Archive for July, 2009

I was in a parish outside my diocese recently, and I read a bulletin announcement similar to one that appears in thousands of parishes every Sunday. The announcement invited all those who had never been baptized, or who had been baptized in another tradition, or who had been baptized Catholic but not received the sacraments [...]

I’m going to tell you the secret to starting and sustaining a successful RCIA team: Break bad habits That’s it. That’s all there is to it. Sounds too simple to be true? Well, you’re partly right about that. It sounds simple, but it is also difficult. Have you ever told a smoker to stop smoking? [...]

People often ask me who they need to have on their RCIA teams. By that, they generally mean, what job descriptions do they need to fill. In his book Good to Great, Jim Collins makes the point that getting the right kind of people is more important than filling the right job descriptions. If you [...]

Thank you for the great job you’ve been doing! Last week, I was helping to lead a training session for catechumenate teams, sponsored by the North American Forum on the Catechumenate. I was so impressed by the dedication and commitment of the participants. Some of them have been at this 20 years or more. And [...]

The Catholic News Service has posted a word cloud for Pope Benedict XVI’s encyclical, “Charity in Truth.” A word cloud is a pictorial representation of the most- and least-used words in a document. The CNS graphic makes it very obvious what the emphasis of the Pope’s letter is. See also this related post: Free reader’s [...]

Kent Schaffer, on the Church Relevance blog, has posted the top 13 reasons seekers choose a church. The top three are: preaching teaching hospitality This would be a great discussion to have with your team. As you are making plans to start or improve your catechumenate process, how can you make the seekers’ top three [...]

Several people have reported trouble playing back the video. We have a few ideas that might help, but we are not too sharp about computer stuff ourselves. So if you have a techie friend, he or she can probably solve your problem more easily than we can. That said, here are a couple of things [...]

Pope Benedict XVI has just written a letter to all of us about the current economic crisis and the solutions required to fix it. Download your free preview to the Reader’s Guide of this ground-breaking letter. Free preview of introduction section as PowerPoint (2.1 MB) (When prompted, click Open to view the file, or Save [...]

In this surprising discussion on the science of happiness, Nancy Etcoff says that even though we are wired from birth to be happy, we are not very good at increasing our happiness. Her 20-minute presentation covers a lot of data, but she never talks about the link (or absence of one) between faith and happiness. [...]