Every year about this time, a member of our Parish Pastoral Council stands up at Sunday Mass and offers a brief appeal for nominations to the Council. This weekend you will hear about some of the matters that the Pastoral Council has addressed in recent years and you will be reminded how to nominate yourself or someone else for membership. Perhaps your question is, “Behind all the glitter and the glory, what is it really like to serve on the Pastoral Council?” Let me try to fill in a few of the gaps.

You might be wondering, for example, what our meetings are like. Our bylaws state that a meeting may not last more than two hours; but our goal has always been to keep the meeting to ninety minutes. We have almost always been successful at that, because the officers and I meet the week before the meeting to set the agenda and allot each topic a certain amount of time. We also try to be clear about what is supposed to happen within that time frame. Are we just brainstorming or are we trying to come to a consensus about a particular topic? A consensus decision is one that everyone can accept and live with. Consensus decision making is not as speedy as voting, but it encourages everyone to contribute to the final solution. The reservations that a Council member or the Pastor has to a proposal must be addressed to their satisfaction before we can move ahead.

The first half hour of our meeting is given to prayer, discussion, and learning. Each member takes a turn at preparing a prayer service, a reflection, or a talk about a favorite saint, devotion, or Catholic social teaching. We allot ten minutes for that. Over the past six years, the Council has also elected to educate itself about some topic related to ministry, spirituality, or the social context in which we live. We have chosen a book to read over the course of the year, and spend fifteen or twenty minutes discussing one or two chapters at each meeting. We have read books on revitalizing church ministry (Fr. James Mallon’s Divine Renovations, Tim Glemkowski’s Made for Mission, Fr. Michael White’s Tools for Rebuilding, and Evangelical Pastor James Im’s No Silver Bullets). We have read Fr. David Knight’s Way of the Spirit, and Isabel Wilkerson’s analysis of our country’s social structure, Caste.

Our Parish Pastoral Council is relatively new, compared to many Catholic parishes. Twelve years ago, a steering committee spend a whole year examining how other Pastoral Councils operate and then drawing up the bylaws that would govern our operations. We tried to keep it simple. We avoided standing committees that give reports at every meeting, forming committees only for the purpose of studying or researching a particular topic. The other important decision that we made was to choose members by discernment and not by voting. Just as members of the Council do not vote in meetings, we do not vote for the members of the Council either. This has two benefits. First, it allows everyone an equal chance at serving on the Council. Voting in church almost always favors those who have been in the parish for a long time and whose contributions to parish life are well known. Their parish bio will look much more impressive than someone who joined our church community from Michigan six months ago. More important, serving on the Pastoral Council is a particular ministry within the church, calling for certain gifts and talents. People who are generous with their time and are good at doing may not necessarily be good at considering, evaluating, and recommending—which is the work of the Pastoral Council. Using the nomination process, every adult member of Assumption has an opportunity to serve on the Pastoral Council. Those who are nominated are asked to attend an information session (which in recent years we have done on Zoom), where nominees can become more familiar with our bylaws and can ask very practical questions. Those who choose to move forward will gather in the context of prayer at the evening of discernment. There we will all listen together for whom the Spirit is calling to this ministry. (If this sounds spooky, it’s not!). The steering committee also made the decision not to allow present Council members to succeed themselves, so that we can continue to be revitalized by new voices.

I hope this information is helpful to those of you who receive a nomination or who choose to nominate yourself (Don’t be bashful!). Some years we get a couple of dozen nominees; some years a much smaller number. But even if there are only three nominees left at the evening of discernment, it is not predetermined that those three will serve on the Council just to fill the three open slots. One year we had to reopen the nomination process. Part of the process of renewing the church is looking less for volunteers and more for people who are gifted to serve the community in a particular way. This not only helps avoid burnout of overburdened volunteers, but also challenges all of us to step forward and take an active role in the Body of Christ.

                                 Fr. Joe