OVERSIGHT OF PARISH LIFE AND DEVELOPMENT
Oversight is what knits things together in harmony and beauty. Oversight is expressed in the three threads of spirituality, community, and leadership. Oversight provides strength and connection for the fabric of Christian life. They offer richness and depth in worship, doctrine and action.
Oversight is also a process of reflection and action, a discernment process. It is the process of:
-
Reflection on the state of the parish, especially on the parish’s productivity in its primary task of renewing people in their baptismal identity and purpose and sending them into their daily life; and
-
Action that creates the conditions from which the primary task is accomplished.
So, oversight involves the creation of a learning organization; an organization with the capacity to learn from its experience. This is very different from the type of oversight that acts as though the task is simply to create a vision or a plan. It’s relatively easy to get parish leaders to share their hopes and desires for the parish’s future. It’s much more difficult to get them in a disciplined process of looking at their common experience, assessing it and discerning God’s presence in it, and stating what they are learning about the parish, themselves, their context, and the presence of God. It is out of such learning that a Christian community faithfully sets direction for its life and ministry.
Spirituality – The task is to shape a healthy corporate spirituality.
This includes:
-
Enabling a pattern and climate that focuses the parish on Christ; that encourages people to discover the claim Christ has on them; and that helps people to trust and rest in God;
-
Inviting the parish to contemplation, surrender and transcendence.
-
Using models for understanding the parish’s spirituality and skills for guiding the parish to a healthier spiritual life.
-
Building competent common participation in the Eucharist and Office and providing ways of exploring forms of personal devotions that respect the unique character of each soul.
-
Nurturing an adult parish climate in which people accept responsibility for their own spiritual life as part of the Body of Christ.
-
Providing various levels of spiritual guidance that accept people where they are while inviting them into a fuller life. It is especially important to offer this for people of apostolic faith and practice. That group is often neglected in a parish in favor of serving the larger numbers of sacramental Christians. But it is the nurturing of the more mature in the parish that will help create the needed climate and set loose the energy that grounds the parish in its truest life.
Copyright Robert A. Gallagher, 2006