In Search of the Emerging Church
June 20, 2009After attending the National Ministry Summit, and listening to the stories of Catholics as they describe the nature of the life and changes in their parishes, Tom Roberts, editor at large for the National Catholic Reporter, began a road trip to meet and further exploring the emerging reality.
View this ArticleTom Roberts, NCR's editor at large, has decided to conduct a series of road trip to visit Catholic pairtshes first hand.
"The idea of taking an extended road trip to get a closer look at Catholic America began to take shape little more than a year ago when I attended a national meeting that demonstrated rather clearly that something is bubbling up from the grassroots in U.S. Catholicism. The meeting was a kind of culminating gathering, to that point, of a four-year study, funded by the Lilly Endowment and titled, "Emerging Models of Pastoral Leadership."
After four years, to put it quickly, the study had established through extensive interviews with church workers and leaders throughout the country, as well as exhaustive research and discussion, that:
- Lay people have become an integral part of the functioning of the U.S. church;
- Some old presumptions about who does what in the church were fading;
- Unity in the U.S. church was certainly not dependent on things being identical. In fact, during that gathering in Florida it was abundantly evident that the means of keeping the church together, of sustaining worshiping communities and parish ministries and education and all the rest varied significantly from one region of the country to the next.
- The numbers of priests and sisters were not only in continual decline, but those who remain are aging while the number of trained lay ministers had grown to the tens of thousands.
The project has generated papers, speeches, articles and at least three small books, and amid it all the notion of "emergence" plays large. While the project is principally about emerging models of pastoral leadership, part of the process involves looking at an emerging theology of parish and the emerging ministry of parish life coordinators. There is an almost springtime feel to all the talk of newness, emergent shoots of new life, if you will, breaking through the troublesome loss of parishes, the deepening crisis of the priest shortage and continuing drop in the number of women religious, as well as demographic shifts and challenges that create episcopal nightmares."
Follow the "On th eRoad" series at NCR Online.
