Lay Ministries: Summit affirms lay stake in future church

Catholic laywomen and men turned a corner in this city of fantasy and family fun April 20-23. They stepped out of the shadow of their church’s sex abuse crisis and its acute shortage of religious vocations and looked instead at the light that their own work as lay ecclesial ministers is bringing to the mission of the church.

Some 1,200 participants -- the majority of them lay -- came to Orlando to share their experiences of leadership in the American church and to spark a national conversation on how to use pastoral imagination to create vibrant parishes.

Billed as a national ministry summit, the meeting represented the culmination of a four-year study of Emerging Models of Pastoral Leadership, financed by a $2 million Lilly Endowment grant. The project was a joint venture of six national ministerial groups that comprise umbrella organizations for lay ministers, pastoral planners, deacons, priests, young adult ministers and church personnel administrators.

In many ways, the project is more an affirmation of what already exists than a discovery of new ministries in the church. The six groups collaborated in providing research on the type of leadership that has emerged during the past two to three decades in a church that has grown more than 40 percent since 1965 while its clergy corps has dropped 20 percent during that same period.

Both the research and the summit are responses to new realities in a U.S. church experiencing fewer and older priests and religious, a more educated laity, the highest number of deacons (16,000) of any single country, a growing and diverse Catholic immigrant population, an influx of foreign priests and the emergence of thousands of professionally prepared laypeople who view their call to ministry as a genuine vocation, not just a job or second career.

Precious Blood Fr. Robert Schreiter called the gathering “remarkable” and “historic,” on a par with the 1890 Congress of Black Catholics, the liturgical movement of the 1930s and 1940s and the Encuentro of Hispanic Catholics in 2000.

The summit and the eight regional consultations that preceded it are changing the structure of parish leadership and showing how the church has matured since the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), said Schreiter, a theologian at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago.

desc=Bishop Blase CupichWhile many participants attributed the rise of new leadership models to the paucity of priests and sisters, Bishop Blase Cupich of Rapid City, S.D., finds that perspective limited. Cupich, the episcopal adviser to the Emerging Models project, said laypeople are answering the call to holiness that is part of their baptismal heritage. “It is a call that has to mature into a call to communio and a call to witness,” he said.

Lay ecclesial ministers are more fully integrated into the life of their parishes and dioceses and are faithful to the mission of the church precisely because “we are all coworkers in the vineyard,” said Cupich, echoing the title of the U.S. bishops’ 2005 pastoral on the development of lay ecclesial ministry. “Lay and ordained all have a stake in the future of our church.”

Project director Marti JewellProject director Marti Jewell credited the growth of some 31,000 lay ecclesial ministers -- working 20 or more hours per week in the church -- and the 10,000 now in training to the work of the Holy Spirit and the needs of a growing church.

Many suggestions from conference participants, who discussed needs in small groups, dealt with ongoing formation. Even priests can’t learn all they have to know to be a pastor during five years in seminary, said Fr. Richard Siepka. “They must be prepared for lifetime learning.”

Siepka, rector of Christ the King Seminary in East Aurora, N.Y., welcomed the training of deacons, laymen and women at seminaries. “It makes it easier for all of us to work together,” he said.

One fully engaged woman, Sr. Florita Rodman, leads St. Helen Church in Amory, Miss. The Divine Providence Sister, who worked 40 years in the southern part of Boston, has been involved with lay ministry since the 1980s. She serves one of the more than 530 U.S. parishes that have a deacon, a sister or layperson in charge of the pastoral needs of the congregation. These leaders are active in two-thirds of American dioceses -- many in the Midwest, South and West, where lack of local priests is acute and parishes are located miles from one another.

The nun conducts the Sunday celebration in the absence of a priest, and has the assistance of two sacramental ministers. She described her ministry as “exciting, challenging and exhausting. … I find great satisfaction in working with the 80 families in the parish. I feel a part of their lives -- their joys, but also their struggles, their cancers and old age.”

Finances came up frequently around the summit’s 100-plus tables. Among audible suggestions: “Call this a real job with real benefits.” “Combine recruitment drives for lay and religious vocations.” “Get dioceses to invest more in the laity.” “Encourage parish scholarships for lay ministry training.” “Fund campus ministers at state schools.”

When NCR asked who would pay for the cadre of lay ministers and find parish or diocesan placements for those in the pipeline, Cupich replied: “Money follows mission. We’ve got to get the mission piece right first. ... We can’t treat people like ATM cards.”

Though many praised the energy and breadth of the summit, several voiced their concern that its audience was “too white” and “too old” to rightly represent a 21st-century church of young people and of newcomers who are largely Catholics of color.

Nicole Sotelo, program coordinator for Call to Action in Chicago, worried that the summit’s recommendations might not be acted upon. She recalled a similar fate when the original Call to Action conference organized by the bishops in 1976 brought forth recommendations only to see a majority of bishops “walk away from the concerns” of the lay, religious and clergy who had gathered, she told NCR.

Jewell said the six project partners would study the recommendations and report back to participants, helping them integrate what they’ve learned here into their future ministry practices. Plans were also on line to have other church groups join the alliance of six.

Patricia Lefevere is a longtime contributor to NCR.

National Catholic Reporter June 13, 2008