BEING AMERICAN AND CATHOLIC - #3

WHAT ARE OUR PRIORITIES?

The last column considered the first priority for the church in the United States: a preferential option for the poor and a challenge to the rich. Father Anthony J. Gittens presents three other priorities for the church and its mission: the promotion of new communities, a commitment to mission instead of maintenance, and a reverse evangelization (i.e., being a church that both gives and receives).
This column will focus on the promotion of new communities. Every farming community knows that the annual harvest achieves two purposes. It feeds the community and provides seeds for next year's harvest. The gospel does this, too. It sustains the well fed and provides seeds of a wider scattering (broadcasting). "(The gospel) must be planted in new or abandoned fields and not simply be gathered into barns."
During this time of spiritual crisis, the church in the United States needs life-bearing seeds of faith in order to avoid a great famine. This means that the church will flourish by promoting new communities and new expressions of community in parish life. Gittens states his case:"Conventional parish structures may be like rusty machinery, once effective, but no longer so, due to wear and tear and changed times. Parishes are not 'service stations' and Christians are not chauffeurs bringing automobiles for tune ups...Service stations - or barns - are inadequate models for the church of tomorrow. If yesterday people came to church,, tomorrow the church must go to the people. If not, not only will it continue to lose the people, it will lose its own soul."
How can the church regain its soul? The church publicizes itself by becoming more relational, "less a dispenser of sacraments - on - schedule and more a community of faith-and-works." I would add, less a church where parents sent their kids to CCD so that they can get their sacraments and more a church where faith underscores daily life and urges a deeper religious literacy. Some call this reshaping of parish life the reinvention of the church. The foundational issue is faith and edification: not building or renovating effete edifices, but the fashioning of bonds and the forging of relationships "Still too many churches dot our landscape while too few communities of support and encouragement are to be found." Putting faith into practice requires that we rediscover ourselves as a people and not simply as individuals. Catholics have to ask, is it costly or inexpensive to be a Christian and to be a church?
North American parishes are learning from our kin in the churches of the Caribbean, Central and South America. Small faith communities developed so that people could relate the gospel to their place in the world. The communities met regularly to reflect on their own experience of struggle, poverty, and pain. They connected real life situations with the message of the gospel. These base communities developed bonds of support, love and friendship. They enable creative action. In some instances, small faith communities have sustained people with courage to lay down their lives. Faith is costly. The martyrs-of-the-Americas are contemporary witnesses for the gospel. Ordinary Christians are sowing the seeds that blossom into human, land, civil, economic and earth rights.

John J. O'Brien, C.P.