Between the “Leadership in the New Parish” think tanks and the hundreds of parish walkabout Tim Soerens, Paul Sparks, and I have lucky enough to have engage over the last few years, we’ve identified 2 vital questions, and 10 practices that can help a person who is beginning to sense that their neighborhood is wooing them toward even greater faithful presence. As is always the invitation with any self-reflective question, the hope would be that you might be really honest with yourself, opening up to the real, while interrogating any assumptions or narratives you may wish to believe.
QUESTION 1 – When you think about your neighborhood, how are you feeling about your presence within it?
QUESTION 2 – What could you experiment with to become even more faithfully present?
The following 10 practices are a blending of actions and postures that you can do by yourself, or with neighbors ,or members of your local group…
· Plot your Parish – Identify your parish. It has natural, porous boundaries. It’s a place that’s big enough to live a lot of life in, and small enough to be a known character. Your city is too big, your development or street is too small. Can you map it?
· Follow the Goose – Start where the Spirit is already moving and focus on the gifts, strengths, and passion of the people.
· Habit Exchange – Consider where you spend your time, resources, money, even relationships, and discern how to move them into the neighborhood whenever possible.
· Find the Bumping Spots – Inhabit a few local public areas where people already intersect and connect.
· Connect liturgy to Everyday Life – Reimagine your prayers, songs, and liturgical practices as a rehearsal for life together in the parish.
· Lean toward difference – When you discover someone (group) who feels like “the other” in your parish move towards them in collaboration & friendship.
· Common matters – Begin to pay attention to how the economic, civic, environmental, and educational sectors play out in the local context that residents share together.
· Point to the Center – Keep bringing it back to faithful presence, champion the faithful stories, help people remember their core desire and identity in Christ.
· Shift the Shape – Tweak the yards, streets, rooms, and buildings for relational engagement.
· Pray – Invite God to teach you to be present within your parish. Ask the Spirit to give you eyes to see and a heart to feel the suffering and oppression within your place that you haven’t noticed before.
Peace, dwight
