As I See It

by Fr. Vin

Life from Death

Today’s Gospel is the story of Jesus’ raising of Lazarus, showing that he has power over life and death.  In that vein, Here’s a quote from a recent issue of the N.Y. Times about a study of church membership in America today:

The percentage of Catholics in the American population has held steady for decades at about 25 percent. But that masks a precipitous decline in native-born Catholics. The proportion has been bolstered by the large influx of Catholic immigrants, mostly from Latin America, the survey found.

The Catholic Church has lost more adherents than any other group: about one-third of respondents raised Catholic said they no longer identified as such. Based on the data, the survey showed, “this means that roughly 10 percent of all Americans are former Catholics.” (February 26, 2008)

We just have to look around the church on a Sunday morning (or perhaps look at our own families) to see the truth in this.  I take two lessons from it.  First, we need to face the truth: What we’ve been doing (throughout the country, not just in Our Lady of Grace) isn’t working, so we need to do things differently.  And second, we have at hand a tool for doing things differently – if we’re willing to take the chance and trust it, despite the temporary discomfort it may cause.

That tool is the vision of member engagement and the process we’ve begun in Our Lady of Grace to address it.  You may remember from what I’ve written in the past that there are three sorts of members in any church:

•      The engaged, who are psychologically invested; church-life and –membership is “front of mind” for these people, and they show it by their commitments to serving, inviting others, giving, and thanking God;

•      The not engaged, who may attend when there’s nothing better to do, but whose connection to the parish is more social, or cultural.  They’re not angry; it’s just that nothing has (yet) helped them to connect in such a way that church membership has any power in their lives;

•       The actively disengaged, who have a psychological connection to the church but one that’s negative, despite perhaps regular attendance and even participation in ministries.

Obviously, we want people in the middle and bottom groups to move up into the top one.  According to last year’s survey of our parish, 21% of parishioners were engaged – one in five.  Almost half – 44% - were not engaged; and 35% were actively disengaged.  (The national figures for Catholics are 16%, 49%, and 35% respectively.  No wonder “one third of respondents raised Catholic said they no longer identified as such.”) 

Interestingly, we know how to build engagement, and we know how to measure whether we’re successful at doing it.  That’s why I’m encouraging every parish ministry and society to address the things that build engagement, and it’s why we spent so much time this past year addressing what you told us in the survey last year and in the listening-sessions that followed it.  The Lent / Easter renewal this year was shaped by what you told us, and I’ll have more of what we’ve been working on to announce to you in a few weeks.  In the meantime, I invite you to use the coming Holy Week to think about the way God works – bringing new life out of death.  It’s not just something that happened to Jesus a long time ago and far away. It’s what God always wants to do.  We’re certainly experiencing a good amount of “death” in the Catholic Church at this time – we ran read about it in the papers and see it if we open our eyes.  What we need is confidence that God is ready, today, to give renewed life.  But just as Jesus’ risen body was both like and unlike the one he walked through Galilee in, we should expect that the new “body of Christ” will also be different from what we’ve known.  We have to be ready to “die” a little ourselves, to do things differently in order to experience God’s power.  More next week.  Until then, peace.

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