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Forming Missionary Disciples for Synodality in a Home Mission Diocese
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December 9, 2021
An example of one of our current projects has us working in collaboration with Deacon Clemente Villa, Director of Hispanic Ministry in the home mission Diocese of San Angelo, TX. We are helping him to prepare a team of lay leaders to carry out culturally sensitive home visitations in the parishes of the Diocese. They want to reach out to those living on the peripheries of the Church and society to accompany them and welcome them to their parish community. They see it as a ministry of welcoming, grounded in the Church’s evangelizing mission.
The project has three parts to it that illustrate well the multi-faceted and tailored approach the Congar Institute takes to accompany our partners in lay leadership formation. To its credit, the Church in San Angelo has been training lay leaders on the parish level in culturally sensitive home visitation for some time. However, the training needed renewal, and they needed assistance with implementing and evaluating it.
The first part of the project involves helping the Diocesan Office to update the training manual. The manual they have been using originated prior to Pope Francis’ election. They recognize that this Pope has promoted significant new insights and a whole new vision for this ministry. So we will help them to integrate Pope Francis’ vision of missionary discipleship and the insights of the V Encuentro, which was based on his vision, into the materials.
We assisted them this past weekend in redesigning their bilingual train-the-trainer workshop based on the new manual. This workshop was intended for lay parish leaders. The 20 lay leaders who attended the workshop were trained to train others in their parishes to do the home visitations. Our Resource Persons, Anna Alicia Chavez and Marco Martinez facilitated the weekend workshop.
Imagine that each of these lay leaders will return to their parishes to train other lay leaders at the parish level. Let’s assume that each of them has 15 participants at their parish workshops. That’s 300 lay leaders at the parish level trained in the skills needed to carry out culturally sensitive home visitations. These home visitations are intended for those within the parish boundaries who are not active in the church community. Let’s assume that each of these 300 skilled culturally sensitive visitors will then visit an average of 10 households, each with at least 4 members. That’s a total of 3,000 households and 12,000 individuals.
Their purpose: to inform the residents of the presence of the church, its services, and that they are welcome to participate. They will also listen carefully and sensitively to the needs of those they visit, noting what those needs are—a home-bound member of the household who needs communion or anointing, anxiety about food, rent money, employment, childcare, or awareness of social services, and so on. They will answer questions, inform them of services the church already offers that they may not be taking advantage of, pray with them if they ask, and encourage them to be active in the church community. They will also note down needs that they can’t address or that the church is not currently addressing and take that information back to the church community. This is what Pope Francis means when he calls the church to the practice of synodality: careful mutual listening (made more possible and effective by training in cultural sensitivity) and prayerful discernment about how the church can respond to what is heard as it listens. That is why they will take back with them the information they hear. It will build the response of the community to the actual needs of the larger community. Most importantly, it will be a response to what the church hears from the peripheries.
This will take some time. The train-the-trainer workshops took place in early December. The local parish training workshops will probably take place early in 2022. Then the home visitations will likely take place in late winter and early spring. Once all the home visitations are completed, the Institute will facilitate an evaluation that will also reinforce the participants’ learning. The Congar Institute’s work of empowering lay leaders has a multiplying effect as the leaders go on to touch many lives.