Oct 2006

Notes for Pastoral Council on Growing the Parish

Background

This item for the October 17, 2006 agenda of the Parish Council of Canadian Martyrs Parish (CMP) has originated with some notes prepared by a previous Council member, David Mulcair. He reminded us that Evangelization is one of the responsibilities of the Christian community and therefore of Canadian Martyrs Parish, and also that it is more than the common notion of  ‘preaching the Gospel’ to strangers on street corners or ‘converting the heathens’ in faraway countries. Evangelization  – the spreading of the Good News of Christ’s message  – also consists in living that Good News in our community and sharing our living of it with those outside our community. We do this already through our parish ministries, but David posed the question as to whether we are being open enough and attractive enough to newcomers.

The practical aspect of this is that our active parish membership seems to be static at best, if not declining as older parishioners die and others move away. New persons and families have joined us, but it is not clear that the rest of the community is doing enough to engage these newcomers actively in the parish, or to attract more of them. Our ministries are being carried out, by and large, by the same people (mostly middle aged or older) who have been doing them for years; our parish collections do not seem to be meeting our needs, partially perhaps because there are fewer people around to contribute. 

Because we have a parish that we all love and are proud of, we have a responsibility to reflect on what we can do to help our parish grow both evangelically and institutionally. Adriana Beemans, a parishioner now living in Toronto and working in community-building and institutional development, suggested that such a reflection might begin with an exercise commonly used for analyzing situations or institutions and developing strategies: the SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats). The rest of this note summarizes a discussion with Adriana along those lines.

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Purpose

For our discussion, we took as the purpose of the exercise: to look at how we attract more people to CMP and how we engage them in the life of the community.

Preliminary clarifications

To focus the discussion and keep on track, it is important to know who we are talking about:

1. what is the current makeup of CMP, not just numbers, gender, ages, etc., but also the way in which they participate. E.g., there are different kinds of members:

a) some who attend weekly Mass fairly regularly and like coming to CMP, but for various reasons are not able to become more involved;

b) some who attend regularly and get involved occasionally in one or two activities or ministries, but can’t do much more than that;

c) some who are able to be very involved in a number of ministries and activities, including organizing or managing them;

d) some who are on our parish rolls but rarely if ever attend, or who attend other parishes. 

Some of this information might be on file in the parish, the rest of it might be obtained through some sort of inquiry (probably not a questionnaire). It would also be useful to know the parish boundaries.

2. what kind of persons do we want to attract? One possible breakdown is:

a) believing Catholics who practice elsewhere: the ‘CMP diaspora’ or people from other parishes;

b) believing Catholics who don’t practice but are interested in resuming if they can find a community that meets their needs;

c) people with spiritual yearning  - former Catholics, other Christians, or non-Christians who are looking for a community with religious values and practices they find attractive, even if they are not intending to become Catholics.

In our discussion we assumed that CMP would not want to raid other parishes’ memberships or to ‘convert’ people who already have a full and active life in other faith communities, Christian or non-Christian. However, we felt that former parishioners or ex-Catholics with no parish affiliation were fair game, and that CMP has always welcomed people looking for a spiritual ‘home’, even if they are not able to participate as fully as baptized Catholics.

Strengths

What makes people come (or not come) to our church? What are our strengths and assets as a community in terms of who we are and what we do (in commercial terms, our ‘selling points’)? Some of these might be described as qualities (‘the way we are’), others as activities (‘the way we do things’), and others as properties (‘what we have’).

1. Qualities, the things that describe CMP’s character or ‘organizational culture: e.g., welcoming, supportive,  inclusive and open-minded, family-oriented, children-friendly, parishioner-centred not pastor-centred, community-run, informal and unpretentious, good supportive pastor and pastoral assistant, ...  add others...

2. Activities: we may think we have all these qualities, but an outsider would want to know how they express themselves in practical terms. I.e., what activities or ministries are carried out in a way at CMP that makes them different and more attractive than in other parishes? E.g.,

• gathering the children at the altar for the Our Father 
• children’s ‘Sunday school’, Easter and Christmas pageants/readings
• marriage preparation course (conversations with married couples)
• communion under both species
• ecumenical activities (Palm Sunday, Lees Ave.)
• community socials: summer picnic, Christmas dinner, spaghetti dinner, ‘first-Saturday pizza’ Mass

3. Properties: CMP also has certain strengths in terms of its situation, such as its proximity to Immaculata High School, St. Paul’s and Ottawa University, its special relationship with the Oblate Fathers, its location near Centretown but easily accessible to the rest of the city, its closeness to the Anglican and United Churches, etc.

Weaknesses

CMP  --  and especially its Parish Council  --   has to be prepared to look objectively and dispassionately at where it is weak, not meeting expectations, or failing to grow. This can be sensitive and painful at times, and sometimes is best done in a group exercise with an outside ‘animator’.  Some questions that emerged in our brief discussion were:

• is there too much of an ‘inner group’ at CMP who tend to take on most of the key activities and ministries, leaving newcomers feeling like outsiders? Or looking at this question from a different angle: why is it that we cannot get more people involved as lectors, choir members, eucharistic ministers, etc.? 

• do we offer enough opportunities for parishioners to deepen their spiritual life?
• although CMP has a good number of young children involved in the ‘Sunday school’,  the ‘children’s Our Father’,  the pageants, etc., there are too few attractive opportunities for pre-teens and teens to be active in the parish. We have not been able to keep enough children involved when they reach the pre-teen stage and feel ‘too cool’ to go up to the altar or off to the children’s classes.
• are we really doing enough as a parish for the poor and disadvantaged in our city (e.g., Food Bank, Shepherds of Good Hope, new immigrants, etc.)?
• does the parish offer a space for members to talk about their concerns as Catholics on major issues in society and the Church? for example, how to raise our kids to remain in the Church, religion and politics, married clergy and ordination of women, challenges that science or society raise to our faith, etc.

Opportunities

For the most part, opportunities consist in the way we choose to make use of or build on our strengths in order to achieve our purpose, or the way in which we decide to address our weaknesses. We didn’t review all of these, but talked about a few examples:

• Welcoming: how could we make new families or members better known and more active in parish ministries? Introduce them at the altar, as we do for newly baptized persons? Set up a team of volunteers who would meet with them to get to know them better, introduce them to some other parishioners at Mass, outline activities they might want to become involved in? 

• Supportive: for newcomers in a city, joining a church is a good way to establish social and support networks (evangelical churches excel at this, and some Catholic churches have reached out to Korean, Latinamerican, African immigrants, etc.)). Is there any group that might be attracted to CMP because of such opportunities? 
• Marriage prep: CMP has a unique approach that should be attractive to many engaged couples - how can we make it better known and ‘market’ it? how can we keep the newly married couples in the parish? Can we improve the quality of the marriage prep program (e.g., refresher courses or retreats for the members)?
• Immaculata: covers much of CMP’s catchment area and parents are interested enough in the Church to send their children to a Catholic school. Do we know how many families with children at Immaculata reside in our parish? What can CMP offer or do to attract to the parish those  students and their parents who are not active in parishes of their own? How can we strengthen our relationship with Immaculata  – what can we offer (e.g., opportunities for students to do some of their 40 required hours of community service)? Could there be a parish info booth at PTA meetings?
• St. Paul’s: some students already attend Mass at CMP. How can we reach out to more of them  – are there opportunities in CMP that could dovetail with the spiritual, theological or pastoral interests of more students?

Other opportunities to reach out to and attract new members could arise out of new activities in the parish, such as a ‘guest speaker series’ on faith-based perspectives on different questions facing  society, or a series of talks on Catholic doctrines and principles, or ‘cake & coffee get-togethers’ for young mothers in the parish centre, with the parish providing a couple of sitters who could look after the children in another room. 

The parish might also consider asking one of its members with good writing skills to do periodic articles on the parish, for publication in the neighbourhood newspapers in Ottawa East, Alta Vista, the Glebe, etc., to make us better known to people who might be interested in coming to our church.

Threats

Threats can be looked at as the things that affect our ability to achieve our purpose, but which are beyond our control as a parish. For example:

• The tenets, institutions and values of religion in general and the Catholic Church in particular are commonly painted in a poor light by the forces which shape our secular society (e.g., the media, many intellectuals and academics, advertising, popular science, consumerism, etc.). Public figures who are open about their religious convictions and practice are often held up as odd or suspicious. Young people are shaped by this popular secular culture and tend to lose interest or dismiss religion as a force in their lives when they reach high school or college.

• The Catholic culture and social institutions that in previous generations  shaped and buttressed the identification of Catholics with and within their Church (e.g., prayer liturgies, sodalities, Catholic women’s and men’s associations, youth groups and camps, media, colleges and universities, etc.) have withered or become vestigial in most parts of Canada over the past 40-50 years. For many, their Catholic identity is only expressed socially at Sunday Mass, if that.
• Many people who are looking for spiritual meaning are attracted to ‘fundamentalist’ churches which offer theologically simple explanations to complex issues or to flexible ‘new age’ spiritualities that cater to contemporary lifestyles. Many of these offer dynamic community activities and liturgy that are more emotionally and socially engaging than the traditional style in many established Catholic parishes, and that provide a framework that ‘shelters’ their spiritual life.
• The Catholic Church’s stance on prominent issues such as married clergy, ordination of women, homosexuality, sexual abuse by clergy, birth control, etc. has alienated many practicing and non-practicing Catholics, as has the way in which it is seen as stifling discussion of these issues within the Church. 
• The Catholic priesthood continues to age and new vocations are still not at replacement levels. In some cases, newly ordained priests belong to communities that are more traditional and conservative than the older generation of priests; in other cases, dioceses are recruiting priests from countries with social, cultural and pastoral traditions that make it hard for them to meet the expectations of their parishes in Canada. For CMP, the shortage of priests implies the need to look continually at new approaches to pastoral services that will ease the demands on our pastor.

Conclusion

Canadian Martyrs is a great parish that means a lot and gives a lot to its members, and has much to offer to newcomers. We may be approaching a critical period in the life of the parish and it would be fitting to dedicate some effort to reflecting on who we are, where we are, and where we want to go. ‘Growing the parish’ in such a way as to expand its membership would enrich the community spiritually, address some of our institutional and material problems, and enable us to better carry out our evangelical responsibility of sharing Christ’s message and Christ’s love with others.

Suggestions

1. If there is an interest in Pastoral Council in pursuing this, it would be a good idea to bring together a ‘working group’ of 5-7 interested people who reflect different dimensions of the parish (age, background, gender, degree of involvement in parish life, etc.) to discuss the issues further and develop the questions to be explored. Ideally, most of these would not be on Parish Council so that Council would not have conflicting interests in discussing their report.

2. It would also be helpful for the working group to do a mapping of the current make-up of the parish, along the lines suggested above under ‘Preliminary Clarifications’. Some of this is no doubt already available in the parish records. 

3. Once the working group has prepared a report outlining the issues and presenting options,  a full discussion and clear guidance from the Pastor and the Pastoral Council would be required before proceeding any further, perhaps after a special half-day or full-day Council retreat with the working group and an independent animator or discussion leader. 

(P. Beemans, October 3, 2006)