Our parish is one of the few in the archdiocese to have a committee exclusively focused on the future. In the spring of 2008 Fr. Tom appointed a small group of men and women to spend as much time as possible looking ahead, at what our parish situation might be in five or ten years. The group has met monthly for the past 20 months and while we wish we could quicken the pace of our work, we feel we have made significant progress and we want to tell you what we have done and what our plans are for 2010.
There are six members of the planning group. We come from different experiences, in the church and in our personal and professional lives, and our opinions on many things vary. We are, however, in near-total agreement about the challenges that lie ahead: how to expand and enrich the spiritual health of our parish in the face of a precipitous decline in the number of priests and women religious.
Without a doubt few parishes in 2015 or 2020 will be functioning exactly as they are today. According to a recent report from the archdiocese, within five years there will be fewer priests available (266, at most) than parishes (287). Thus, big changes are coming and the more successful we are in getting ready for them the greater our chances of preserving all that is wonderful about St. John’s.
We have spent a lot of time, both individually and as a group, trying to learn more about what is happening in the church in America and how other dioceses (and parishes within them) have dealt with these major changes. The number of books, periodicals, websites and reports is growing constantly, as more and more individuals and groups in the church look to the future and search for ways of dealing with both the big, “strategic” issues and the particulars of managing the day-to-day affairs of parishes and tending to the spiritual needs of an ever-increasing population of Catholics.
While we have not become experts in any sense, we have become much more aware of the nature of the challenges and the available options. In the past year, we have met with several groups in our parish – the Pastoral Council, a joint meeting of Finance and Pastoral councils and parish staff and the people participating in the ARISE program. We would love to share what we have learned with more members of St. John’s, so please contact us to arrange either individual meetings or meetings with small groups, formal or informal. We are quite flexible and available! You can reach us by email (ppg@stjohnwellesley.org) or by phone (John Stewart – 617 969 0950).
We have been meeting recently with pastors of neighboring parishes in Wellesley and Newton. There are three goals to these sessions – to talk about the work of our planning group, to listen to their experiences in working with people who have come together from two or more parishes and to explore some of the broad issues associated with parish collaborations. We hope to expand these meetings to include informal groups of lay people and representatives from various parish organizations.
We have no broad or hidden agenda in undertaking these meetings. Our hope is simply to take advantage of our common interest in the future of the church, to enhance our understanding of all the possibilities for organizing our parishes and in a very basic sense to make ourselves totally receptive to move in whatever direction the Holy Spirit leads us.
In the next few weeks our group will expand. Fr. Tom will appoint several new members, enabling us to expand and accelerate our efforts and, most important, to begin to assist individuals and groups within the parish in looking specifically at the planning decisions that lie ahead.
The archdiocese of Boston was without a full-time pastoral planning person for several years. Happily, Father David Couturier was appointed director of the Office of Pastoral Planning almost a year ago and recently Joshua Phelps was added to the staff as associate director. They, along with people in every parish, have an enormous amount of work to do and for it to be successful a range of new and productive relationships must be created – between parishes and the archdiocese and among parishes in each of the 70 or so geographical collaboratives or groupings that have been designed for the 287 parishes. Our group has communicated with Father David and hopefully he will visit St. John’s in the next few months to tell all of us more about the strategic planning efforts his office is undertaking and of the tools and processes that will be available to parishes as we confront dramatic declines in the number of priests and the number of Catholics participating regularly in church activities.
Our prayer as we enter the new year and as we become more and more involved in this work is that all members of St. John’s will, first of all, consider very thoughtfully exactly how their lives as Catholics are strengthened by all that happens in our parish. In a very real sense, we depend on one another for both our individual spiritual vitality and our common strength as a worshiping community. To carry out the mission God has assigned to each of us we must be positive and enthusiastic in all we do, accepting the inevitable challenges to the “comfort levels” we as Catholics have always known and happily responding to calls for more and more lay people to assume responsibilities as leaders and workers in their parishes.
Finally, we are grateful for the confidence Fr. Tom and Sister Evelyn have expressed in us and we look forward to meeting with many of you in 2010, to share our common thoughts and to reflect on the amazing gifts God has given all of us as members of St. John the Evangelist Parish.
Rose Mary Donahue
Svea Fraser
Jerry Kehoe
Dan Kenslea
Mike Nilles
John Stewart
