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During the summer months we teach at various universities. This gives us a chance to share our experiences with others and to try out new ideas. To make the material more interesting we set up “virtual parishes.” From four to six people make up a parish staff, each with a particular role, including parish priest, principal, youth minister and the like. It is up to the group to settle on the size, make-up, location and type of their virtual parish, as well as its name. Examples from this past summer included Blessed John XXIII, All Saints, St. Laurence and Church of the Holy Spirit. For most of the groups, the parishes they formed were of medium size (1500 families), had an elementary school, a multi-cultural population, five Masses on the weekend and were located in a suburb close to a large city.
Getting Started The first step was to identify the purpose and mission of the parish. What would motivate people and give them a sense of direction? One parish, for instance, centered its efforts around the three key words of welcoming, celebrating and serving. Everything else flowed from this emphasis. Then they formed a structure that supported this focus. As they made choices about how it all fit together, we suggested that others might need to be included, such as the pastoral council or influential committees. This led to a discussion about leadership styles and decision making. The Pastor's Role It often happened that the person playing the role of the pastor ended up leading the discussions or setting the agenda. For instance, a woman who was a member of a parish staff in real life was given the role of pastor. She relished this opportunity, telling her fellow workers back home that she had finally achieved her life-long ambition. Then she discovered how thankless a job it was. Other members of the virtual staff began bucking her authority and were not holding up their end of the project, at least in her mind. In frustration she asked why. “Because it’s all your parish,” one person remarked. “It belongs to you, why should we work hard or try to break in, it’s your show.” This introduced the topic of conflict management, always a needed skill for those leading and ministering in parishes. The virtual pastor’s way of operating provided a real life experience that needed to be addressed. Applications Towards the end of the course, we gave a letter to each group that came from the (virtual) bishop. It stated that the parish would be closing soon and that the staff would be scattered. The immediate reaction was outrage. “What right does he have to shut us down? We should get our people down to the chancery to make our feelings known.” No longer were these just virtual parishes; they had a life of their own. We suggest that this same process might be used in an actual parish setting. Divide the staff or the pastoral council into two or three groups and let them decide what kind of virtual parish they want to be. Give each person a role to play and let them deal with concrete issues that often surface in parish life. Some of these might include how to cope with a non-cooperative group, how to connect with young adults or reach out to inactives, how to recruit volunteers or plan a stewardship process that gets people’s attention. For a one-hour session, let each “virtual parish” come up with solutions which are then presented to the entire group. Discuss not only what they came up with but how they operated together. Practicing how to be a parish, without the fear of making mistakes, provides insights into how to manage a parish for real.
Tom Sweetser, SJ & Peg Bishop, OSF |
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