PARISH IS GOOD PEOPLE MANAGEMENT

                       

From time to time, discussion in the parish will focus around some of the people that are difficult to work with or resistant. What people are ignoring is that the church is composed of human beings!

 

And human beings can clash, disagree or at times be downright mean to one another! Should we be surprised when we discover such dynamics in the parish community?

 

There will always be people moving into our community and moving out in this modern world. One parishioner, a man in his mid-fifties, told of a very painful situation about the trucking company he worked for three years ago. New management was brought in and eighteen of the thirty-two employees moved on within the first year and two months of the new management’s tenure. Something dysfunctional here!

 

One of the essential qualities for anyone in leadership, in whatever organization or family situation, is how well they will treat other people. What kind of skills do they exercise as people managers?

 

Anyone in leadership in a church must be sensitive enough to recognize how people actually work and who works with whom, and who clashes with others. This is just good common sense. Some people are gifted in this regard. There are situations where a parish erupts in conflict and a new assigned pastor brings harmony and cooperation. Then there are other pastors or leaders whom the  people just walk away from!

 

First, take time to read the community. Are there individuals who are prickly porcupines, who find it difficult to cooperation and work with others? And then, are there dreamers who can talk big, make great plans but never carry out the work? 

 

Do you have family groups within your parish that have long memories (going back two generations at least) of antagonism towards another family group?  Is there a reason that some couples sit only on the north side of the church and others sit on the south side of the church?

 

Whenever we bring in a new pastor, a new music director, a new youth minister or leader of the RCIA, we must ask, “What kind of people skills do they actually bring with them?” Will they be able to bring people to cooperate with them? Will they be useful to the functioning of the parish?

 

A parish is not a religious service station where you get your religious ‘services’ done. I t is a living, breathing community of people who share in their belief in Jesus Christ and share in their calling to live as disciples of Jesus. And just like our own family, we need to learn and adapt to one another.  Family life is not easy; life in a faith community is not easy either!

 

Look at your own parish. How well are you integrating the new comers (especially the new Canadians) into the life of the parish? How well are your trying to work together in harmony? Do difficulties provide an opportunity for growth or do they cause serious cracks within the community fabric? 

 

How good are your people skills?

 

 

 

 

 

 

BE PATIENT WITH YOU OWN MISTAKES

     

Several years ago we had an elderly gentleman, right around 89 years of age, move into the nursing home. It was mid-morning. As his two suitcases were being brought in he politely, but firmly, informed the care-aide that he would like his meals brought to his room.

 

Noon came. No lunch!  One o’clock. No lunch!

 

He had made a mistake! He had chosen to be wrong. He did not miss the evening meal with all the other seniors in the dinning room.

 

How terrible it would be if we never made mistakes. What a disaster it would be if from day -one of our lives our parents did not stand back and allow us to make mistakes. Real learning only happens through mistakes! 

 

This Lent bring to your prayers the mistakes you have made in your life, the mistakes our country has made and the many mistakes that are made in the world.  The repentance asked of us during Lent is not only over the evil things (and thoughts) we may have done, but also all the many mistakes we have made in this life. 

 

Give to the Lord the times when you selfishly demanded your position and deliberately did not consider the needs of your family. “You did it your way,” but oh, so selfishly! Now you can look back on that decision and take ownership of its falsity. 

 

Bring before the Lord the time you rejected the concerns shared by your 27 year old nephew about the exploitation of the garment workers in the Third World. He pointed out that we buy cheap clothing in the First World because the wages in the Third World are just above subsistence. And there are corporation owners of these manufacturing companies who are making huge profits from such poor wages. And you just brushed off your nephew! Now, you recognize your mistake!

 

The leadership of our Church were so very slow to take action in the sexual abuse scandal. Even if this happened five decades ago the mistakes have long lasting effect. Trust has been eroded. As a Church we have much to take ownership of when we tally up the neglect towards young people at the hands of clergy and the neglect of what was happening in our families. The scars of these mistakes are very much with us.

 

At the moment we must add the indifference, the lack of care, that circulates in our country in the opioid crises. People just seem to throw up their hands and Canada is only one family away from the overdose of one of their members. We are living through a season of mistakes towards our fellow citizens who struggle with addictions. 

 

And then there is the neglect of Mother Earth. Humans have used and abused her, not protecting and supporting her in her oceans, her soils and her bounteous atmosphere. A great number of our fellow citizens refuse to even hear concerns for the well-being and preservation of Mother Earth.

 

As we come to prayer during Lent we need to clutch in our hands all the mistakes and failures that we have accumulated. We must ask for the courage to take responsibility for the mistakes we have made.

 

And we seek that the Lord will redeem our mistakes through forgiveness and courage to learn and move on into our future with better decisions and actions in our lives.

 

WHAT DO WE SEE IN COLD WEATHER?

         

Fr. Joe, who was pastor of a smaller set of parishes on the Western side of the province shared an insight that brings a smile to your face. He was the passenger of the man who owned and operated the local tire shop. There on the pavement were the tire tracks of a set of tires. Fr. Joe pointed this out: “Now, isn’t that terrible?”

 

The owner of the tire shop (his income depends on tire sales) calmly responded: “No, not so bad!”

 

What you see always depends on where you are standing!

 

We are now into ten solid days of brutally cold weather. Everyone will tell you that they check the weather forecast several times a day when the thermometer is as low as it is today. But what do we see from the vantage point of an artic wind that will freeze exposed flesh in a couple of minutes?

 

People mention the men who have to work outside, such as the men who service the oil rigs, the farmers who are out with their cattle, the toe-truck drivers and all people in the police service. No one mentions these workers when the weather is pleasant.

 

Often mention is made of the elderly and shut-ins who will spend today and every day during this cold snap, alone. You can sense that these concerned individuals are getting into the shoes of the lonely, the isolated and the shut-ins.  There are serious concerns about the mental health of our seniors in our long term care homes. With all the lockdowns they miss the human contact and support the that only close friends and family members can bring. People ask, “Who gives grandpa a hug like his twin eight-year-old granddaughters can hug Grandpa?”

 

We look at the absence that so many of our families experience when they can only have a very limited number of family members come to the funerals of their loved ones. We have families who have to invite some of the grandchildren, but not others (there is no more room). There are no gatherings after the funeral to share and support one another with stories and memories of the loved one. Funerals and/or leave takings are a painful season. 

 

The unemployed too often have such empty days. How do you keep your spirits up when you are looking forward to ten more weeks of this inactivity? And what of our students working from home who struggle to pay attention to the Zoom lecture but have no one with whom to share this learning time? Where is the human touch in this semester?

 

When we go over this list we recognize that when times are manageable and going well, we seldom even think about these people and their struggles.

 

There is blessing in this week of brutally cold weather. We see the struggles of others that we   walk by in the good weather. 

 

This week of freezing cold weather places us in a different place to observe the world. The strong ray of sunshine in this cold weather is not outside. It is what is happening within us as we see the light to look towards the sufferings and isolation of others. 

 

 

A SPIRITUALITY FOR SURVIVAL

 

There has been a strong concern on my mind for many years that we Christians need to develop a spirituality of compassion; a spiritual approach that embraces the goodness of all creation and that seeks to promoted the inherent dignity of every human being. Simply put, we need a spirituality of deep compassion.

 

Contrary to the expectation of many religious people (of all the different religions of the world) our spirituality is never something that has been worked out in a set form that will last forever. Spirituality is not like a stone building (i.e, the pyramids in Egypt) that have stood solid for over four thousand years. Rather spirituality is a program (like the therapy after you have hip surgery) that enables to thrive and live well.

 

Spirituality is our listening to God in our lives (global and personal), being embraced by the Word of God, growing in prayer and spiritual practices and lived out in concrete details in our daily lives. Spirituality is found as much in our actions as in our prayers and teachings.

 

Two streams of spirituality are coming together in our Christian experience. There is much room to cooperate with other world religions (which is a first possibility in the history of world religions). 

 

The first is the strong theology we have developed to promote and protect the dignity of all human beings. There is a strong call for our societies to respond to all humans with a consistent ethic of life. The full dignity of every human being must be supported, protected and nourished from conception until natural death. 

 

Paralleling this concern for human life is the concern to preserve the earth. We must protect all forms of life (from the bacteria, to all birds and fish and to human beings). Global warming is a reality and we humans can change this threatening collapse of the ecosystems. 

 

Pope Francis has clearly outlined in the encyclical, “Laudato si,” that both streams must be brought together. How humans treat the earth (extracting its minerals and cutting down its forests) is also how we treat human beings (the neglect of the millions of poor people on this globe). The correct attitude is to be concerned with both streams. 

 

Christianity has the power within its soil (its origins) to develop a spirituality of compassion towards our future survival. Human beings cannot continue to abuse the earth and neglect its peoples. To continue to do what we are doing can only lead to collapse. 

 

As we try to move into a new culture, a different approach to the earth, we need to be rooted in a strong religious (i.e., spiritual) tradition. Religion gives people the power to continue to work towards the good for decades and centuries, even if they experience little success or change. A spirituality of compassion that is rooted in God will sustain us through some of the very rough decades ahead. 

 

Christianity has always has had to develop a meaningful spirituality for its own time and place.  Consider what happened after the Black Death in 1347, after the abolition of slavery in the British and American Empires in the early and mid-1800’s and after the first and second world wars. Our Christian spirituality has to recreate itself after these disasters.

 

Pope Francis may be ahead of us (i.e., humanity) but he has laid out the correct path our spirituality (Christian and non-Christian alike) must take into the coming centuries.  We must work towards a spirituality with wide open arms embracing the well-being of all human beings and supporting and protecting all of the earth.

 

 

 

A CHURCH THAT CARES FOR THE WOUNDED

 

One of the loud clashes that we see in our Catholic Church is to see media coverage of Pope Francis leading the liturgy in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Here you have this huge opulent building (one of the great structures on the globe) that surrounds the church leader who consciously wants to be a bishop for the poor of this world. He challenges the people of the Church not to look for support in their buildings, their power or their competence. Rather he calls the Church to be a ‘field hospital;’ a Church for the poor by the poor.

 

We have yet to come to grips with this incredible challenge. This is definitely directing to Church to make a sharp right turn. Lift your eyes from doing churchy things and care for the poor beginning in your own country. 

 

In our faith communities (the local parish community of believers) we need to turn our attention towards the wounded and the push-aside ones. 

 

In our faith communities we need to work to become more aware of the wounds that people carry in their lives. They come in all their woundedness to the Lord. 

 

There is the wounds of divorce and disjointed families. When a marriage breaks up there are all kinds of feelings of failure and fear of joining the praying community. There are wounds between parents and children, and between the children. One of the painful wounds that divorced people will tell you is that they do not feel that the Church is a very welcoming place.

 

Then there are the parents and siblings who live in fear that one of their brothers (a drug user) might accidently overdose on bad drugs. In 2021 it is so dangerous out there!  The fentanyl epidemic is a silent killer because all the national attention is turned towards the covid epidemic.  These parents may never articulate their fears but they will tremble if the phone rings at 9:00am on a weekend morning to inform them of the overdose death of their son (it is mostly males who die of an overdose in Canada). The long-lasting wounds of an overdose death is so real in the lives of too many of our parents.

 

The unemployed and the people who are on the verge of collapsing the businesses they worked so hard to establish have the wounds of failure and uselessness. Who wants to have a thirty-four year old male banging around the house day after day and often for months because there is no job!  The struggles that the unemployed go through do not receive sufficient reflection in society at large, but also in our Churches. What are their wounds? 

 

Whenever our Church gathers on Sunday there are always people who have lost loved ones. Death is a walking companion to every human being. We have a strong spiritual accompaniment to those who have died, but there are deep feelings of loss and loneliness in those who have loved them. If we live long enough (into the mid-nineties) we will have lost all our friends and co-workers. We might only have grandchildren that are still attached to us. The wounds brought on by the death of our loved ones is very real.

 

Each faith community is challenged when we embrace the woundedness of our people. Each person/family/relationship must come before the wounded Christ and ask for healing and support. This is such a good time for the Church. We may be very slow to take up the challenge of Pope Francis to become a ‘field hospital’ but he has set us on the right path. 

 

When you can join your faith community again, do a ‘spiritual search’ for the woundedness among us.  You will engage in prayer immediately. 

 

AMERICAN EVANGELICALS: MAYBE A WRONG PATH TAKEN

 

I am very concerned about the direction that many American evangelicals have taken with regard to their strong support for the just-past Trump administration. Here they had a leader who skillfully  manipulated them in support by his strong political stand (not necessarily personal conviction) against abortion and gay marriage. 

 

This does not mean that all American evangelicals are included in this caution.

 

There is a strong point of wisdom from the study of history. ‘Everyone who does not learn from history is bound to repeat the same mistakes.’

 

Two of the most glaring mistakes that churches have made was the Catholic Church in France in the many decades that preceded the French Revolution (1789). The second was the very close marriage between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Czar (the autocratic government) prior to the revolution of 1917. In both examples both sides were benefitting from the power and wealth of the other. It was a social marriage of enrichment.

 

But what happened? When the revolution (the uprising of the anger of the people to the oppression of the king and religion) erupted, both churches were butchered! The people took out their anger and frustration on king and church in the same uprising. No one should be sorry that the churches suffered so greatly. They made the wrong friends! They were so entwined with the political and economic powers that they could not see how far off-course they were. 

 

Religion should always have a love-hate relationship with power: whether it be pollical power, big business or big media.  If the church is faithful to its calling there will always be a line of tension in all relationships with power!

 

This does not mean that religion must stand opposed to the leadership of government or of big media. It means that it must cooperate with all forces within a society that are working for the well-being of the society. 

 

Where were the Churches during the three hundred years that slavery was practiced in the Americas?  Why were there so few voices that opposed such a brutal and unjust system of economic production? 

 

The people of the Church must ask the tough questions of governments, the big media, educational institutions and big business. There are going to be people in our churches who will walk out in anger: the churches have no business to ever ask how the poor are benefitting from the billions of dollars in profit that our corporations are making this year! Fear of upsetting some people never gives us permission not to ask how our society is caring for and trying to lift up the poor (the people who benefit the least from the benefits of the society). 

 

The Church must work with the parts of society that help its citizens to thrive but it must always walk with a critical eye toward its own timidity to challenge selfishness, racism, destruction of the eco-system and downright indifference toward the poor and the suffering. And it must not only exercise that attitude towards the government but it must also bring these same critical tools to its own exercise of power within its own life. The Church must walk with a self-critical attitude.

 

Simply put, a healthy church must never become too comfortable!

 

PRAY ATTENTION TO YOUR WEAKNESSES

      

If you have a supervisor at work who is super-organized, everything has been outlined and there are no surprises. The staff will feel very secure.  But there is a downsize to this personality. Their great strength, their organizational skills is also their greatest weakness: they can be so hard on people whose performance does not measure up!

 

Your greatest weakness is located in your greatest strength!

 

Church is no different. We function in a liturgical church where things have been clearly worked out. People do not need to invent the wheel. Each year we pray, preach, study and apply the life and teachings of Jesus. We have our doctrines worked out in the Catechism which indicates clearly what we believe. We have organized the lines of authority through the ministry of the bishop, leader of the faithful of a particular part of the Church.

 

These are great strengths. We must never lessen their importance to the life of faith.

 

But the weakness is that too many people relegate their faith practice to  the rituals alone. The preaching church and the practicing church does not insist that we work hard to learn and integrate the teachings of Jesus into our daily lives.  We do not hear the ordinary parishioner insisting that we need more teaching and opportunities to deepen our faith. 

 

It is never sufficient to proclaim and teach the correct doctrines of the Church. We must ask ‘and how is this put into practice?’ Do the faithful of the Church give a polite nod to the more difficult  teaching of Jesus? Are they polite to the social teachings of the Church? Our weakness as Church is the neglect of listening to what is and what is not happening in the lives of the believers. 

 

We need to ask every bishop, ordained priest, religious sister and parish leaders, ‘how well are you working with your own personal weaknesses and limitations? How well are you working with the limitations of this parish community?

 

We are never going to be a completely redeemed people on earthside. We await full transformation in eternal life. But in the meantime, we must take into our hands our own limitations in responding to Jesus, Son of God.

 

Ask every person who claims to be a believer how well they are integrating God’s great love for all people into their daily lives. Do they view and treat people who are of a different skin color, a different economic and education standard, a different religion or a different ethic background as people of equal value? As people who deserve equal treatment and opportunities within their own society? 

 

We are a church of sinners. There is much in our lives that needs redemption but we come before God holding our strengths in one hand and all our weaknesses in the other. As we struggle with our weaknesses, our need for the redeeming power of Jesus Christ cries out from our bones. Our weaknesses can become our cry for redemption and transformation.

 

Neglecting our weaknesses will limit what we can do in life and in Church. 

 

When you apply the principle that your greatest strengths are your greatest weaknesses, what are you discovering?