “It does help if you can read music and/or sing in tune and in time”!)

We might have to preach without assuming too much (e.g. that our congregations understand the gift of the Eucharist or the context of Gospel readings) and preach purposely into people’s lives (e.g. our Trinity Sunday homilies almost never touch on the Great Commission and tend to deliver flimsy abstractions that leave people disoriented or disengaged).

What no longer serves the mission of the parish and needs to be set aside so we can redirect the hard labour of maintenance to the real promise of mission? What pathway might we need to put in place to accompany people from no or little faith into an encounter with the living Christ (whether it is a five-step process of Divine Renovation or the three-step method of the parish of Rebuilt)?

It is a truth of our life of faith that prior to conversion to God’s mission, it is behaviour which determines belief (‘Things have always been done this way’) and so mere habit becomes the reason to maintain our well-worn methods. However, after conversion to God’s mission, it is belief which determines our behaviour, resulting in better responses to change (‘What can we do to now reach them?). It is our mission which will drive our methods and constitute the criteria by which we assess our groups and our programs.

Structures to Support our Mission

old-vines-south-australia-wine-story-adelaide-review-800x567A third horizon we can move toward in forming evangelising parishes is structures that support the mission. We want to grow but many parishes are not necessarily structured to grow. There can be literally “no room in the inn” for change.

Take for example the ministry of the priest. A priest can certainly maintain a parish largely by himself, conscripting lay leaders to fulfil the basic functions of community and to keep the wheels turning. However, if the parish wants to go out in mission and reach the unchurched the priest will have to learn to lead with and alongside others. This is because one priest can only have so many meaningful relationships, perhaps a hundred at most. If a parish wants to go out and reach the lost and unchurched, then this realistically demands a team of lay leadership with whom the mission and methods are proclaimed, structured and taken forwards.

So, structure affects mission by default or design. Like a trellis, it will encourage growth and provide room for change and adaption, or like a small pot it will restrict the size to which a sapling can grow.

As a practical parish example, in walking alongside a priest in another diocese, he had inherited a well-resourced parish but also a structure of staff that made mission and outreach difficult.

The parish team consisted of a parish priest, two assistant priests, a three day a week secretary, a two day staff member for accounts, two days for a sacramental coordinator, two days for a pastoral care coordinator, two days liturgical preparation, and two days youth ministry (the equivalent of almost four full time staff).

You can guess how many of these staff reported directly to the parish priest – all eight. The structure of parish staff was keeping him somewhat boxed in, tied to the order of maintenance.

However, if we consider a structure with three teams – an operations team (with a secretary and a report of finance), a newly created evangelisation team (with a four day a week parish evangelisation coordinator working on Alpha, engagement and formation of ministers in the parish, with direct reports of a sacramental coordinator and the youth minister, and accompanied by an assistant priest) and a communications focus (actually integrated into the youth role, so not requiring a paid employee but remaining an area of focus) we could reduce his direct reports from eight to a more manageable five. The previous paid liturgical role was made voluntary and the pastoral care coordination role was integrated into the new evangelisation coordinator role.

This structure empowers lay leadership, and gives back time to the priest for the core work of setting parish vision through his weekly homilies, and to drive and support the evangelisation of adults from which all else flows.

We cannot address the renewal of parishes without looking under the hood or checking the fuel gauge, whether that is our staffing arrangements, our budgets or ministry structures. It is one of the hardest things to do but it is the right horizon or direction in which to move.

Mission in Action

FootprintsThe fourth horizon we can move towards is putting mission into action, perhaps the hardest pilgrimage of all. As a friend once shared, conferences can sometimes be a bit like this: “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit” and when we get home, it is more “… as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end”.

I want to acknowledge that in suggesting a comprehensive focus on the unchurched, methods and strategies to support this kind of evangelisation, and renewed structures to enable growth, we can be tempted to feel overwhelmed.

However, I believe we can make change at every level of the Church, even in our own individual parish ministry groups. Parishes need ‘lighthouse’ ministries that show the way, to show that evangelisation is urgent, possible and can bring about personal and spiritual change.

Whether it is a music ministry or a form of service like a St Vincent de Paul conference, it is possible to shift toward a dedicated outward focus, a culture welcoming of outsiders and challenging of insiders, with a commitment to elevating mission over old methods and to revisit current structures to support the goals we want to achieve. Ultimately, our plan is our people, not programs, and leadership is essential to our cultural transformation. What we do every day matters more than what we do once in a while.

Conclusion

As Christians, people of the Incarnation in which the Word was made flesh, we know that the medium is the message. Jesus not only proclaims the Kingdom of God but embodies it in his person.

In that light, we can ask, ‘What image of God and God’s mission does your parish convey’? How does your parish vision, your parish method, your parish structure, and the action of your parish express the mission of Jesus who came to ‘seek out and save the lost?’ (Luke 19:10).

I believe every parish can grow in its outreach and move towards an evangelising culture but it demands our intent and conviction to bring it about. We are being called to reclaim our primary mission, to bring the nations to a living faith in Jesus who is, as the Church describes, “the light that knows no setting”.