is what Pope Saint John Paul II called for when he proclaimed the New Evangelization. This phrase “new evangelization” has come to mean all kinds of things in the Church, including in some contexts especially the use of new media in sharing the Gospel. Yet John Paul was calling for more than that. He was inviting the Church to dramatically reorient herself in the present age, given the cultural trends. Prophetically aware of the challenges already facing the Church and those to come, this great pope proclaimed that he saw “the dawning of a new missionary age, which will become a radiant day bearing an abundant harvest, if all Christians … respond with generosity … to the calls and challenges of our times.”8
The Crucial Role of the Parish
The parish is the Church’s great missionary opportunity. Think about it: All of our “church planting” has already been done! We have outposts of Catholic faithful set up throughout the world, ready to encounter the broader community and culture in which they are placed. Yet too often, especially in the United States, the parish experience is not mission-focused at all. For many Catholics in the United States, the parish experience could be summed up in one word: comfortable. The familiar culture of far too many parishes involves polite suburban people gathering together socially on Sunday mornings and mumbling their way through common prayers before returning to the “real world.” We are seeing the results of this culture all too clearly.
To understand how we got here and what we can do about it, it helps to look more closely at what a parish is, and what it is supposed to be. Did you know that the parish itself is not a building but an area of land? They still call counties “parishes” in the state of Louisiana, a traditionally Catholic area, and this is itself instructive. When we are talking about a parish, we are not referring only to a building owned by the Catholic Church and the Catholics who choose to become members, we are also referring to a geographic region.
Over the centuries, the Church has divided up the entire world into these parishes. By doing so, she has planted outposts of her mission in local communities around the world. Each parish is a local instantiation of the universal Body of Christ. The reason for this is not just to have a place for Catholics to gather, but to show the community of Catholics in any particular area the extent of their shared mission field. Within a given parish’s boundaries, the priests’ job is to sanctify the baptized faithful. The baptized faithful also have a job within those parish boundaries: to sanctify one another within the Body of Christ, and to reach out to those not in full communion with the Church. It is that simple.
For the vast majority of Catholics, almost their entire experience of the Faith will be mediated through the parish. Yet too many of our parishes are clinging to ways of functioning that could not be more out of touch with the presently demanded apostolic moment. So many of our modalities of functioning have been crafted for a cultural moment that no longer exists, one that was much more supportive of religious practice in the wider culture. Even if it does not reach the fullness of the parish’s mission, maintenance of the parish structures is all that a Christian cultural context requires to keep the doors open.
Though this shift has been happening for hundreds of years, the second half of the twentieth century saw this cultural revolution toward a post-Christian society fully mature. We now operate as a Church in what is called a “post-Christian society.” The Christian worldview and praxis are no longer the dominant forms of life in Europe and North America. Traditional morality and religious belief are seen, not just as optional, but as outdated and even repugnant.
Art and entertainment tend to reflect the underlying culture. To take one stark example, consider the Colosseum and the pagan culture of ancient Rome, which it represents. Then consider our own entertainment culture today. In 1953, a Catholic bishop standing in front of a blackboard talking about the moral issues of the day pulled in ten million viewers a week and won the Emmy for “Most Outstanding Television Personality.”9 In 2018–19, the runaway top TV show among adults 18 to 49, Game of Thrones, frequently featured graphic nudity, extreme violence, and various forms of assault. When John Lennon famously remarked in a 1966 interview that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus”10 and that rock ‘n roll would outlive Christianity, maybe he was not only being arrogant, but pointing to a seismic shift in culture that was already taking place.
In our post-Christian society, there has been a rapid and significant breakdown in the family. This is an issue for parishes because we have based many of our parish realities on the strength of the domestic church. As a Church, we have relied on the family unit to support and sustain most of our initiatives. In an ideal world, the parish in all of its structures would exist to support the strong formation that is already taking place at home. In reality, the sacramental numbers alone testify to a weakening of the domestic church in our parishes. While there were 420,000 Catholic marriages in 1970, in 2018 that number dwindled to a generational low of 143,000. It should be no surprise, then, that while there were almost 1.1 million infant baptisms in 1970, in 2018 that number was 615,000.11
When the overall culture supports religious practice, churches get to do ministry as if it is “bumper bowling.” As long as we throw the ball toward the pins, it is going to get there. We may not have a strike every time, but we will at least hit a couple of pins by default! In our current day, the bumpers have been taken off completely. There are almost no cultural pressures to guide current or future generations back into the Church. On the contrary, increasing social pressures are drawing people — including many baptized Catholics — away from the Church Jesus founded.
Clearly, we live today in a very different cultural moment, but many of our parishes are still operating in a “maintenance” mode that would only make sense in a Christian cultural context. In the face of this mounting secularizing shift, many parishes in the United States and other parts of the world are simply not structured to turn things around.
It is crucial that we understand the challenge that now faces our parishes. If we consider our problems to be temporal and shallow, then we might be tempted to think that simply tweaking things will produce the desired results of a renewed Church. Yet maintenance solutions alone cannot turn things around. Only a radical recommitment to our Church’s missionary identity is a fitting response to the revolution taking place in the world. Too often in parishes, we are “playing not to lose” rather than “playing to win.” Today, more is required. What is needed to meet the challenges today’s parishes face is not just a more effective form of maintenance, but a complete transformation into continually operating on mission, like the first apostles who burst out of the Upper Room on Pentecost.
Until now, to make a broad generalization, the New Evangelization that Pope Saint John Paul II called for has been carried out largely in ecclesial movements and ministries. We have not done enough in our parishes, and thankfully, we are beginning to make this a priority. We must figure out how to transform these communities whose structures are often built only for maintenance, and repurpose them for mission. If we do not, we will miss our key advantage for re-Christifying our postmodern world. In the end, the fulfillment of the call to the New Evangelization will depend on the parish, because the parish is the place where salvation history and people’s individual lives meet.
This means that in order to renew the whole Church, we have to first renew the parish.
That is the whole point of this book. My full-time work for many years has been to accompany parishes through a process of renewal focused on discipleship. Through that work, and by encountering parishes of all sizes, I have learned a few key principles about what works and what does not.
Each parish is unique, with a rich history and pastoral context that changes the tactics that might work at ground-level. A “one-size-fits-all” approach to parish renewal simply cannot work, and there is no quick and easy process for renewing a parish, so this book will not seek to propose one. What it does propose is a map of sorts for long-term cultural change. I am convinced that, if each parish
