Having a faith conversation with old and new friends is as easy as setting the table.
FAITH FEEDS GUIDE PARISHES AT WORK
Frequently Asked Questions 4 Ready to Get Started 5 Conversation Starters 6 • Untying Wet Knots by Bill Barmen 7 Conversation Starters 9 • Communities of Practice by Jane Regan 10 Conversation Starters 14 • Gathering Prayer 15
The FAITH FEEDS program is designed for individuals who are hungry for opportunities to talk about their faith with others who share it. Participants gather over coffee or a potluck lunch or dinner, and a host facilitates conversation using the C21 Center’s biannual magazine, C21 Resources.
The FAITH FEEDS GUIDE offers easy, step-by-step instructions for planning, as well as materials to guide the conversation. It’s as simple as deciding to host the gathering wherever your community is found and spreading the word.
All selected articles have been taken from material produced by the C21 Center.
The C21 Center Presents
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Who should host a FAITH FEEDS?
Anyone who has a heart for facilitating conversations about faith is perfect to host a FAITH FEEDS.
Where do I host a FAITH FEEDS?
You can host a FAITH FEEDS in-person or virtually through video conference software. FAITH FEEDS conversations are meant for small groups of 10-12 people.
What is the host’s commitment?
The host is responsible for coordinating meeting times, sending out materials and video conference links, and facilitating conversation during the FAITH FEEDS.
What is the guest’s commitment?
Guests are asked to read the articles that will be discussed and be open to faith-filled conversation.
Still have more questions?
No problem! Email karen.kiefer@bc.edu and we’ll help you get set up.
READY TO GET STARTED?
STEP ONE
Decide to host a FAITH FEEDS. Coordinate a date, time, location, and guest list. An hour is enough time to allocate for the virtual or in-person gathering.
STEP TWO
Interested participants are asked to RSVP directly to you, the host. Once you have your list of attendees, confirm with everyone via email. That would be the appropriate time to ask in-person guests to commit to bringing a potluck dish or drink to the gathering. For virtual FAITH FEEDS, send out your video conference link.
STEP THREE
Review the selected articles from your FAITH FEEDS Guide and the questions that will serve as a starter for your FAITH FEEDS discussion. Hosts should send their guests a link to the guide, which can be found on bc.edu/FAITHFEEDS.
STEP FOUR
Send out a confirmation email a week before the FAITH FEEDS gathering. Hosts should arrive early for in-person or virtual set up. Begin with the Gathering Prayer found on the last page of this guide. Hosts can open the disussion by using the suggested questions. The conversation should grow organically from there. Enjoy this gathering of new friends, knowing the Lord is with YOU!
STEP FIVE
Make plans for another FAITH FEEDS. We would love to hear about your FAITH FEEDS experience. You can find contact information on the last page of this guide.
CONVERSATION STARTERS
Here are two articles to guide your FAITH FEEDS conversation. We suggest that you select one that will work best for your group, and if time permits, add in a second. In addition to the original article, you will find a relevant quotation, summary, and suggested questions for discussion. We offer these as tools for your use, but feel free to go where the Holy Spirit leads. Conversations should respect and ensure confidentiality between participants.
This guide’s theme is: Parishes at Work
UNTYING WET KNOTS
By Bill Barmen
From C21 Resources Spring/Summer 2020
A wet knot on a pair of sneakers is hard to untie— even harder when they’re on your feet. As the pastor of a multigenerational, multicultural, and multilingual parish, I at times feel responsible for untying a lot of wet knots.
Farm workers from Central Mexico founded the parish where I serve, La Purisima Church in Orange, California, in 1923. They gathered under a pepper tree for Mass until they saved enough money for a wooden mission church. The parish built a new church in 1958 and another in 2005. Normally new construction signals a healthy community coming together. However, the Hispanic community came to believe that the parish was discriminating against their community and started picketing on the sidewalk before the new church opened in 2005. Protests continued through 2014.
I did not serve at the parish during most of its history and can comment only on the repercussions. I don’t believe enough people considered the effect the new large worship space, driven by donations from mostly white parishioners, could have on others. The
Mass schedule offered 10 liturgies in English, one in Vietnamese, and one in Spanish. This created a sense of loss and alienation for the Latino community, who founded the church and yet felt they were not welcome. The new church, they felt, neglected to value them as agents of their own pastoral needs or religious practices. Eventually, their alienation and disempowerment found expression in picketing, which began before construction was completed and lasted for almost a decade.
My first pastoral decision was to un-employ the armed guard hired to “keep the peace.” I also began the typical task of putting names to faces and meeting my staff, who shared in the task of ministering to this diverse community of 4,000 parishioners. My next decision was to declare a pastoral amnesty and a new beginning for everyone in the parish. Anyone seeking the Lord would be welcome. Access to parish facilities and involvement in Masses was open to all.
Three weeks later, just as I thought things were settling down, 30 families picketing in front of the church surprised me. Armed with a thermos of coffee, some paper cups, and a trembling heart, I headed out to the sidewalk. Surprised and startled, they eventual-
ly took me up on the coffee, but hesitated on my offer to speak with them in my office regarding their concerns. Eventually my pastoral mantra became, “You can serve at the altar or continue protesting in the street; you are free to choose one or the other.”
I spent the next three years trying to figure out how the Hispanic community could become so alienated and feel completely like outsiders in their own parish. Along the way, I puzzled over how to achieve greater harmony and collaboration between the Spanish-, English-, and Vietnamese-speaking communities. It became obvious early on that each language community and ministry were living comfortably in their own silos. Parallel and tangential community life is easier to manage in some ways.
The first step to integrate a parish and create a fair distribution of resources is to have the desire for unity in less than a superficial manner. I proceeded to make some changes that, while small, ended up having a huge influence on the culture of the parish.
The first morning I arrived I was struck by the number of signs on the plaza: nine in total. Affixed to the church, in two languages, were the words “No Loitering” and “Restrooms are not for public use.” How odd to tell people they can’t congregate in the parish’s plaza. And if people do gather, don’t expect them to use the restrooms. Doesn’t that already limit our options for hospitality? I also noted small metal signs in various planters around the parking lot with an arrow pointing toward the parish office. Besides being too small to be useful, these were only in English. We created a new mantra: If it’s worth announcing, it’s worth announcing in all three of our languages.
Our community is 75 percent working-class Mexican Americans, 5 percent elderly Vietnamese immigrants, and the remainder are white English-speaking Americans of various origins. While I felt the Mass schedule to be one of the most egregious examples of injustice in the parish, I delayed changing it in the hope that I could bring the white English-speaking community into a greater awareness of the inequality and stir in them a desire to redress this wrong. That was not to be.
I took various polls while also offering multiple options until a consensus was reached—four Masses in
English, four in Spanish, and two in Vietnamese each week. While many Spanish-speaking parishioners will attend daily liturgy in English, the English-speaking crowd voted with their feet and left for a nearby parish. Even when we projected the scriptures in the opposite language on large screens and offered multilingual prayers of the faithful, many were uncomfortable and unwilling to remain part of the parish family.
Attendance by the English-language community may be down, but participation at the Vietnameseand Spanish-speaking Masses has increased. One of the great examples of leadership came from Deacon Tony Bube, who, at the age of 94, learned his parts in Spanish and is now a fixture at the 6:30 a.m. Spanish liturgies.
I discovered that the group of volunteers who lock and unlock the parish did not include a single Spanish-speaking person. Today, more than half the team speaks Spanish. Closing time for parish meetings is no longer an inflexible 9 p.m. curfew. Each ministry is trusted and receives a key simply by asking for it.
If sacraments are spiritual signs that reveal an inner truth and beauty, then our physical appearance should also reveal our community’s spiritual roots. To an immigrant community, many of whom are undocumented, a church fence, a locked playground, or an English-only room-use form is intimidating. They don’t say, “Come to me who are weary and burdened and I will refresh you.” If our sense of order and rules prioritizes legalism before welcome, redemption, and forgiveness, then we fail as a community of Jesus.
I am pained by those who have withdrawn from the parish. But those who have stayed and those who are returning hearten me. I believe we are getting stronger in our unity and shared life and mission. I love the challenge to engage this parish dynamically and justly and in a culturally sensitive manner. Today at La Purisima we are mostly at peace and the poor are always welcomed, as I continue to untie a motley assortment of wet pastoral knots.
Fr. Bill Barman has been the pastor of La Purisima Church in Orange, California, since 2013. He has worked in parish ministry since his ordination in 1981.
UNTYING WET KNOTS
“The first step to integrate a parish and create a fair distribution of resources is to have the desire for unity in less than a superfiial manner.”
—Fr. Paul Barman
Summary
In this essay, Father Bill Barman, pastor of a multilingual and multiethnic parish in California, chronicles the challenges he faced and success he found when it came to unifying his parish community. He offers hopeful, practical suggestions for anyone with a similar task and mission.
Questions for Conversation
1. Fr. Barmen says the first step to integrate a parish and create a fair distribution of resources is to have the desire for unity--what are some of the ways your parish embraces diversity and inclusion?
2. What are some ideas the Church can put into practice to engage minority communities?
3. What are some of the ways your parish listens to its laity (feedback)? What are some ways parishes can collect feedback from their community?
COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE
By Jane Regan
From C21 Resources Spring/Summer 2020
Let me tell you about three interesting gatherings of people.
Mike’s Muffins—A few years’ back, a parish liturgist named Mike had an idea: the second Tuesday of the month, a group of parish liturgists meet for about an hour and a half at a local diner for conversation and coffee. The routine is generally the same: some time of checkin, followed by conversation about a book or document on liturgy they read over the course of the month, and a discussion about its implications for their own parishes. At the end, they name new prayer requests and share updates on older ones. Ann, one of the members of the group, said it well: “This is one commitment a month that I take seriously. It is important to me as a liturgist and as a person of faith.”
Care for the Caregivers: Twice a month, 8 to 10 people gather in the church hall after the morning Mass. Each person is responsible for the care of some loved one—a parent, spouse, sibling, or friend. Most of them are caring for someone at home; several have loved ones in a nursing home or hospice. The meetings are organized and facilitated by the parish nurse. They begin with coffee and socializing,
followed by a reflective experience of prayer. This is followed by a speaker—sometimes live, sometimes on video—and then some time for conversation and a closing prayer. Some people come regularly, others come for a few sessions; there is a core consistent group of about 6 who are there every time. For participants, this is an important part of their own self-care.
Faithful Finance Committee: The Finance Committee of St. Odo the Good meets each month to provide guidance to the pastor on the budget, expenditures, and stewardship.They used to have meetings that lasted exactly an hour, at which time everyone left fairly quickly. Now the meeting lasts exactly one hour and 15 minutes, at which time many people stay around to chat and check in. The change happened gradually. First, the pastoral staff had decided a couple years back to recommend that each parish committee spend the beginning of each meeting in prayer and faith sharing. As people became more comfortable with this activity, the amount of time that the members of the Finance Committee spent reflecting on the Gospel or talking about how they live their faith each day expanded. And relationships were built. So they added 15 minutes to the meeting and enjoy one another’s com-
pany more.
Three different groups, with varying reasons for gathering, ways of relating, and patterns of meeting. Yet they share three things in common. First, each group has its own reason for gathering, an enterprise or set of goals that the members all share. Secondly, the members of each group engage with one another in a way that supports their reason for gathering, marked by mutual respect and a willingness to engage in the common enterprise. Thirdly, each group interacts and expresses itself through established patterns of behavior, styles of conversation, vocabulary, and resources.
Each of them, I would propose, is an example of a community of practice (CoP), defined as “a sustained gathering of people whose interactions are marked by mutual engagement, shared enterprise, and common repertoire, and where the collective learning involved in surviving/thriving as a community leads to practices that enhance group identity and further group goals” (Regan). This concept provides an important resource for rethinking the life and vitality of our parishes.
Within a moderate-sized parish there are a number of contexts in which adults gather, such as: the parish council, youth ministry team, catechetical team, Bible study group, social justice committee, finance committee, or pastoral staff. Each of these groups has the potential to be an effective CoP if they are intentional about their shared enterprise, mutual engagement, and common repertoire. As communities of practice, these committees and working groups have the potential to enliven the faith of the members and further the parish’s mission.
SITUATED LEARNING
Before looking a bit more closely at this, let me make a comment about how we learn the important things of life. Do you know how to make lasagna? Play bridge? Use a new software program? Do you understand hockey? Have you come to recognize the complexity and challenges of finding a career? Being a parent? Caring for an elderly relative? Living with teenagers? All of those things we learn primarily through “situated learning,” or learning that takes place in the doing of an activity, in real-life situations (Lave and Wenger).
The same thing is true of faith. We learn what it means to live our Christian faith in real-life situations. I learned what it meant to parent my daughters as a Christian by watching, being with, and talking to other Christians as they parented their own kids. While adult education, Bible studies, and homilies are helpful, we learn best how to live our faith by being with others who are doing the same; that is, by being in communities of people who share our commitment to live lives that are marked by the values and beliefs of faith—communities of practice.
PARISH AS COMMUNITY OF COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE
While we speak of the parish as a community of faith, it might be more appropriate to say that it is a community of communities. I have heard people say, “I had been a member of St. Odo the Good for several years, but I came to feel like I was really a part of the parish when I became involved with the choir.” Or, “A big change in my faith came when my kids started faith formation and I volunteered to be a catechist’s aide. Then I felt like I wasn’t just a member of the parish, but that I really belonged.” While the whole parish has the shared enterprise to evangelize by putting faith into action, it does this and expresses it most effectively in smaller CoPs. At St. Odo the Good, catechists prepare on their own, gather their resources, teach their class, clean up their things, and leave.
At St. Odo the Great, catechists meet every six weeks in smaller groups based on the peer groups they teach. They pray, share experiences, review the plans for the next six weeks, and socialize. It is the opportunity for mutual engagement; the shared enterprise in attended to; and the common repertoire is learned and enacted. At St. Odo the Great, catechists are invited into a CoP through which they gain the competencies to teach their peer group and be a witness for the Gospel in their lives. In this way, they further the shared enterprise of the catechists and the parish.
CoPs are also communities in which “the collective learning involved in surviving/thriving as a community leads to practices that enhance group identity and further group goals.” Since the learning that takes place within a CoP is situated learning, it takes
on certain characteristics.
First, learning within a CoP is about gaining the competencies to engage effectively as a member of a particular community. The knowledge, skills, and perspective one gains as a member of a CoP are specific to that group and rooted in the relationships among the members. Here’s an example: Maria is a new member of the advisory team for the parish’s youth ministry. She brings a good deal of insights and ideas: she is the parent of two young adult children and had been active in youth ministry in her prior parish. At the same time, she has a good deal to learn: What does youth ministry mean to this group? How does youth ministry relate to other ministries within the parish? How do the members relate to one another? What are the relationships of authority and power within the group? What are the “war stories” of the group (great achievements and less-than-successful endeavors)? Who has a key to the parish center? Who knows how to fix the copier when it gets jammed?
Second, even as a newcomer to the youth ministry advisory team gaining knowledge and skills, Maria will influence the CoP. Her membership, over time, contributes to the transformation of the team. As she strives to understand the repertoire of the CoP, she asks questions about perspectives or positions that had been unexamined for some time. Or she makes an inquiry that causes others to ask questions that lead to change. As she moves into ever fuller participation, Maria’s own ideas and insights naturally become part of the community’s understanding of its shared enterprise and common repertoire. This mutual learning is part of what strengthens the group and enhances the vitality of the parish.
FOSTERING COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE
Within a parish are gatherings of people who do the work that gives expression to the parish’s vision and goals. The question remains: how do we begin the process of shifting parish committees or interest groups into effective CoPs so that they not only address their specific tasks bubecome a source of vitality for the parish and strengthen their members’ commitment to the parish and to each other? Groups and committees can start by reflecting on their identity and goals. The following questions can serve as a guide in that
process:
SHARED ENTERPRISE
• How does the community recognize that its rolegoes beyond the tasks of a particular meeting to a broader goal of participating in the parish’s role of evangelization?
• Does the description of the community’s charge include the call to be evangelizers and foster the faith of its members?
• To what extent does the community integrate prayer, reflection, and faith conversations into its regular work, making them more than simply addons to a busy agenda?
• How is the faith life of the members of the community intentionally enhanced through participating in the community’s gathering and engaging in the community’s work?
MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT
• How do people treat one another, those with whom they agree and those who hold a differing position?
• Does the community welcome new members and provide mentoring so they understand the community’s shared enterprise?
• To what extent are their interactions marked by care and mutual respect of each person’s strengths and contribution?
• In what ways is the identity of the community as a community of faith and of faithful people strengthened and enhanced?
COMMON REPERTOIRE
• How attentive are the community members to recognizing the ways in which they convey (or fail to convey) the message of the Gospel?
• In what ways are the community’s members supported in gaining the competencies necessary to participate in the particular CoP and in the broader enterprise of the parish?
• Does the community reflect a consciousness that the various modes of communication convey a spirit of hospitality?
• To what extent is there interaction and mutual support with other communities within the parish and beyond that support the shared enterprise?
Imagining our parish groups and committees as CoPs has the potential to enhance their effectiveness in their own areas of responsibility and in the life of the parish. They can serve as a context for prayer and sharing faith, for learning and developing competencies, and for participating in the parish’s mission to be and become an ever more effective agent of evangelization. ■
Jane E. Regan, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Theology and Religious Education in the Department of Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry at the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry.
COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE
“Within a parish are gatherings of people who do the work that givesexpression to the parish’s vision and goals.”
—Jane E. Regan, Ph.D.
Summary
In this piece, scholar Jane Regan proposes that a parishioner’s sense of belonging in a parish is often tied to participation in a “community within the parish community.” She shares how those groups can implement some standard practices and behaviors to keep members coming back and feeling seen, known, and loved.
Questions for Conversation
1. Jane Eagan defines a community of practice as “a sustained gathering of people whose interactions are marked by mutual engagement, shared enterprise, and common repertoire, and where the collective learning involved in surviving/thriving as a community leads to practices that enhance group identity and further group goals.” What are some of the communities of practice at your parish?
2. What are some of the reasons why building and maintaining community within a parish is essential?
3. What are some of the ways that communities of practice and situated learning gives expression to a parish’s vision and goals?
GATHERING PRAYER
Be With Us Today
St. Thomas More (1478-1535)
Father in heaven, you have given us a mind to know you, a will to serve you, and a heart to love you.
Be with us today in all that we do, so that your light may shine out in our lives. Through Christ our Lord.
Amen.
For more information about Faith Feeds, visit bc.edu/c21faithfeeds This program is sponsored by Boston College’s Church in the 21st Century Center, a catalyst and a resource for the renewal of the Catholic Church. (617)5 52-0470 • church21@bc.edu • bc.edu/c21
