Lay people and life. Anti-bubbles and refreshing"Candidates for lay ministries will be required to have adequate training."Susan Longhurst joined the team at Sycamore two years ago as a manager in the mission development department. Previously, she worked as a youth coordinator for a deanery and diocese in the UK, and used Sycamore with young people and their parents. There she found that Sycamore "worked very well. It brought young people together, it helped them open up, the conversation was good." So when the job posting came up, she decided to give it a try.
Her job is to "work with teams, nationally and internationally, to spread the word." In this interview with Omnes, she talks about Sycamore, its origins, the goal of the project and what a great tool it can be for everyone. lay people.
How was the project born? What’s the purpose of Sycamore?
– This project was started essentially by Father Stephen Wang in 2010, when he was a chaplain at Newman House, and this was for London university students. He got together with a group of students who felt that there was a need for an evangelization resource to introduce Christianity to people with little to no experience of the faith. So it was really all about reach, but also the recognition that talking about faith in today’s culture can be difficult.
Father Stephen and these students worked together to produce an initial set of films, which were put online and quickly spread. Sycamore charity was then funded and the trustees of the charity decided to work with father Stephen to remake the films, but with much higher production values. So then the films were remade, slightly repackaged and the tagline “Sycamore, what do you believe?”, which is what you can see today, is what accompanied these films.
So that is how Sycamore came into being, basically. It was a resource that would allow people to talk about the faith, in the context of their lives, and to reach a wider community, not assuming that people have religious upbringing, or religious language or religious practice.
It feels like our religion and our faith are something that we must keep private, so why are platforms like Sycamore important for Catholics?
– Because of what we’ve been through and changes in society, talking about our faith can be very difficult. And yet, it’s so important. Platforms like Sycamore are good because they are introducing people to the core and heart of Christianity, but they're doing so in really new and innovative ways.
Sycamore, for example, is obviously online as well as an in person resource. The heart of Sycamore is about bringing people together for discussion. Father Steven and the trustees wanted to make the films accessible to everyone, so online access is very important.
Platforms like Sycamore are all about good quality resources that are introducing people to Catholic christianity in a really beautiful way.
Sycamore seems like a really open platform, can a non-christian be part of a Sycamore group?
– What Sycamore does really well is that it brings deep questions about life that sometimes we think about and sometimes we don’t get the opportunity to think about because life is so fast paced.
Actually, father Stephen has often commented that when he started Sycamore with the university students he was very encouraged when he could see people bringing their friends, from different religious backgrounds, that wanted to explore faith.
Therefore, Sycamore provides that opportunity to bring people together with careful questions that allow people to dwell into their own experiences about their life and about the role of God in their life.
So, of course, Sycamore aims to be there for discussion. All people, of all faiths and none, are invited and welcome. However, there is also that emphasis that Sycamore is at the heart a Catholic evangelization tool.
I’d like to mention the symbol of the sycamore, because it’s really important and a nice allegory for what Sycamore does particularly well. It goes back to the story of Zacchaeus. When Jesus comes to Jericho and Zacchaeus can’t get a good look at Him, he really has this burning curiosity to find out more about Jesus, so he climbs a sycamore tree and gains a better look. When he is in the tree, Jesus notices him and calls him down, and they have this initial getting to know each other. That’s the beautiful symbol that Sycamore takes to its core, it’s a resource that can introduce people to Jesus.
You talk a lot about groups and communities. What’s the importance of community in our Catholic lives?
– Although what we get to see these days is people feeling quite privatized in their faith, actually it’s when we come into contact with others that faith comes alive. We are all born to share our experiences and to learn from each other. So community is at the heart of Sycamore and on a couple of different levels.
Community, in terms of what we’d like to see and what we hope is being done in the groups, is that they’re bringing people together in person.
Community is at the heart of what Sycamore is and what Sycamore does. And I think because having entered an initial relationship with Jesus, we are also welcomed into his Church, and as Church we are a community. So I think that’s probably where Sycamore wants to see every group going, to bring that community together, and bring everyone in, so that spirit of radical welcome.
I’m proud and grateful to be able to share that our international community has also spread. I think we are reaching 13 translations of Sycamore.
At Sycamore we like to keep our community quite close. We encourage leaders and participants to share their progress and how they’re getting on with us. That’s one of the joys of working at Sycamore.
Sometimes we think that formation is only for priests or consecrated people, yet it feels like Sycamore focuses a lot on lay people. Why is that?
– Because the way that the resources have been intentionally designed to be accessible to anyone, we want people to get excited when they see the films, to think “I want to share the films with others” and to provide all the resources and supplementary information anyone would need so they can literally pick it up and run with it.
For example, all the pathways we have, and we have over 30 different pathways that anyone can choose to run. Once somebody has seen Sycamore and they’ve looked at a pathway, often they would think “I could see this working for my group”, we want to provide as many resources as possible. Each of the films come with a session guide, with all of the major questions, all of the key texts that have been used, the sections of the Catechism and lots of other supplementary materials. So people don’t have to do a huge amount of work additionally, they can get on with running their group.
I think that’s why we see people, leaders, of all kinds, using Sycamore. But also because we want to empower the laity. This is about making everyone feel empowered to share their faith. So we are committed to being completely inclusive to everyone that wants to run Sycamore.
And I would say that part of my role is about supporting people in their journey. I work with lots of teams that are made up of leaders, clergy, religious, chaplains… I could go on. Just to make sure that they have all the support they need to run Sycamore.
Once we know a group is running we are keen to support them to make sure that, once they’ve run that session, they feel confident to run the next one. That’s why I think it’s really important, and at Sycamore we are committed to making sure that everyone is empowered, and that the laity are empowered.
If a group wants to start using Sycamore, where do they have to start?
– The first thing to do is to become familiar with the films, watch a couple and see how they’re structured. Once the leader does that, the next thing to do is to look at the number of pathways we have. It might be that somebody would like to run a Lent session, for example, or a particular session on how to pray.
Then they would go to the website, they choose a pathway and they would check that it fits for them. You download the session guide, gather the team, which doesn’t have to be large, and pray for the success of the Sycamore group, because everything is rooted in prayer.
We have lots of planning tools on the website. So we guide them through lots of elements that would help them run their session.
We hope that people feel supported then, once they’ve gathered their team and prayed. And we encourage people to just give it a go. We have lots of promotional resources on the website, so if people want to send out digital adverts and promotions, we have all that accessible on the website for free.
And the last thing it’s if they don’t feel sure about which IT platform to use, or they just need to talk to somebody, then they have the option to contact me or one of the team, and we’ll guide them through it.
We hope that the journey is clear but it’s really important to feel supported, so having a team around you is nice.
What’s your hope for Sycamore in the future?
– The hope and dream for Sycamore is that we spread the community as widely as possible. That people feel confident, once they’ve seen Sycamore, to run with it. It's about sharing our faith confidently. We want to bring people to Christ and to enter into a personal relationship with Him, that’s our dream.
And as a charity, we would like to see in time our resources grow. Already we are working on training resources, so people feel equipped and confident. And I guess, in time, we would like to see more films.
