Under the Fir Tree

A pastor has declining offertory, an aging building, an unsettled staff, and a school whose future is uncertain. He calls the chancery. Finance offers financial guidance. Human resources helps with staffing. Facilities assesses the building. The schools office reviews enrollment. Each response may be competent and necessary. But someone still has to decide what these problems mean together, what deserves attention first, and how the parish will move forward. Too often, that someone is the pastor, working largely on his own. He hasn't simply asked for help with his parish. Now, he's acquired the additional responsibility of coordinating the chancery. That's where I'd begin a conversation about chancery organization. Not with the org chart. With what happens when the Church's life arrives at our door in the form of one complicated parish. What Do We Need to Become Exceptionally Good At? In the article “ Know What Actually Drives the Organization ,” a question's ex...

A Continuation # # # The previous post asked whether the parish handles what has been given with integrity and transparency. This one asks about the physical environment those gifts have built and sustained. Facilities is the final discipline in this series, and its placement at the end isn't an accident. Buildings, campuses, and physical spaces don't generate mission. They serve it, or they hinder it, or they consume it. A parish whose facilities are poorly maintained, poorly utilized, or poorly aligned with its actual mission isn't managing an operational problem. It's allowing a physical reality to undermine a pastoral one, and paying for that undermining with resources the mission needs elsewhere. The Examen surfaced facilities concerns more consistently than almost any other operational area across the archdiocese. Deferred maintenance, aging infrastructure, underutilized spaces, and campuses built for a parish that no longer exists in its current form: these aren...

A Continuation # # # The previous post asked about the theology and culture of giving: whether the parish is forming its people in generosity as a spiritual practice rather than managing an annual appeal. This one asks what happens after the gifts arrive. Financial management is the discipline of handling what has been given with integrity, transparency, and accountability. It's the operational foundation beneath the stewardship culture the previous post described. A parish that forms its people in generous giving and then manages those gifts carelessly has broken faith with its own formation. It has asked people to trust the mission with their treasure and then failed to honor that trust with the systems the treasure deserves. The framing is simple and worth holding: all of the parish's income and financial assets are handled with integrity and used appropriately for the advancement of the Kingdom. Simple standard. Meeting it requires deliberate systems, clear oversight, and ...

A Continuation # # # The previous post asked whether the parish is known and trusted in its immediate neighborhood. This one asks about the wider horizon. A parish genuinely embedded in its local community and genuinely formed in missionary discipleship will eventually bump up against a question its neighborhood can't fully answer: what is our responsibility to the mission of the Church beyond what we can see from the parking lot? Mission partnerships is the discipline that takes that question seriously. It asks whether the parish understands itself as a sent community, not merely a stationed one, with responsibilities that extend locally, regionally, and globally. Whether the parish's missionary imagination is as large as the mission it's been given. Whether the people gathered on Sunday understand themselves as part of a movement that is genuinely global and genuinely alive, or whether they understand themselves as members of a local religious organization with occasional...

A Continuation # # # The previous post asked whether the parish is making the love of Christ visible through organized service to people in need. This one asks a more basic question. Does the surrounding community know the parish exists? And does it experience the parish as a gift rather than as a background institution it occasionally notices from the highway? Service ministries reach the people who find their way to the parish's programs. This discipline asks about something prior: whether the parish is known, present, and trusted in the broader neighborhood it was placed to serve. Whether the community around the building has any real sense of the community inside it. Whether the parish's presence in its neighborhood is something the neighborhood actually feels. There is a diagnostic question worth carrying through the entire post: if the parish closed its doors tomorrow, what difference would it make to the community around it? Not to the parishioners. To the community. To ...

A Continuation # # # The previous post asked whether the parish is developing the volunteers and lay leaders it needs to sustain and multiply the mission. This one asks about the deepest form of that question. Whether the parish is forming people whose encounter with Christ is deep enough, and whose faith is formed enough, that some of them begin to hear God calling them to give their whole lives. Vocations to the priesthood, religious life, and the diaconate aren't produced by vocation programs. They're produced by parishes that pray, form disciples, accompany people through the interior life, and take the question of total consecration seriously enough that it becomes thinkable. The Archbishop's Examen singled out the vocations question for special attention. He asked parishes to pay particular attention to when the last vocation to the priesthood, diaconate, or religious life came from their community. That question is worth sitting with before any program discussion be...

A Continuation # # # The previous post asked whether the parish is teaching the faith systematically and whether its people can articulate what they believe. This one asks a related but distinct question. Does the parish have the people it needs to actually do the work the mission requires? Not just the pastor. Not just the staff. The trained, formed, supported volunteers and lay leaders without whom no parish can sustain its mission at scale, who carry the welcome and the pastoral care and the small group leadership and the sacramental preparation and the works of mercy that no staff team, however dedicated, can carry alone. Here's a strategic observation worth leading with: a parish's volunteer and leadership training system is not an administrative support function. It is one of the primary ways a parish increases mission capacity. If this system is weak, growth will eventually stall because the parish will lack the trained people needed to welcome newcomers, support small g...