Parish Cultural Density
An inquiring and discerning heart
From time-to-time we’ll offer a reprint from another blog or a section of a book. This piece comes from A Wonderful and Sacred Mystery: A Practical Theology of the Parish Church, Michelle Heyne, OA & Robert Gallagher, OA, Ascension Press, 2021. Here we are sharing a section from the chapter on “Cultural Density.”
Leaves a mark
David Brooks wrote this about cultural density: “Some organizations are thick, and some are thin. Some leave a mark on you, and some you pass through with scarcely a memory.” [28] He goes on to write, “A thick institution is not one that people use instrumentally, to get a degree or to earn a salary. A thick organization becomes part of a person’s identity and engages the whole person: head, hands, heart and soul.” That the Church is called, in Brooks’s terms, to be a thick organization is seen in the Great Thanksgiving of Rite One:
And here we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, our selves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice unto thee; humbly beseeching thee that we, and all others who shall be partakers of this Holy Communion, may worthily receive the most precious Body and Blood of thy Son Jesus Christ, be filled with thy grace and heavenly benediction, and made one body with him, that he may dwell in us, and we in him (BCP p. 336).
This is from the baptismal rite:
Then the Bishop or Priest places a hand on the person’s head, marking on the forehead the sign of the cross [using Chrism if desired] and saying to each one, you are sealed by the Holy Spirit in Baptism and marked as Christ’s own for ever. Amen.
Just prior to the marking is a collect that brings together a description of the marks. It’s a picture of the marks embedded at baptism and rising from faithful participation in the church:
Give them
an inquiring and discerning heart, the courage to will and to persevere, a spirit to know and to love you, and the gift of joy and wonder in all your works.
What kind of thickness does a parish need to do that well? What cultural density is necessary for the faithful, effective and efficient formation of the baptized?
Shaping and nurturing a productive and healthy cultural density
What is involved in shaping and nurturing a productive and healthy cultural density? What can parish clergy and lay leaders do? To begin, we’d propose that leaders take an appreciative stance. The assumption here is that you will gain more investment and commitment from people if you accept and build upon the existing strengths. We suggest you begin with four areas: the parish as a community, the people of the parish, the Anglican ethos that the parish shares in, and the tradition of Prayer Book spirituality. The first and second are about a particular community of people and what God has brought forth in their life. The third and fourth are about nurturing the parish’s density by grounding the parish’s life in the larger life of the church.
A second, and also commonly overlooked, part of shaping healthy density is maintaining a repetitive pattern of engagement around certain central factors. Among those factors would be the most important elements of parish life identified in our appreciative approach. We use the phrase “habits are like muscles.” Repetition of practices, methods, and training and coaching for prayer and the inner life, develops the “muscles.”
An appreciative stance toward the parish
Appreciative thinking and methods can be especially productive. An appreciative approach is about seeing and building upon the parish’s strengths, gifts, and charism. It’s about something that is already present. About patterns of behavior that you can see in the parish’s history and current life.
You can gain a sense of what these things are for your parish by pursuing questions about what the parish has done well over time and under stress, what have been the high points of parish life over the years, what the parish is known for by people outside the parish, and what elements/factors have significantly contributed to the parish’s faithfulness and health (approaches to leaders, pastoral theology and strategy, communal spiritual and liturgical practices, etc.). What have been the times when the parish has seemed most alive and faithful?
An appreciative stance toward the people of the parish
The “people of the parish” certainly includes the members of the Eucharistic Community, the faithful baptized. It also includes people at all stages of the faith journey—Apostolic, Progressing, Stable and Sacramental, uncertain and immature, the occasional and the Vicarious. It includes all those scattered throughout the families and institutions of society as instruments of the Divine Charity.
Clergy and lay leaders need to love the people of the parish. Leaders are an instrument of God’s love for them. They need to work at maintaining a relationship with parishioners, corporately and individually, that is neither enmeshed nor detached. Leaders—including clergy—shouldn’t have all their friends in the parish, and neither should they have no friends in the parish. [29]
The people of the parish are also more than the parish. They live in, have been nurtured in, and exhibit a local culture. A parish in Seattle is likely to have a somewhat different culture than a parish in rural Alabama. An inner-city parish in Trenton, New Jersey, is going to differ from one in Short Hills, New Jersey. A working-class parish in the Bronx will not have the same climate as a parish in Bryn Mawr. There may also be special communities or connections with the neighborhood that the parish is in relationship with. Priests need to appreciate the culture of the people of this parish and love those people.
This abides,
Sister Michelle & Brother Robert
NOTES
[28] Brooks, David, The New York Times, April 18, 2017. “How to Leave a Mark on People.”
[29] We have been told that some seminaries have been instructing students that friendships in the parish between clergy and laypeople are essentially forbidden and that they represent some inherent ethical violation. To the extent this is accurate, we think this is absurd, inhumane, un-Christian, and almost tailor-made to create destructive power distortions. Obviously, there are important issues to navigate—that has always been and will continue to be the case. But a blanket prohibition on friendship represents the Church subordinating the Body of Christ to insurance company priorities, and to a culture that values the perception of safety at all costs over the love, hard work, sacrifice, care, suffering, and joy of following Christ in community.