Reading Time: 20 minutes
Welcome to my place! I’m delighted to see so many here for what will be, God willing, two days of inspiring reflection upon Parish Renewal. I would like to acknowledge the tireless efforts of the Parish Renewal Team and the Sydney Centre for Evangelisation, for providing this opportunity to the Church in Sydney and beyond. The Archdiocese is blessed to have so many sharing their gifts to make our parishes places of encounter with Christ, of spiritual growth, of pastoral support, and of outreach to the community. This evening I’d like to reflect with you on parishes as centres of evangelisation.
Whether or not we are Boomers, COVID has made us all Zoomers! The video-conferencing app Zoom is now used on a truly ‘biblical’ scale: by 300 million participants daily for 3.5 trillion minutes a year.[i] Yet it was not all plain sailing for its Chinese-born founder Eric You-wuhn Yuan. In the late 1990s he sought to move to Silicon Valley in the U.S., so he could join the tech boom, but his visa application was rejected eight times. On the ninth attempt he was finally admitted and started work with WebEx, a web conferencing startup. Because he spoke virtually no English, his primary mode of communication was computer code. Back in his university days he had to travel more than ten hours to visit his girlfriend (and future wife) Sherry and he had lamented his difficulty in seeing and speaking to her.[ii] This sparked his interest in developing videocall software that would connect people better. In 2011 he pitched a new smartphone-friendly version to WebEx and Cisco Systems, only to have the idea rejected: the market was already saturated with comms technologies from Microsoft and others; even his friends said he was proposing a ‘solution’ to a problem that didn’t exist! But Eric was having none it: convinced of the merits of his idea and motivated by love, he started his own company Zoom and convinced some talented developers to join him. The app went public in April 2019, the COVID-19 virus emerged a few months later, and the rest is history. The success of Zoom in told in Yuan’s net worth rising $US16.4 billion in the following year and by the fact that Zoom and zooming are now part of the universal vocabulary!
Although our parishes are not Silicon Valley start-ups, Eric You-wuhn’s Yuan’s tale of a project aimed at bringing people together that was sparked by love, pursued with conviction, demonstrated trust amidst risk and perseverance despite setbacks, and built upon teamwork has its parallels with our present concerns. Indeed, one of tomorrow’s presenters will be zooming us from America. There is inspiration there for us, even if Zoom is not altogether the way of the future for our parishes.
The Who and Where of the Missionary Parish
There are no parishes as such in the New Testament. There is ‘the Church’ as a whole[iii] and there are ‘the Churches’—more or less dioceses—in Jerusalem, Antioch, Corinth, Rome, Ephesus, Smyrna etc.[iv] Yet you might say there are the beginnings of the idea of parishes. While there was only one Temple in Jerusalem—the cathedral as it were—there were synagogues in the towns and suburbs where people prayed, gave or received alms, studied and discussed the word of God, and were governed as a local faith community.[v] Jesus Himself was a regular both at the Temple and in the synagogues. His first intimation of the Eucharist, however, was out in the hills with thousands of people, when He took bread—and fish—blessed, broke and miraculously multiplied it,[vi] echoing a previous occasion when He had miraculously changed water to wine in similarly extravagant quantity.[vii] This time he directed the disciples to divide the crowd into what we might call parishes of fifty or a hundred families, so they could receive this proto-eucharist (Mk 6:40; Lk 9:14). And while Jesus had thousands of followers, He mostly worked with the Twelve plus some holy women and only they were present for His Last Supper, post-Resurrection appearances and Pentecost…
So, a community gathered in a place of a scale to allow a certain intimacy was a feature of the life of the early Church. It was in this context that the first Christians practiced “the Breaking of the Bread and the prayers”, proclamation and witness, and works of charity. And while all the Christians of a particular city or district would gather in one place on a Sunday, these were often in domestic settings[viii] and thus presumably fairly intimate groups. In due course there were Christian groups in centres beyond Jerusalem and these had an apostle or bishop as their founder and thereafter as their leader. The world was gradually divided in dioceses.
In the centuries that followed, as diocesan congregations became too big to congregate with their bishop in a house or even in a cathedral, presbyters were appointed to celebrate on behalf of the bishop in local communities and so dioceses were divided into multiple territories. Our English word for those territories, ‘parish’, comes from the Anglo-French paroche, the Latin ‘parochia’ and the Greek πάροικος (from πάρα which means near and οικος meaning household, clan or neighbourhood): they word means a group of faithful who are neighbours or fellow-travellers in a particular district.[ix]
Dividing the world into dioceses and the dioceses into parishes was never an entirely neat arrangement. There were monasteries, and later more active religious orders, with their own churches, ceremonies, charities and lay associates. There were shrines and pilgrimage sites and the private chapels of the upper classes. Cathedrals became rather unusual city parishes as well as centres of much else in diocesan and even civic life. Missionaries were sent out to areas where people were yet unevangelised or little catechised. But for most people the parish church was the centre of their Church life and this often mirrored the people and boundaries of their neighbourhood or municipality. ‘Closer to the ground’ than cathedrals and monasteries, the parish system allowed for the provision of many kinds of pastoral care and evangelisation—even if levels of faith and activity varied enormously from time to time and place to place.
Thus the Catechism of the Catholic Church speaks of the parish as a place “where all the faithful can be gathered together for the Sunday Celebration of the Eucharist”, where Christians are initiated and Christ’s teachings elaborated, where the Gospel is lived in charity and concretely expressed in good works.[x] So, while there is an undeniable territorial aspect to parish as the ‘somewhere’ that Christians gather—whether it’s a house, a catacomb or a ‘bricks-and-mortar’ church appointed to serve a particular district—its true essence is the participation of a group of people in the Paschal Mystery of Christ who may or may not be perfectly circumscribed by the geography of their domicile. Sunday Mass may be at the heart of the parish idea, but no-one will come to Mass unless they are brought to faith and practice by evangelisation, family, culture; and Mass itself should equip and project people back into the world they must influence for the better. Thus, if parishes are to be Mass centres, they must also be centres of evangelisation: the one feeds the other.
What’s more, the baptismal vocation of every pastor and parishioner mandates solicitude for those attending but also for those beyond the present attendees. Healthy parishes are, as it were, infectious: while their pastor may focus much of his energy on the care of those who already identify as his flock, those he shepherds must themselves extend the faith, love and worship of that community to others, especially to those who have not known it or have forgotten it. This means that the very logic of parishes is proclamatory or missionary: they are there precisely to ensure that the Good News of salvation spreads ever more widely and penetrates ever more deeply in a particular district. They are the local vehicles of evangelisation for an evangelising Church.
The For Whom of the Missionary Parish
Our parishes, then, are not static entities, designed to keep the ‘in-group’ of the committed comfy. They are more like organisms, with numerous dedicated cells and organs, each working together towards a common goal of nourishment and growth, self-rejuvenation and reproduction. The DNA directing this organism’s mission—its Great Com-mission—comes from the Lord’s last words to us (Mt 28:18-20; Mk 16:14-18), with its four-fold mandate:
- to evangelise—“go out to all the world, preaching the Gospel” and “making disciples of all nations”
- to sacramentalise those disciples—“baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit”
- to catechise those disciples— “teaching them to obey everything I commanded you” and
- to memorialise His presence with us—“remembering that I am with you always, to the very end of time”.
Successful parishes, then, are like farms constantly sowing new Gospel seeds in people’s hearts, or like nets always trying to draw new ones in—to use two Gospel metaphors. But this ‘growth’ is more subtle than corporate growth for profit’s sake or bureaucratic growth following some five-year plan. The fruits f evangelisation are not always immediately obvious and parishes must engage in the ‘inefficiency’ (as this world sees it) of the Good Shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine in search of the single lost one, or the Good Farmer who casts his seed everywhere, hoping that in some place it will take root and sprout and fruit.[xi] This growth is more subtle but no less intentional: we must be quite deliberate about making our parishes places that radiate the love of God, places where Jesus is encountered not only within church walls but where he is taken to those outside, calling them in to his life-giving love.
The Why of the Missionary Parish
The Church in Sydney is living out the mission of Jesus Christ in a time of unprecedented change. Sydney’s population continues to grow, while the sources of meaning and way of life for many have radically changed. Fewer people engage with our parishes or other community groups for that matter. Not as many are as active or effective in transmitting faith to the next generation. Some are disillusioned by the child abuse crisis. Others are victim to the relentless march of secularisation. The recent census found that many no longer identify with any particular religion and are happy to tick ‘no religion’ in a culture inimical to faith. Others are gradually drifting away, not through any conscious choice against, faith, God or the institution, but by attachment to competing narratives and interests and distractions of many kinds. The pandemic and associated restrictions on worship were also keenly felt. Some traditional methods and supports for mission are no longer effective; others might yet be rediscovered and reinvigorated; but some new directions must urgently be taken.
This concern to propose the Gospel ever ancient, ever new, to our times sparked renewed thinking about evangelisation at and following the Second Vatican Council. This drive to recapture the missionary nature of the Church has been a very strong one in the recent papacies. In Evangelii Nuntiandi Pope Paul VI taught that God’s kingdom is built up by those who sincerely accept the Good News into their hearts, gather in the name of Jesus in faith-filled communities, and then share this with others. This means that evangelisation is incumbent upon all of us who have received and accepted the Gospel, not just the official missionaries to ‘deepest darkest Africa’.[xii] We are all called to be evangelisers, but in our case to deepest darkest Yagoona! And our reason is simple: every human person is, we know, made for truth and goodness and beaty, and ultimately for communion with God and fellows; none of us will truly thrive without this. So love for each individual should drive our evangelising, not some numbers game, not some target of parishioners or collections, not so we can feel good about ourselves. No bureaucracy or grand plan can love you: only a person can love you, a divine or human person, and so mission is always one to one and one by one.
Evangelisation is no numbers game. But should we care about numbers none
