Guiding your faith community into even greater faithful presence within its parish invites discernment of the collective. Where and how to focus time and energy is a vital and ongoing journey of listening and adapting. Sometimes we get sidetracked by important things that keep us from our primary calling. Here is a framework drawn from the discipline of Social Work which I find to be a helpful tool. This simple framework can help leaders wisely identify where and how our energies are being invested.
Its a fairly straightforward, noting of three primary practice areas: Macro, Mezzo, and Micro.
The Macro
| Macro practice explicitly embodies the parish church’s commitment to holistic social justice, creation care, equity, and social change by collaborating with others to promote structural solutions to systemic inequalities and various forms of oppression that go beyond individual adaptation and resilience. |
The Mezzo
| The Mezzo practice is the bread and butter of the parish church. The mezzo is the parish. The mezzo area of practice deals with small-to-medium-sized groups, such as neighborhoods, schools or other local organizations, rooted within a local context, or linked across parishes for mutual support and collaboration. General examples of mezzo work include community organizing, pastoring a faith community, or managing a social work organization. The mezzo focuses on collective practice, local engagement unto the common good, note that this is focused on the collective rather than individual people. Parish leaders engaged in mezzo practice are inevitably engaged in some measure of both micro and macro levels as the neighborhood is the real world where the micro (people) and macro (systems) integrate and find expression in reality. It is in real place were we see and feel the impact of the macro on real persons and places. Again, the mezzo is the primary area of practice for parish leaders. |
The Micro
| The Micro practice area is the realm of the person, family, and small local social groups. This is often the realm of pastoral care, chaplaincy, spiritual direction, or counselling. It is often the realm many people mistakenly imagine as a pastor’s primary work. In the micro parish pastor engages with individuals and families in order to address and mature intrapersonal and interpersonal barriers to relationship, communal thriving, and global sustainability. |
As you can see from the definitions and the image above the Mezzo is the realm which most naturally reveals the impact of the Macro on the Micro, while also being the realm in which the Micro are knitted together to transform the Marco. All three realms are vital in parish life, yet the calling of the parish pastor is to attend to and from the Mezzo.
I found this helpful video by some of that faculty at the University of Wisconsin’s Sandra Rosenbaum School of Social Work. The video is clearly anchored in the practice of social work but they provide some helpful definitions of these three areas of practice.
Peace, dwight
