St. Gertrude Parish Synod
“The Reign of God Needs a Church”
Growing in Faith — Adults
Are you hungry to know more about our Catholic faith? And about the broader world of belief? Do you wish you knew more about spirituality, prayer, ethics, other religions and current Catholic teaching? What do you need to feel more grounded in our shared faith?On the morning of Saturday, May 22, St. Gertrude will be joining together for a synod — a meeting of the whole parish to look at, think about and discuss a variety of important challenges before us. The theme is “”The Reign of God Needs a Church.”"
One key aspect of parish life to be examined will be what the adults at St. Gertrude need to help us grow in our faith. This will be the subject of one of several break-out sessions during the morning.
As Catholics, all of us are called to be priests through our baptism. Each of us has a responsibility to nurture our own faith and the faith of those with whom we live. It also means that we are called to live our faith as fully as possible. We can’t sit back and “”let Father do it.”" To be Catholic means to be always growing in faith, to be searching for new and deeper understanding of what we believe.
This is particularly important today when lay Catholics are taking an increasingly important role in the operation of parishes — from liturgy planning to social services, from preaching to property management. It’s also important because Catholicism is, at its heart, counter-cultural. As Catholics, we hold values that are often at odds with those of mainstream society. To be able to operate within that culture and yet not be overwhelmed by it, we need to be deeply rooted in our spirituality and faith. And we need to support each other.
Many of us come to St. Gertrude for the quality of the preaching. That’s an example of the hunger we have for knowing more about our faith. There are other opportunities, such as the Women’s Spirituality Group, Theology-on-Tap during the summer, and RCIA (the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults). There are also groups that are focused on broader questions of what it means to be human, such as the Book Club and the Poetry Club.
Learning, of course, comes in other forms as well. The Parish Retreat is an example. So are the Simple Suppers during Lent and the many on-going faith-sharing groups throughout the parish, some together for more than 20 years. And doing is a way of learning. When we work for social justice through United Power in Action and Justice or the Organization of the Northeast (ONE), we grow in our understanding of what it means to be Catholic and to be human.
But there is much more that we, as individuals and as a congregation, could and should be doing to grow in our faith. Aside from an occasional speaker or forum and the Sunday preaching, we as a parish don’t provide many opportunities for adults to study aspects of our Catholic faith as well as more general questions of spirituality and ethics.
During the synod, the goal of the break-out session on adult education is to answer two questions: (1) What is your yearning/hunger for adult formation? (2) How could we do a better job of addressing these needs at St. Gertrude?
For example, do you feel the need to know more and understand better the Eucharist? Are you curious about what the church has to say about business ethics? Maybe you’re wondering what ever happened to Confession. Or perhaps you’re intrigued by what you’ve heard of Islam or Judaism, and would like to look into how the believers in those traditions approach the same spiritual questions you grapple with.
The drawback of learning about the faith only through the Sunday preaching is that, except at the gym Mass, there’s no chance for give-and-take. Many formats for adult education would provide those opportunities.
The RCIA model is one possibility. This involves prayer, instruction and discussion at regularly scheduled meetings. Although the RCIA meetings take place over the course of an entire year, the model could be used for a package of, say, six or eight meetings to discuss a particular topic. Another model would involve a lecture or movie/video for a large group of parishioners who would then break into smaller groups to discuss the topic among themselves. Again, this is a format that could be used over a series of regularly scheduled meetings.
Or, to borrow a format from city government, there could be a One Book, One Parish program in which the whole congregation is invited to read the same book and meet in small groups to talk about it. The books used in this program could be specifically religious or more global in nature.
In earlier years, St. Gertrude Parish had a reputation as a parish of some prestige, when it came to adult educational programming. In the 60’s there was a Speaker’s Forum where national figures, such as comedian-civil rights activist Dick Gregory, would come to speak six times a year. There was also a parish library, now long gone. We don’t know much about it, but it was certainly a resource for parish education.
The challenge in the last decade has been to discover different ways to rebuild interest, participation and sociability into parish life, especially for the adults. There was an educational program that accompanied the two parish trips to the Holy Land in 1992 and 2000, and even parishioners who were not going on the tour could attend the pre-trip and post-trip events.
We now have the popular Parish Plays, we have upgraded the Music Ministries at the various services, and we have the occasional Lenten Reflections by internal and external speakers such as Rabbi Schalmann, Father Pfleger, and Dick Westley. We’ve organized the bus tours of various parishes and other occasional educational events. We have a parish website and active parish online discussion groups, focusing on community, peace & justice, prayer and theology.
Despite our considerable current efforts, we know there is more to do. Other parishes have speaker series — some, general in nature; others that focus on specific areas of interest such as: Relationships, Women, Liturgy, Catholic Theology, History of the Church, Business and Ethics, Spirituality, Peace and Justice, Social Action and Being a Catholic Today. In addition, there are parishes that conduct regular ongoing theology classes and scriptural studies.
Are any of these topics of interest to you? Are you interested in knowing about the current “”speakers”" in the Catholic world, conservative, moderate and liberal? And what about the various magazines/publications for Catholics? And the latest Catholic websites and tools for today’s Catholic, such as www.masstimes.org? We need your help to steer us to the areas where you have an interest, a hunger to learn. And we hope for other suggestions that we haven’t encountered or mentioned.
In mounting an adult education program, St. Gertrude would be able, in many cases, to tap our own parishioners. We have expertise among us from a wide range of fields, such as theology, liturgy, literature, education, journalism, social work and counseling. We might think of this structured adult education as “”a school of ministry.”" The more we know and understand about what we believe, the better we will be able to live out those beliefs. And the better Catholics, and people, we will be.
So, please come to meet with us at the synod on Saturday, May 22, to tell us what you’re hungry to know about your faith. Let’s talk about how we want to grow as believers. How we need to grow as believers. Let’s figure out how we can come together to reflect, learn, discuss and wrestle with the implications of our faith, and the demands of living in our complex, ever-changing, ever-challenging world.
Bob Backis, Claire Conley, Maureen Kelly and Patrick T. Reardon
White Papers:
White Paper - Children Teens.pdf :: White Paper - Growing in Faith.pdf
White Paper - Prayer.pdf :: White Paper - Social Action.pdf
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