Parish

PARISH – THE CATHOLIC COMMUNITY.

  The parish has been the traditional place where Catholics have lived out and practiced their faith.  The parish is generally geographic, encompassing a particular area.  Sometimes the parish is ethnic, made up of people from a similar background but living in different parts of a city or countryside.  It is in the parish that people get support for their faith, that they have the responsibility of building community, and that they bring up their children in faith in Christ and his way of life. 

  The parish today needs a lot of attention by its leaders and by all who hold the Church dear.  Living, as we do, in a very individualistic age the parish is the best provider of a real community for people’s lives. The parish needs to be built in such a way that there is a place for everyone who wants to belong.  It is a very complex community where there are more questions than answers.  It needs to be a real mother and father for people’s faith, hope and love.

  Love is for Life Trust can help in your parish’s development.  One of the major things that we have to offer is a system of Parish Strategic Planning.     To know more about this please click on the button Strategic Planning. 

  We also can provide, or put you in touch with others who can provide, spiritual renewal programmes.  The renewal of prayer in our homes, in our own lives, in our parish is so very important for the health of the parish community.  To see what we are doing in the Movement of Continuous Prayer for Marriage & Family Life, please go to the section on Prayer and click on Continuous Prayer.

And one of the exciting programmes we have to offer is the Nazareth Programme for young people as they leave Primary education and move into Secondary level.  This programme is geared to help claim these young people for the parish community in order to keep that community young in spirit and also to exercise its responsibility for handing on the faith to the next generation.  To know more about this, please go to the section on Family and click on Young People.

Finally, it is so important to remember that the heart of the Church is in our homes and families.  The real health of the Catholic Community is to be found in our couples loving one another in the Sacrament of Marriage; our parents giving themselves generously to their children in love; our children and young people growing up with a spirit of openness to the needs of the world in which we live and a knowledge of how much richness they have to bring to that world.  Visit the section on Marriage regularly and grow in a profound respect for marriage.  Our couples, parents and families need the wider community to support them if they are to live their vocation of love to the full.

Strategic Planning 
in Parishes

What is strategic planning?

  This is a tool which has been widely used in business and community settings over many years. In short, strategic planning is a process whereby those who have an interest or involvement in an organisation come together to create a common vision for the organisation and to devise a series of actions which can make the vision a reality.

  It has not yet been widely used in Catholic parishes but the Love is for Life Trust has been working with a small number of parishes in various parts of Ireland to explore how the strategic planning process might be adapted for use in those parishes. We believe strongly that if we fail to plan we plan to fail.

  Someone recently said “If you want to give God a laugh show Him your plans.” They were using this joke as a reason for not planning and implying that God does not need us to plan. But God does need us to plan. Nothing will happen without His support and we can tell an old joke in reply: “ A man wanted to win the lottery and he asked God to help him.  Of course, he didn’t win and so he asked several more times and again he had no luck. Eventually he got fed up and lost his temper with God. The reply was, ‘ well, at least you could buy a ticket.’ ”

In a sense strategic planning is our purchase of the lottery ticket.

How does strategic planning work?

There is no precise and definitive way to plan strategically. We tend to take the following steps if we are helping a parish to plan strategically:

1.      We ask the parishioners how they see their parish. This is invariably done by designing a questionnaire, distributing it at Sunday masses and asking people to complete it during mass instead of listening to a homily.

2.      The questionnaire is analysed and the results fed back to the parishioners either again at Sunday masses or at a special parish Assembly which is open to every parishioner. (To see a sample questionnaire click here)

3.      During the Assembly people have an opportunity to look at the survey findings and then to begin to design the actions which might be taken to meet the needs identified by the survey.

4.      Overseeing all of this could be the Parish Pastoral Council or if none exists a special Parish Core Group might be set up.

5.      This group then works on the feedback from the survey and Assembly  and designs the draft plan.

6.      The plan usually contains:

A vision for the parish

The values by which the parish will operate

The parish mission statement

The aims the plan will try to achieve

The objectives for each aim

The actions to be taken to achieve each objective

(To see extracts from a parish plan click here.)  

NEWRY PARISH DEVELOPMENT PLAN

  If you would like further information on our approach to strategic planning at the parish level please contact us.