All year long our Pastoral Council has been meeting frequently and intensely to help me guide our parish in such a way that all of our parish efforts can be “on the same page.” Together we cobbled together our Parish Purpose Statement. This was important to do because too often the various pieces of our puzzle can be running off on their own and miss the need we have to all work together. A purpose statement helps us discern whether or not every effort in our enterprise is helping us succeed with our purpose. Having a clear purpose statement helps us keep our focus and helps us be the best possible stewards of our parishioners’ generosity. Here is the statement we created:
Our parish purpose is to use our baptismal
gifts of faith, hope and charity to inspire
and serve the world so that through us
people will see that God is credible and
present in our time.
Creating this statement of our parish’s reason for being was a great challenge. We could have simply have quoted as our purpose the Great Commission of Matthew 28: “Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.” However, there are certain needs in our time that we want to emphasize as we continue to follow this Great Commission. Let me explain:
- “Use our baptismal gifts” – By the very act of our Baptism we were infused with the theological virtues of faith, hope and charity, so that everyone of us in the parish is being called upon to exercise these gifts given to us for a particular end, namely:
- “to inspire and serve the world” – Being parishioners of this parish (which is a part of the world-wide, 2000 year old Catholic Church) is not just for our own inspiration and consolation. We are called to be Christ in the world, wherever our journey takes us. Many of us travel the world for business or pleasure. Each of us is to exercise our Catholic faith, be an ambassador of hope, and electrify with deeds of charity whoever we come in contact with, wherever we are. Why? This is why:
- “so that through us people will see that God is credible and present in our time” – This phrase was not one we dreamt up. It comes from Pope Benedict XVI, who has pinpointed in this phrase the key problem of our time: that too many people no longer think of God as believable or as having anything to do with, or say to, us today. Our purpose, therefore, is to let the Lord’s grace work through us as a whole parish, and through us as individual members of this parish, to help people come to believe in God and find Him in their own lives.
In the coming postings I will share with you other fruits of the council’s deliberations:
- Clarifying the values we want to inculcate among all of our parish groups;
- Defining the acceptable behaviors for living by these values;
- Establishing our parish priorities on which to focus in the coming months.
By the way, the members of the Pastoral Council are as follows:
Neil Schiffhauer, President
James Cavanagh
Melissa Haapala
Betty Jancosek
Joe Kubler
Tommy Lorden
Catalina Mendez
Pat Palaich
Pam Jackimiec
Ex officio: Our pastor, our parish administrator and our school principal.
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