By Mark F. Fischer
Published as “‘Sounding’ Out the Parish,” Today’s Parish 35:6 (Oct. 2003): 16-19.
Some Catholics feel that parish pastoral councils are more trouble than they
are worth. But the following story illustrates the kind of problem that a
pastoral council can help pastors avoid.
From the time that St. Stephen’s opened its new church in 1995, parishioners
have complained about the public address system. Some said that is difficult
to hear the presider, lectors, and musicians. A few added that the existing
loudspeakers were placed too high, and reverberation creates too many echoes.
In the year 2000, when Father Seamus O’Sullivan became pastor of St.
Stephen’s (the names have been changed), he resolved to do something
to improve it.
Father O’Sullivan hired an acoustical engineer to undertake a study.
The engineer found that the new church has a reverberation time of three seconds.
This delay makes it difficult to understand the spoken word. The engineer
proposed changes that would cut the reverberation time in half. He estimated
the cost of these improvements at $150,000.
In addition to consulting an acoustical engineer, Father O’Sullivan
also consulted his staff. Two of the newest staff members, the directors of
liturgy and of music, were especially enthusiastic. They believed that the
improvements would enhance the Sunday liturgies. New microphones, amplifiers,
and loudspeakers, they said, would better project the voices of cantors and
lectors.
After consulting the engineer and his staff, Father O’Sullivan held
two open parish meetings to discuss the problem. Unfortunately, the meetings
were poorly advertized and poorly attended. At the meetings, the engineer
presented his design to a combined 125 people. The meetings confirmed what
Father O’Sullivan already knew – namely, that some people were
dissatisfied with the PA system. So the pastor gave the green light to the
acoustical engineer. He installed new loudspeakers, amplifiers, and microphones.
New seat cushions dampened the reverb.
The improvements enhanced the ability of parishioners to hear both the spoken
word and liturgical music. But they did not stifle complaints. Parishioners
complained that the pastor listened more to his staff than to them. They complained
that $150,000 was too much to spend on acoustical improvements to a brand-new
church. They complained that the parish had more important things to spend
its money on than seat cushions and electronics. Father O’Sullivan had
thought he was responding to the needs of people. But parishioners remained
dissatisfied. He had improved the sound system but had not sounded them out.
In Search of a Mission
Apart from the acoustic problem, Father O’Sullivan seemingly had inherited
an ideal situation. When he took over in the year 2000, St. Stephen’s
was a growing parish with about 1500 families. The founding pastor, Msgr.
Declan Carroll, had established St. Stephen in 1988. He had overseen construction
of the new church and, by his departure in 2000, had paid off the $5 million
mortgage. When Father O’Sullivan arrived, his main duty was to maintain
the parish’s high morale and to build upon the seemingly firm foundation
laid by Msgr. Carroll, his predecessor.
The success of the founding pastor, Msgr. Carroll, was due to his charismatic
personality and commitment to the dream of building a new parish. Parishioners
had rallied to his winning style. During the early years of the parish, while
its people rented another church building, they were generous with their contributions.
When the new church opened in 1995, there was a procession through the town
and a festive celebration. The people of St. Stephen had pride of ownership
in their new church.
Msgr. Carroll, for all his vision and personality, was not good at developing
consultative structures in the parish. To be sure, there was a pastoral council
and finance council. They did exist. But they met infrequently, their members
were pastoral appointees (not elected by parishioners), and half of them were
parish employees. They were not essential to defining the parish’s vision.
That vision was clearly articulated by the founding pastor himself. Msgr.
Carroll confidently promoted the idea of a new church building for his new
parish family. And while he was pastor, this vision sufficed. With the opening
of the new church building, Msgr. Carroll brought the vision to completion.
When Father O’Sullivan took over as pastor from Msgr. Carroll, he found
a parish with high morale but an uncertain sense of its future. It had paid
off its debt on the new church, but was unsure about where to channel the
considerable energies of its parishioners. It had to make a transition. It
was no longer a new parish with a church to build. It was an established parish
in search of a mission.
The Expertise of the Parish Staff
As a new pastor, Father O’Sullivan’s first goal was to ensure
that the parish’s liturgy continued to be of high quality. St. Stephen
parish had a tradition of vibrant liturgy with good music. Father O’Sullivan
believed that the best way to ensure the continuity of this tradition was
to develop the parish staff. So with the high parish income – now that
the mortgage was paid – he hired new staff members. These included a
full-time liturgy director, a full-time music director, and a full-time business
manager. They were trained professionals. But they were new to the parish,
and took over many duties formerly done by parish volunteers.
Father O’Sullivan felt that the people of St. Stephen’s –
affluent, well-educated, and dedicated – would appreciate the new professionals
on the parish staff. The professionals would win the people’s loyalty,
he believed, and would maintain and even improve the quality of the liturgy.
Father O’Sullivan wanted to promote lay participation and collaboration.
He felt that, by hiring competent professionals and giving them scope for
innovation, he was being a collaborative pastor.
In the eyes of many parishioners, however, the new staff members were cool
and distant professionals. They were new to the parish and did not know its
people. By taking over many jobs formerly done by parish volunteers, the professionals
seemed to imply that volunteer efforts were no longer as necessary and were
not up to par. Veteran volunteers dropped out and fewer new people offered
their services. Some parishioners moved to the other parish in the city. The
level of weekly contributions dropped. Parishioners had begun to lose their
pride of ownership.
As Father O’Sullivan noticed the drop in attendance and collections,
he turned to his parish staff. He trusted them. After all, he was still new
to the parish. He was not sure which parishioners to listen to. But he had
hired the staff members and they were loyal to him. They gave him the best
advice they could. They told him that he was able to reach more parishioners
through the Sunday liturgy than through any other means of communication.
So he should invest parish resources in making the liturgy the best experience
possible. Father O’Sullivan took their advice and that of the professional
sound engineer. He upgraded the public address system.
This upgrade, however, did not reverse the decline in attendance and the drop
in weekly collections. Father O’Sullivan was frustrated. He had focused
on the liturgy, the moment during the week that he reaches the majority of
his parishioners. He had done everything he could to form a parish staff with
liturgical expertise. He thought that, with vibrant liturgies, he could touch
parishioners and make Christ especially present in their lives. By their frequent
complaints, however, and by voting with their feet and their wallets, parishioners
indicated widespread dissatisfaction.
Analysis of the Problem
A new publication sheds light on Father O’Sullivan’s situation.
Two chapters in The Parish Management Handbook (Twenty-Third Publications
- Bayard, 2003), edited by Charles E. Zech, focus specifically on parish vitality
and the importance of information to pastors in large parishes.
One chapter addresses the question of the importance of the liturgy. Liturgical
quality and style “are not the best indicators of overall vitality”
in the parish, writes Michael Cieslak. Cieslak (Director of Planning for the
Diocese of Rockford, Illinois) analyzed 55,000 questionnaires administered
to diocesan parishioners in 1997. His findings contradict the conventional
wisdom that the quality of the liturgy is the best indicator of parish vitality.
“That honor is reserved for the variables that measure leadership,”
he writes (p. 130), “especially the one measuring encouragement for
the laity to become involved.” In vital parishes, pastors and staffs
encourage people to participate. Participation is even more important than
a well-executed liturgy.
Cieslak’s chapter suggests that Father O’Sullivan was wrong to
think that hiring a new Director of Liturgy and a new Director of Music would
be the best way to maintain high morale at St. Stephen’s. It was not
enough to put competent professionals in charge of liturgical planning and
coordination. Such professionalism can displace volunteers. More important
is to encourage lay people to become involved in parish ministry, including
liturgical ministries.
Another chapter of the Parish Management Handbook relevant to Father O’Sullivan’s
situation was written by Francis Kelly Scheets. Entitled “Parish Information
Systems,” the chapter emphasizes the importance to pastors of accurate
knowledge about the parish. Scheets, a Crosier priest and researcher, reports
that 71% of all US Catholics attend Mass in parishes with more than 3000 Catholics
and 1200 households. He argues that, the bigger the parish, the more difficult
it is for parish leaders to know their people. In such parishes, regular face-to-face
meetings between pastors and parishioners are not always possible and communication
solely via announcements and parish bulletins is not adequate.
“Accountability for decisions,” wrote Scheets (p. 201), “rests with the parish council and implementation with parish staff.” In large parishes, where most American Catholics worship, the pastoral council helps the pastor make good decisions, which are then carried out by his staff.
Good decisions, Scheets argues, depend upon good information. By investigating
and reflecting on pastoral matters and recommending conclusions to the pastor,
councils help a parish to judge how well it is accomplishing its mission.
Scheets identifies the kinds of questions that pastors and councils ought
to ask (p. 204), illustrates how these questions can promote a sense of accountability
(p. 206), and suggests four ways to use accurate data for parish management
(p. 212). He shows that pastoral planning councils help parishes see whether
they are succeeding.
The chapter by Scheets suggests that Father O’Sullivan overlooked important
information that his pastoral council could have gathered for him. Pastoral
councils fulfil their role best, according to Scheets, when they help pastors
judge how well the parish is accomplishing its mission. At St. Stephen Church,
Father O’Sullivan’s council could have studied (1) how well the
musical and liturgical ministries were doing, (2) who was leaving the parish
and why, and (3) the reasons for diminished Sunday collections. If council
members had investigated these questions in an objective way, they would have
discovered that newly-hired staff members were indirectly discouraging volunteerism
and that ordinary parishioners were losing the sense that the parish belonged
to them. But Father O’Sullivan never asked the council to look into
these matters.
How to Sound Out the Parish
Recently, however, Father O’Sullivan has taken a renewed interest in
his pastoral council. Recall that he had inherited the council appointed by
Msgr. Carroll, half of whose members were parish staffers. Father O’Sullivan
met irregularly with them during his first years as a pastor, but had no long-range
plan for the council. At meetings he would update the members about parish
events and ask for their reactions, but did not give them explicit directions.
He used to think that the council should generate its own agenda. He used
to say, “If I wanted something done, I would ask my staff to do it.”
Canon 536 states, however, that pastors consult councils. They are not autonomous
boards that work independently of pastors. Rather, pastors consult them with
a specific purpose. And official church documents teach that pastoral councils
should be representative. They do not represent parishioners like congressmen
represent districts, but they represent by making present the wisdom of the
parish community. So Father O’Sullivan is now thinking about a renewal
of his council by holding open parish elections.
He does not need to have staff members on the pastoral council, he came to
realize, because he meets with his staff regularly during the week. Undoubtedly
he wants to avoid hurting the feelings of staff members who have been on the
council in the past. But if he seeks from his council accurate information
about how the parish is doing – including measurable information about
parish programs – he needs members who will be objective.
The task he has in mind for his renewed council is a study of parish hospitality.
He wants to know what will attract new parishioners and win back the disaffected.
In the past, St. Stephen’s gained adherents by involving people in the
establishment of a new parish. The founding pastor, Msgr. Carroll, tirelessly
proclaimed the construction of a family church in which all would find their
spiritual home. But now that the church has been built and paid for, that
vision no longer suffices. The prospect of further building plans (e.g., of
a parish center or parochial school) so far has failed to ignite popular enthusiasm.
St. Stephen’s has yet to find its new mission. Father O’Sullivan
hopes that a renewed pastoral council, by studying how to make the parish
more hospitable, can discover new ways to make St. Stephen a spiritual home
for its people.
In order to attract new councillors, Father O’Sullivan is planning to
hold three open parish meetings in the fall. He has announced that the theme
of the meetings is “rediscovering our true home.” Through these
meetings, he plans to educate parishioners about the reinvigorated role he
foresees for the pastoral council. Its new role is to help investigate how
St. Stephen’s has been a spiritual home for parishioners and how to
make it even more “homey.”
Participants will be asked to describe the indicators of parish vitality and
propose ways by which future council members can define and measure that vitality.
Through these meetings, parisioners will be able to judge who among them would
make suitable council members. Finally, at the last of the three meetings,
participants will be asked to elect councillors from among their number. In
that way, Father O’Sullivan will not only gain a renewed council. He
will have truly sounded out the parish.
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