For a busy parish pastor, a blog has the potential of becoming your most effective and time-efficient tool for evangelization.

A pastor’s fantasy

Think of it this way. Suppose that after Mass next Sunday, you are shaking hands and saying goodbye to parishioners as they leave. A new person greets you and says, “Father, I’m thinking of becoming Catholic. Can you tell me what I would need to do?” Now suppose the rest of your Sunday is completely free. And suppose you are not exhausted from the killer week of meetings, weddings, and funerals you just completed. (Hey, this is a fantasy. Bear with me.) If you had all the time and energy in the world, you could spend the next couple of hours just chatting with the seeker that the Holy Spirit sent to you at that moment.

But you don’t have all the time and energy in the world. You’ve got the next Mass or the emergency finance council meeting or lunch scheduled with the capital campaign chairperson (and largest contributor to the parish). And even if you have nothing else scheduled, you’ve been looking forward to your first free Sunday afternoon in a month to just kick back and watch the game.

Now imagine there are ten such seekers and imagine there are ten more next Sunday and ten more the Sunday after that. Because in a medium-sized parish with three Masses on a weekend, that’s the potential. You can’t possibly meet, individually, with each and every one of those seekers. But they can “meet” you—if you are blogging.

When you put yourself out there on a blog, people get to know you as a person. Even if you are blogging about what you had for dinner, over time, people will discover your level of integrity, what you are passionate about, what you know about, and what you think is important in life. And they will also encounter you as a person of faith—which is what they are seeking in the first place.

No time to blog

But doesn’t blogging take time? Precious time that you don’t have to spare? Yes to the first question, no to the second. Evangelization is the number one job for parishes. Take out your calendar and add up the number of hours you are evangelizing this week. Then add up the number of seekers your evangelization efforts are touching this week. What do you think? Are you spending enough time on job one? Are you reaching enough people? If so, maybe you don’t need to blog. But most pastors are caught up in a lot of “smaller” jobs related to just keeping the parish afloat.

What if you could carve out one hour a week for evangelization and touch hundreds or maybe thousands of seekers? That’s what I’m suggesting. Write two short posts a week. Spend 30 minutes on each. And get yourself out there in the blogosphere as the evangelizer-in-chief for your parish.

And really—if you think you are too busy to blog, check out this guy! You can’t possibly have more on your plate than he does.

What to blog about?

I think what stops most pastors from blogging is not the time it takes. It’s writer’s block. What in the world would people be interested in that you would have to say? Okay, you’re going to have to imagine with me again. Or better yet, remember.

Remember back before you were a priest. Maybe remember all the way back to childhood. What did you think of priests? Weren’t you wildly curious about what kind of people they were? What they did? Why they became a priest? Did they pray all the time? Do they talk directly to God? And does God answer? Just because you have come to realize that priests are flesh-and-blood people like the rest of us doesn’t mean the rest of the world has. Seekers in particular, who are not likely to know any priests personally, are fascinated with the whole idea of “priest.” So draw back the curtain a little, and let them peak inside. You can blog about anything. It doesn’t have to be about faith or the church. In fact, it’s probably better if some of your posts are more “secular.” Here is a short list of some ideas to blog about, but don’t limit yourself to these:

• The last movie you saw
• The last book you read
• A joke someone told at the priests’ retreat
• A Scripture passage you are struggling with as you try to write this Sunday’s homily
• A great meal you had at a parishioner’s house
• What the bishop said to you the last time you spoke with him
• How you pray
• Your best (and worst) golf score
• What you would do if you weren’t a priest
• A list of hopes you have for the parish in the coming year
• Pictures from your last vacation
• The last time you blessed a car and what you think of blessing cars
• The hobby you wish you had more time for
• Your favorite musician / your least favorite musician
• How you will be spending the next holiday
• Saint of the day and why that saint is important to you
• What the upcoming Jewish, Muslim, or Buddhist holy day means and how Catholics should think of it

Guidelines

When I said you could blog about anything, I meant anything within reason. The U.S. Bishops have recently posted some very helpful guidelines on social media that you should read before you start blogging.

And here are five reasons you don’t need a social media policy!

Do you have questions about getting started? I can help. Post a comment or send me an e-mail.

Today’s Parish author Fr. Jim Field died peacefully yesterday morning, July 12, 2010. I first met Jim in the pages of Today’s Parish. In the late 80s and early 90s, he wrote regularly on liturgy. At the time, his contributions were one of the best sources available for advice on parish worship.

I got to know Jim much better when we served for several years together on the board of directors for the North American Forum on the Catechumenate. That time coincided with the worst moments of the child sex abuse crisis in the U.S. Jim, a priest of the Archdiocese of Boston, never succumbed to despair. Even in the darkest moments, Jim was able to see the light of Christ. He did his best to shepherd his parish and his parishioners through a very rocky period.

Jim loved being a pastor, and he loved the people of Incarnation Parish in Melrose. Every time the Forum board would meet, he would tell some hilarious, outrageous story about his community. More than once, I accused him of stretching the truth a bit. He’d always put on a shocked expression and say, “It’s true! I swear, every word of it is true!”

At our spring 2008 board meeting, Jim was not feeling well. After he got back home, he e-mailed his friends with the shocking news; he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. His doctors told him he probably only had a few weeks left. That was over two years ago.

In those two years, Jim taught us what it means to live the paschal mystery. Just as he had when his parish was in crisis, he was able to see the light of Christ in his struggle with cancer. Just as he had shepherded his parish through a dark time, his parishioners rallied around to sustain him in his time of suffering.

The way Jim faced death is a lesson in grace for all of us. He was 59 when he died. He could have retired. He could have taken sick leave. Instead, he committed to pastor his parish as long as he was able. In a June 2009 interview with Michael Paulson of the Boston Globe, he said, “This is what I got, and this is how I deal with it. I’m a teacher, and this is a teachable moment.”

What he taught us—what he taught me—is that death cannot win. Cancer may have taken his body, but it can never take Jim, child of God and priest of Christ. Jim is one with us and one with Christ—always.

As he said in his 2009 interview: “This is a time when you have to figure out–do you believe this or not. You’ve been saying this your whole life. Is this really the truth or not? And, so far, it feels like the truth.”

Jim, may the angels lead you into paradise;
May the martyrs come to welcome you
And take you to the holy city
The new and eternal Jerusalem.

In the July-August 2010 issue of Harvard Business Review, Richard Barker argues that management is not a profession.

He says, “Professions are made up of particular categories of people from whom we seek advice and services because they have knowledge and skills that we do not.”

His examples of true professions are medicine and law. A manager, according to Barker, is not a professional in the same way a doctor or a lawyer is:

The manager, however, is responsible for bringing together many inputs. The lawyer is always concerned with matters of law, whereas the manager’s focus may change significantly and unpredictably from one day to the next. In general, the professional is an expert, whereas the manager is a jack-of-all-trades and master of none—the antithesis of the professional.

What about pastors? Some might argue that “priesthood” is a profession. But priesthood isn’t really a job of any kind. It is a state of life—like marriage. A priest, like a married person, usually has to find a job or a profession. While most diocesan priests become pastors, not all do. And in some dioceses, lay people and deacons serve in the role of “pastor” when there are not enough priests for every parish.

So, using Baker’s criteria, is the job of leading a parish—whether as a priest-pastor or as a lay or deacon parish life director—a true profession?

Jazz musician Charlie Parker said, “Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.”

Many of us are so busy with our careers, our kids, our studies, or our ministries that we often don’t have time to live our own lives. Summer can be a slower time for many of us. It is perhaps a good time to take stock and pay attention to our own wisdom so our spiritual music can come out. Here are some questions to reflect on:

1. Is your work your prayer or is your work prayerful?
2. What do you pray for? How has what you pray for changed in the last year?
3. Is your prayer life deepening or stagnating? How do you know?
4. Is your worship life more or less reverent these days?
5. Is your worship life more or less fascinating these days?
6. Are you more fearful or more peaceful than before?
7. Are you seeking God or is God seeking you?
8. What spiritual promises do you rely on? Have you written them down?
9. Are trials times of growth or times of despair?
10. Do you pray for strength before you need it? Do you “pray ahead” before difficult times?
11. Who are your models of holiness? How often do you meet with them?
12. What is your spiritual practice? Can you write it down? Can you teach it to others?

Please share some comments about your spiritual practice and how it helps you pay attention to your own wisdom.

“Good architecture should help a company with its mission.”

You might expect that line to have appeared in Architectural Digest and to have been spoken by someone like famous designer Cesar Pelli. In fact, it appeared in the June 2010 issue of Inc., and it was Robert Wood Johnson IV—the owner of the New York Jets football team—who said it. He said it from his office in the Jets’ new “120,000-square-foot shrine to athletic and corporate excellence.”

When I read the words like “mission” and “shrine,” and my little Catholic heart starts to perk up. Aren’t we the people who do mission? Don’t we have the corner on the shrine market? I re-read the article a little more closely.

When Johnson bought the Jets in 2000, they were clearly a second-class team in a first-class town. He did a lot of things you’d expect someone to do who wants to win football games. He hired a feisty new head coach. He drafted a hot young rookie quarterback. But Johnson considers the biggest contributor to the Jets recent success to be the “shrine” where all the employees work. How does his company headquarters help support the Jets’ mission?

A mission to win

The mission is clear: Win football games. So right in the front lobby, through which every employee, including the players, have to enter stands the Jets’ only Super Bowl trophy (from 1969). It is a not-subtle reminder of the team’s legacy and also a challenge for their future.

Next, the facility includes an enclosed, football-field-size fieldhouse with a 95 foot clearance to allow for punting practice. Most of the offices in the building have an outer glass wall that looks out over the four outdoor practice fields. The primary field faces the same solar direction as the Jets’ home stadium, and the office building surrounds it on three sides to mimic the effects of playing in the stadium.

Add to that many dozens of TVs throughout the facility all broadcasting ESPN or the NFL Football Network.

You cannot work in this place and not get the point. But just in case anyone has missed it, all the employees are given free season passes to the Jets games.

Questions for parish design

All this has me wondering, do we put the same kind of passion and focus into building or renovating our worship spaces?

• When people walk in the front door, is there something akin to the Jets’ Super Bowl trophy that immediately communicates our mission?
• Is the space generous enough to accommodate everything we have to do in our liturgies? Perhaps we don’t need 120,000 square feet, but do we have space for catechumenate dismissal, child care, hospitality before and after Mass, and other Sunday activities?
• Is the worship space built to accommodate the lesser-used, but still vital parish rituals, in the same way the Jets have accommodated their punters? In other words, can rituals like the Rite of Acceptance or Easter Vigil be celebrated in a way that looks like the space was designed for these events as well as Sunday Mass?
• As worshipers assemble for Mass, find their pews, and prepare to celebrate, what do they see? Just as the Jets employees are looking out their windows at their mission every day, what is it in our worship spaces that visually remind worshipers of our mission?
• Finally, is what we do in our worship spaces so compelling that people feel blessed to be there—just as the lucky season ticket holders do in the Jets organization?

Good architecture should help a company with its mission. It should also help Catholic parishes with theirs.

What is your worship space like? In what ways does it support your parish mission? Please send your pictures and your comments.

1. Homilies that are joyful, inspiring, challenging and that call the assembly to the Lord’s Table.

 

2. A physical environment that is airy, light-filled, hospitable, accessible, warm, and conducive for communal singing

 

3. Presiding or leading that is transparent, inviting, faithful to the rite, and faithful to the assembly

 

4. Hospitality that is extended from everyone, to everyone; above all, strangers are greeted, seated, assisted, and recognized as incarnations of Christ in our midst

 

5. Liturgical ministers who are well-trained, smiling, participating (not just when they are “on”), and ever-alert to the movement of the Spirit in the liturgy

 

6. A praying and singing assembly whose members have contemplated the liturgical readings ahead of time and arrived with their minds attuned to their voices (CSL 11)

 

7. Music that is excellent, that is singable, that thrills the heart, that gives melody to our faith

 

8. Worship aids, bulletins, and inserts that teach with design as well as text, with only necessary words, and with an absence of acronyms

 

What should be added to the list?

Everyone knows the U.S. church is becoming more diverse. And we know that growing diversity is beginning to have an impact on almost every parish. In the old days, we dealt with diversity by segregating people into separate neighborhoods and separate parishes. I once visited a rural town in the Midwest that had two parishes, even though one would have served the entire community. I was told the reason for the double abundance was that parish A was founded for immigrants from Germany and parish B was founded for immigrants from a different region of Germany!

For the most part, we are no longer founding ethnic parishes. Parishes that used to be traditionally Italian or Polish or whatever now find themselves sharing pew space with Catholics from other parts of the globe. What we wind up sharing is not just a difference in language or foods that are brought to the parish potlucks. We also encounter very different styles of leadership and participation in parish life.

In The Loudest Duck: Moving Beyond Diversity While Embracing Difference to Achieve Success at Work, Laura Liswood analyzes how businesses deal with diversity issues. Modern business has engaged in “diversity training” or “sensitivity training” for decades and has mostly failed to leverage the talents of their non-dominant-group employees and managers, according to Liswood. She gives her readers some new lenses with which to look at diversity and some strategies leaders can use to go beyond merely accommodating diversity to maximizing everyone’s contribution to the company.

Do you bring your grandma to work?

The key insight for me was what she calls the grandma effect. When I was a kid, my grandmother told me the squeaky wheel gets the grease. In China, someone my age was taught by his grandmother that the loudest duck gets shot. If he and I are both on the parish council in one of those German-heritage parishes I visited, who do you think will have the most influence with the pastor? All of us grew up with sayings and attitudes that are conscious and unconscious ways of grooming us for success within our own culture. If I tried to bring my squeaky-wheel skills to a parish in China, however, I’d very likely get shot down. The task for a parish leader is to discover what “success behavior” looks like for the various cultures he or she encounters in the parish. And then either accommodate parish ministry to those behaviors or provide stretching exercises for the non-dominant group members so they can participate more successfully. Or usually, the leader will have to employ a combination of both strategies.

Are you a mouse or an elephant?

Another powerful insight from Liswood is her metaphor of the elephant and the mouse. If an elephant and a mouse are in the same room, the elephant may not even be aware of the mouse. And even if the elephant is aware, it doesn’t pay much attention to what the mouse is up to. The mouse, on the other hand, watches the elephant vigilantly, alert to every move the elephant might make. Liswood uses the example of female poker players, who are disproportionately successful at winning games. The reason, according to the women, is they have been learning since they were pre-teens how to read the behavior of men. This is a big advantage in poker. Men, on the other hand, have had less motivation to pay such close attention to female behavior. So in a business or a parish, the dominant group will need to acquire skills for listening better and observing the non-verbal behaviors of traditionally non-dominant groups.

The entire book is worth reading for every parish leader, but Chapter 6, “We hire for difference and fire because they are not the same,” should be required for every pastor, anyone in the diocese who has hiring and firing responsibilities, and anyone in the parish who recruits volunteers. When a parish employee or volunteer is fired, it is, in my experience, more often because of a clash in culture and not because of incompetence. Liswood’s conclusion of the chapter is a good summary of the entire book:

In organizations, managers have the power to allo­cate scarce resources, hire, fire, promote, judge, review, give raises, and assign good projects. The employees re­ceive these positive and negative experiences based on the norms of the culture and how closely they ascribe to them. In diverse organizations, the dynamics are complex. We often evaluate the advantage or disadvantage of oth­ers based on those we are comfortable with, and whether their speaking rituals sound like our own. It helps, then, if two people bring the same Grandmas to work, but that is precisely what doesn’t happen with diversity. We uncon­sciously have right and wrong columns in our head that we add up. When we put different people together—which diversity inherently does—we have to go the next step, move beyond the diversity, and be conscious of who we and others are. Only then can we get the true value of that diversity, make the workplace fair, keep the pipelines flowing, and have more effective global companies.

Share your diversity story

How about you? What is your experience with diversity in parish life? Are you struggling with it? Have you been successful in incorporating differences? Please share your story because it will be helpful for others to hear.

Disclosure: I have not received any compensation for writing this post. I have no material connection to the brands, products, or services that I have mentioned.

Over on Facebook, Joyce Donahue posted a link to a story about our increasingly casual dress in society. Societal norms, of course, influence the way we worship.

I think about this when I’m at church and I see people dressed in shorts and old t-shirts. I’m not a big “coat and tie” prude about Sundays, but shouldn’t our garb for worship be a step above whatever we would wear to clean out the garage?

Whenever I’ve discussed this in public before, someone always replies, “God doesn’t care what we wear.” Well, leaving aside the question of how one can know what God cares about in regard to dress, I don’t think that’s the issue. We aren’t going to church for God’s sake in the first place. We are going for our own sakes and the for each others’. Our effort to “dress up” a little says that we take ourselves, each other, and our worship a bit seriously.

I’d love to know what you think, because I wonder about this a lot.

Cartoon by Dave Walker. Find more at cartoonchurch.com

Priests are thus challenged to proclaim the Gospel by employing the latest generation of audiovisual resources (images, videos, animated features, blogs, Web sites) which, alongside traditional means, can open up broad new vistas for dialogue, evangelization and catechesis.

 
 
Here are five reasons the pope gives for being active in social media:

1. Make God present in today’s world
2. Present the church’s wisdom
3. Offer new forms of encountering Christ
4. Help people grow in expectation and hope
5. Help people draw near to the word of God

What is your experience? Are there other reasons for pastors to be active in social media? What about other parish leaders and volunteers?