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Parish ministry The following article originally appeared in Salt of the Earth. It is posted here for private use only. It may not be reprinted in whole or in part without the permission of Salt of the Earth magazine.   Four key concepts for promoting parish justice Kevin Clarke WHEN ALL IS SAID AND DONE, what does it take to make a parish-wide reality? Kevin Clarke checks with social-ministry leaders to learn the many secrets of their success. Education, opportunity, patience, and power may be the key words to keep in mind when considering how well America's parishes are responding to "Communities of Salt and Light," the U.S. bishops' statement on integrating the Catholic Church's social mission with all the elements of parish life. Education: because time after time parish and diocesan social-ministry directors say that it is educating ordinary Catholics in the pew—not only about contemporary social issues in the United States but also about their own church's social teaching and tradition—that remains perhaps their biggest challenge. Opportunity: because they believe this bishops' statement affords a unique and long-term opportunity to bring and keep social-justice issues before average Catholics in a way that may not have been attempted before—with consistency and with real church authority behind it. Patience: because as parish and diocesan social-ministry directors all over the country can tell you, nothing is going to happen particularly quickly. When these folks talk about transforming social mission into a parish commonplace, they speak in terms of years. Power: because it's power that is at the heart of what a lot of people fear when they hear words like "social justice" and "social mission" and because it is real power that this nation's 52 million Catholics possess but remain unwilling—or uncertain how—to use. Education CONTINUING EDUCATION FOR ADULT CATHOLICS appears to be a crying need within the church. Often adult converts to Catholicism who have endured the rigors of an RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults) program know more about the church's social teaching than do cradle Catholics. Peggy Prevoznik Heins, director of parish social ministry for the Diocese of Wilmington, Delaware, has authored a training program on "Salt and Light." She estimates that 80 to 90 percent of the people who begin her program have never even heard of Catholic social teaching. Susanna Pittman, a social-outreach director in Texarkana, Arkansas confronts the same problem in her parish as she attempts to coordinate direct-service programs. "The only Catholic education that most of [our parishioners] got was elementary school," Pittman says. "That's where it started and that's where it stopped. They've all learned: 'let the priests do it' or 'let the nuns do it,' and now they've even learned to accept me as a layperson doing it. "[To them], it's always somebody else's job—not all of our shared responsibility." IF PITTMAN'S WISHES COULD BE REALIZED, one of the primary "ministries" a parish would undertake wouldn't be a soup kitchen or a clothing depot. It would be a continuing-education program for grown-ups—a "CCD" for each parish's adults, where parishioners could learn about the church's teachings on specific social issues, their responsibilities as Catholic citizens, and the long tradition of papal encyclicals and pastoral letters on social issues like workers' rights, the dangers of a free-market economy, or the requirement of peace. And education efforts don't take a lot of foundation-laying before they begin to show concrete results. Just ask Paul Woolley, the director of social-justice resources for Catholic Charities USA in Oakland, California. Not long ago, a "social-justice component" was added for the first time to the diocese's deacon-training program. "Now that's beginning to bear fruit," Woolley says. In the past, he had to engage in no small degree of arm-twisting and proselytizing to get parish deacons interested in starting direct-service or social-concerns committees in their parishes. Now, he says, for the first time it is the deacons who are approaching him, eager for resources and advice on starting programs at their parishes. Action suggestion. Use every opportunity—homilies, bulletin inserts, pulpit announcements—to explain to parishioners what "Catholic social teaching" is; don't assume they know what you mean by that phrase. Consider this statement from the USCC's Communities of Salt and Light Parish Resource Manual (p. 12): "As Pope John Paul II has said, [Catholic social teaching] is 'real doctrine.' It needs to be shared consistently, comprehensively, creatively, and carefully in the educational ministries of every parish." Make sure that the parish library or reading rack contains copies of important social encyclicals and pastoral letters. As much as possible, provide a synopsis of the highlights, history, and innovations of each document—create your own, or obtain some other useful guide (such as the "Busy Christian's guide to Catholic social teaching" timeline). Action suggestion. In Salt and Light: A Leadership Training Manual, author Peggy Prevoznik Heins makes a crucial point: the cornerstone for all social-ministry education is prayer and worship. On the one hand, don't overlook the importance of good liturgy as a way of fostering in parishioners a sense of God's abiding love and care—and the sense that whatever the parish does, it does as a supportive community. But on the other hand, don't overload your liturgy with so many references to justice and peace that it sounds overly contrived. (To order Salt and Light: a Leadership Training Manual, call 302-655-9624. Or write: Office of Parish Social Ministry, Catholic Charities, P.O. Box 2610, Wilmington, DE 19805) Opportunity HOWEVER INDIVIDUAL CATHOLICS MAY RESPOND to some elements of the "Salt and Light" message, the document does offer parish social-justice leaders a truly unique opportunity to put their religion where their rhetoric is. Rich Fowler is the director of diocesan relations for the U.S. Catholic Conference's Department of Social Development and World Peace. "I used to work in isolation. I really didn't see a chance to integrate [the church's social mission] into what everyone else was doing at the parish until 'Salt and Light' came along. "I see its approach now as a different way and a better way to do our work. "['Salt and Light'] is contributing to a conversion of the people's hearts and minds about what it means to be a follower of Jesus—that it does mean more than just going to Mass." LIKE DIOCESAN DIRECTORS ALL OVER the country, Woolley used "Salt and Light" as a workshop focus at a recent gathering of Oakland's peace-and-justice committee members. "It's a great chance, a teaching moment." Social-concerns committees are using the document as a way to introduce current USCC initiatives—like its legislative advocacy effort on welfare reform—to the wider parish, and many dioceses are seizing on "Salt and Light" as an opportunity to reevaluate the way they go about their business. Before Sister Leona Sullivan, H.V.M. is finished, she hopes to have achieved a complete overhaul of her Saginaw, Michigan diocesan-wide parish network. Sullivan, director of the diocese's Office of Christian Service, is interested in "putting a little consistency" into the diocese's methodology for providing direct service while at the same time improving the parish's lines of communication—"helping people have a scope of what can be. "That turns on lights, because sometimes parishes haven't even dreamed they can do more than the coffee-and-donut and food-pantry thing." Sullivan says, "A lot of parishes do some things, but there isn't a lot of consciousness of what they do. Everybody develops their own patterns, and social justice is already all over the board, so it's already hard for people to explain to each other what they are doing—there's no common language. "We're trying to set up some common frames of thinking, applying methods and tracking, so the whole system can learn from each other." TO THAT END SULLIVAN PLANS TO ESTABLISH an explicit formula that each parish can use to assess local needs and how well it meets those needs. She hopes as a result to better track what the true needs of the Saginaw community are, not what some administrator or advocate perceives are the needs. "We're interested in helping parishes receive people who come to them for help and do that in a way that gives respect to and empowers those people. "The typical thing is to give somebody something and they're gone." Sullivan hopes that her new structure, which would include a means of tracking people to find out what happens to them after they come to a parish, helps parishes begin to develop relationships with people rather than function as handout stations. Sullivan also plans to rewrite the USCC "Salt and Light" manual in a way that connects the issues it raises with local concerns and local resources, turning each parish into a referral service on diocesan and government-assistance services. Action suggestion. One of the fringe benefits of effective social ministry is parish evangelization and revitalization. Catholics who haven't been to Mass in years might well be coaxed back once they realize that their church cares as much about proposals for welfare reform as it does about holy water. Your parish can make that point loud and clear by sponsoring community forums on important social issues; publicize them throughout the larger community via newspaper ads, posters, and leaflets. Action suggestion. Another fringe benefit of effective social ministry is helping parishioners act with a clear conscience. Instead of defining social ministry solely as a series of volunteer activities that parishioners must fit (often unsuccessfully) into their busy schedules, point out ways that people can act justly in their daily lives—within their families, on the job, etc. Each week, print three or four suggestions in the parish bulletin, tying them to prominent themes from that weekend's liturgy.  Patience 'IT'S SLOW," SAYS PAUL WOOLLEY about the work of getting parishes to accept direct-service or advocacy work as a part of their congregational responsibilities. "We really struggle with them....It's not something they do spontaneously." "My timeline and reality are different," says Prevoznik Heins, reflecting on the concrete impact of her training on its participants. "What I'm discovering is that this takes a lot longer than I would have thought. [But] I think it all starts with a personal conversion, and I do see that happening." One way Susanna Pittman gets that personal conversion happening is by taking a slightly different semantic tack with her parishioners. She has no "volunteers," per se, but encourages everyone to see their extracurricular parish efforts as part of a "ministry" of service. "There's a difference between being a volunteer or a minister," says Pittman. "Volunteers come in when they want—when it's convenient to them—and do what they want, then they want you to thank them for spending their time. "Ministry is answering a call to serve a need; it's not supposed to be easy or convenient." Even though accepting a ministry sounds harder than simply volunteering, it is what her parishioners respond to best. PART TWO OF HER PLAN TO KEEP PEOPLE COMING in involves keeping a sharp eye out for a kind of compassion fatigue that kicks in with most volunteers. How much easier it would be if the poor were always cheerful, grateful, demonstrative, spouting folk wisdom and the spiritual insights afforded them by their experience. How much easier it would be if all the members of a middle-class parish could really empathize with the soul-numbing experience of poverty and hunger because they all had been there once themselves. Many may come to a shelter or other direct service full of energy and compassion. But an observer can watch that drain out of some volunteers as they see the same —sometimes hostile—faces return time after time to the church for help. "That is usually the point where I start to lose them unless I can get them to see that this is a ministry and that these people are still children of God and that we're still responsible to serve them," Pittman says. "The truth is for most people, if something isn't bothering them, why should they want to hear about it? Most of my [most dependable] volunteers have been down themselves and know how hard it is." Action suggestion. From the Communities of Salt and Light Parish Resource Manual: "Offer reflection sessions for volunteers in social ministries." Help them to reflect on their ministry in light of Catholic social teaching, the sustaining role of their faith, the support they get from other ministers. Action suggestion. Diminish the disappointment that comes from volunteer burnout and high volunteer turnover. Accept burnout and turnover as givens, and then brainstorm ways to keep them to a minimum. Include volunteers in the brainstorming. Explore preventative measures: building in opportunities for fun, creating long- and short-term volunteer opportunities, creating a buddy system, building in ample opportunities for prayer, emphasizing the need to continually train new leaders, etc. Power POWER IS A TRICKY CONCEPT IN THESE TIMES, "a loaded word," says Rich Fowler. But 52 million American Catholics as consumers, as voters, in their workplaces, and in their positions of authority in state and federal legislative offices must and do have a lot of power. If they used it, they might understand it better. Speaking of the small works he sees and the good people he meets at California parishes, Woolley notes: "Most of them tend to operate out of [an understanding that they're] doing projects on their own. [As a result,] many of them don't have a sense of their own power." "Power is very scary to some people, and there is resistance," says Peggy Prevoznik Heins. She has seen how what may be called the subtext of the "Salt and Light" document—the undercurrent that pulls people into an outright critique of contemporary American life—has troubled many of the people who attend her training sessions. And so Heins calls on scripture passages when she can to help defuse that anxiety about power. "Most people leave every session a little bit overwhelmed by the whole concept of building power. It makes it easier when they can see that that is just what Jesus was doing—building power. "But our sense of power is so corrupted it's hard to translate Jesus' sense of power through how we understand power—the power of the government or the corporation or the big man on top. "Our idea of power is power over people; Jesus' is power with people. People believe that, but it's hard for them to understand and translate into reality.... The crucial message is that our faith is social and that it is through our work and our suffering that we come to know God," says Prevoznik Heins. "What we really want to do is build a relationship with God, but we do that by working together." RICH FOWLER IS NOT SO SURE that it is misgivings about power and authority that prevent a lot of Catholics from taking a harder look at what their faith says about American political and social life. He does believe that "Salt and Light" has something to say about power, though. "It is all about empowering church teaching that life is precious and protecting the lives of our brothers and sisters. You can't do that without power." Those 52 million American Catholics should be able to wield a great deal of power, Fowler suggests. "If we don't try to exercise that power in a positive way, then we're not really being faithful to our responsibility for that power. All it amounts to is doing what we say we believe." And the USCC plans to teach people how to do what they say they believe. Over the next two years, Fowler's office will conduct a series of regional meetings throughout the country—eight to ten over the next two years—to train diocesan and parish leaders in the document and strategies for implementing its goals. Action suggestion. In announcing to parishioners opportunities to respond to various social issues, be sure to emphasize the sheer power of numbers. Share with them statistics about the number of voting Catholics in the U.S. and the ratio of Catholics to the general population. Share various "parables of power," such as the one about the snowflake that considered itself insignificant and inconsequential until, one day, a wise dove pointed out that all snowflakes held tremendous power. One snowflake may be capable of little; thousands of snowflakes, acting together, can break a bough off a tree. And you never know: you might be the millionth snowflake that finally creates enough critical mass. Action suggestion. Use language, symbols, and scripture references to remind parishioners about the power of God. In his book Praying the Kingdom: Towards a Political Spirituality, Charles Elliott reminds Christians of two dangerous extremes: (1) Putting the responsibilities of power solely on human beings, which can lead to something Elliott calls hyperactivism. "As long as we imagine that the world can be changed by our activities, our good works, our energy, we substitute our effort for the power of God. That is as ineffective as it is blasphemous. 'For thine is the kingdom, the power...'" We are powerful, Elliott says, only insofar as "we become penetrable by the Spirit of God." (2) Forgetting about God entirely. "If we only half-believe that the power of God can change us, it is hardly surprising that we don't believe at all that it can change the politics of the world. And if we don't believe that, we are forced back either to total despair or to fatalism." FOWLER IS CONFIDENT THAT "SALT AND LIGHT" won't succumb to the fate of other bishops' initiatives, which seemed to have the staying power of a year or so before sinking just out of sight—and mind. He reports that the two-year-old document is being used in 25 dioceses nationwide and believes it has the potential to influence parish life for years to come. And "Salt and Light" will need that kind of staying power, because it will probably take that long before the initiative begins to bear its sweetest fruit. But what might that fruit look like? How might it taste? Fowler can't say. There are no proper gauges for success in this work. Success in some parishes might mean turning a moribund social-justice committee back into a vibrant ministry. In others it might mean turning the entire parish into sign-waving peace activists. At another it may simply mean awakening in the greater parish body an understanding that their church expects more of them and that there are pressing issues of the time that they are called to address. "I really do believe that we are all called by our Lord to be there for the poor and the vulnerable," says Fowler. "But the call is not the same for all of us. For some people it could mean anything from volunteering at their parish soup kitchen, to getting involved with a legislative network, to just being a damn good mom." A successful Salt and Light community, he adds, might just be "a parish really beginning to know and understand that just being there for one's brothers and sisters in need is a constitutive part of being a parish and that if we're not doing that, then we're really not doing what we've been called to do." To order the "Communities of Salt and Light" document ($1.95) or the Communities of Salt and Light Parish Resource Manual ($5.95), call the United States Catholic Conference at 1-800-235-USCC.—END © 1997 by Claretian Publications Return to Main | Return to Archive Index | Parish ministry index