Parish renewal: How many "somebodies"...?Parish Renewal: The VisionParish Renewal. Don't be a foolThe other day I was talking to a priest friend of mine, and he was telling me that he had asked a certain Church movement to come to his parish to do a certain activity: "Let's see if this way we can attract young people".
I think all priests dream of finding the philosopher's stone to attract young people to parishes. There are parishes that have good programs for young people, or a good catechetical itinerary that leads to youth groups, and that even promote vocations, thank God. It is a model that is based on the parish having a good offer for young people... to come. There are parishes that do not have the capacity to offer these programs, or simply are implanted in places where there are no young people. Not that there are no young people, but that there are no Christian families that can nurture young people in the parish.
The problem here is that what is expected is... for the young people to "come". It is as if Jesus stayed in Nazareth to wait for the disciples to come to him. When we read the Gospel attentively we realize that the formation of the group of disciples around Jesus is not based on a movement of "coming in", but of "going out". It is Jesus who goes out, who begins to preach, who goes to the banks of the Jordan and the sea to look for the disciples; and then it is these same disciples who are "sent out" on the roads, to go from town to town preaching the Kingdom of God.
The question is not how to get people to come to Church; the question is: how do we, those of us who are inside, go out to share the Good News?
The question is not how to get people to come and fill our churches, but how to get the churches emptied (after Mass) of insiders, so that they go out as missionaries.
All this is very clear. For some years now, there has been no more talk about evangelization, the new evangelization, the Church going out, mission, etc.
More than devising and designing attractive programs for outsiders, what is needed is to design processes so that those inside become true missionary disciples as assistants. It is that easy. Or difficult, because it is no longer a matter of someone coming with the magic formula that will fill the parish, but everything happens through a true conversion. Pastoral conversion.
