As we approach the beginning of Lent, it is a good time to think about how we teach the catechumens to pray. The best way, of course, is by example. So here is a list of suggestions for deepening our prayer lives this Lent.

Pray at a set time

• Make an appointment with yourself to pray every day at a set time.

Create a prayer space

• Pray in the same place every day. Find a place that is free from distraction.

Pray some version of the Liturgy of the Hours.

Here are three great resources, listed in order of their level of complexity:

• Give Us This Day: Daily Prayer for Today’s Catholic
• Work of God: Benedictine Prayer
• Benedictine Daily Prayer: A Short Breviary

Pray the Sunday readings before going to Mass

• This is an important prayer practice to master. As catechumenate leaders, we have to prepare our hearts to hear the word.

Keep a written list of people to pray for

• Include the names of all the catechumens and candidates on your list.
• Add at least one “enemy” to your prayer list
• Pray for the strength to attempt a reconciliation. Expect a miracle.

Keep a written list of life goals to pray for

• Spend some significant time discerning your goals for the various areas of your life. Include spiritual, family, physical, financial, and vocational goals. Pray for God’s will in these areas of your life.

Every Lent, try a different prayer form

For example, try one or more of these:

• Meditation
• Lectio divina
• Rosary

Pray the Lord’s Prayer

• Attempt to imitate the practice of the early church; pray the Lord’s Prayer three times a day—in the morning, at noon, and in the evening. Try to do this every day of Lent.

Use a mantra

• A prayer mantra is a short phrase that you can use as a focus for meditation or something to repeat silently as you sit at a traffic light or in a boring meeting. Here are some examples:
  • Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy upon me, a sinner. (Orthodox Church, “Jesus Prayer”)
  • Lord Jesus Christ, fill me with your Holy Spirit. (Modified Jesus Prayer)
  • Maranatha. (Oldest Christian mantra; it means, “Come, Lord”)
  • Glory be to God.
  • My God and my all! (St. Francis of Assissi)
  • Trust in the slow work of God. (Pierre Teilhard de Chardin)
  • Serve the growing Christ. (Bede Griffiths)

Silence

• Spend some time in absolute silence. Start with just a minute and then gradually extend the time of your silent prayer.

Centering Prayer

• Centering Prayer is a combination of silent prayer and using a prayer mantra. Click here for a brief video by Thomas Keating on how to enter into Centering Prayer.

Blessings

• Use more blessings. The introduction to the Book of Blessings is an excellent guide for the use of blessings.

Key scriptures

• Keep a list of key Scriptures that you find important for your life near your prayer list. Read one or two of these every day.

Discernment

• Practice discerning God’s will in your life. There are a ton of resources on discernment. One of my favorites is The Discernment of Spirits: An Ignatian Guide for Everyday Living.

You who do through

• Learn to pray in the “You who do thorough” style:
  • You (address God with a divine name or title)
  • who (recall a great work God had done)
  • do (petition God to do a great work now)
  • through (we always pray through Jesus Christ)
• Joe Paprocki has a great post on this.

Pray when you’re distracted

• Don’t let our normal human condition keep you from praying. God knows you are busy. Pray anyway.

Conclude with thanksgiving

• Always thank God for your situation right now. Even if you are in an absolutely terrible spot, there is some grace to be found. Find it it and offer thanks.

What best prayer practices would you add?

Without looking it up, can you tell me what your parish mission statement is? If you can, can all the members of the parish council? And what about the RCIA team? And if they can, can the parents whose children are in the school or religious education process tell me? What about the neophytes in your parish?

Do you know what your parish mission is?

In most parishes, hardly anyone can say clearly what the parish mission is. In some cases, they’ve never heard it stated. In other parishes, it appears on the cover of every Sunday bulletin and is sometimes read aloud at Mass. And still people cannot remember it. Why does this happen?

Why communication fails

Communication of an important vision fails for these reasons:

• There is no sense of urgency to remember it.
• The people who are communicating it are not the right people; they don’t carry any authority with the listeners.
• The message itself is blurry or just plain bad.

Even when all those roadblocks are removed, it is still difficult to communicate a new vision. But the minimum requirement to get started with your communication plan is to be sure you have eliminated any possible barrier between the message and the listeners. We’ve looked at how to do that in previous posts. Here, I want to focus on some practical steps for communicating your vision of the future for your RCIA process and your parish.

In his book, Leading Change, John P. Kotter says:

The time and energy required for effective vision communication are directly related to the clarity and simplicity of the message. (89)

1. Use the KISS method

In other words, Keep It Simple, Sweetheart! Get rid of all jargon. Here are just a few jargon phrases to avoid:

• RCIA
• The rite
• Candidates
• Precatechumenate
• Confirmandi
• “seeking completion of the sacraments”
• Second Vatican Council / Vatican II
• Neophyte year
• Easter Vigil

2. Paint a picture

If you can’t use the technical language of the initiation process, how are you going to communicate a vision of change? Use metaphors, analogies, and examples. For example:

Version 1: The RCIA is a restoration of an ancient process for incorporating unbaptized persons into Jesus Christ through the sacraments of Baptism, Confirmation, and Eucharist. The process was restored after the Second Vatican Council, but did not become widely available in the United States until late in the 1980s. The local Catholic bishop determines how RCIA will be administered in the parishes under his care. We need to align our process more closely with the process of the ancient church and the policies of the diocese. That means we will instituting an ongoing precatechumenate, year-round catechumenate, and a mystagogical period of at least one year from the anniversary of baptism.  

Version 2: The Holy Spirit moves people to seek Christ in all seasons. The Holy Spirit does not take the summer off, and neither should we.

3. Communicate early and often

Use lots of formats for getting your message out. Here are just few places you can spread the message throughout the parish:

• Parish council meetings
• Staff meetings
• Team meetings
• Back to school nights
• Posters
• Parish website and Facebook page
• Informal, one-on-ones
• E-mail messages
• Stewardship talks and reports
• Letter to the editor in the diocesan paper
• Infant baptismal preparation sessions
• Parish religious education program
• Youth retreat
• Annual Christmas and Easter messages

4. Repeat, repeat, repeat

We all know that once is not enough if we really want to communicate a message. But once we have said something three or four times, we think people should have gotten the message. The really obsessive among us might actually repeat a message ten or twelve times. I want to challenge you to think in “hundreds.” How can you find hundreds and hundreds of ways to communicate your message over the next year?

5. Walk the Talk

You have to be the shining example of the change you want to create. If your goal is to move from a 9-month catechetical program to an ongoing conversion process, for example, what happens if you still use classroom language and models when initiating catechumens? And this goes for your entire team as well. Kotter says:

Nothing undermines the communication of a change vision more than behavior on the part of key players that seems inconsistent with the vision. (97; italics in original)

6. Listen up

Any change process is going to generate resistance. While we can expect that, we shouldn’t ignore it. Sometimes others want change just as much as we do, but the they have a different idea about how to accomplish it. If we discount all feedback as simple complaining, we might miss some good ideas we hadn’t thought of. And even if we hear no new ideas, we still have to listen. Change is not a top-down process. It is a dialogue within a community of disciples.

What are your next steps?

Have you been following along in this series on change? What has motivated you so far? What next steps will you take within the next week? Within the next month? Share your thoughts, and inspire the rest of us.

1. Start changing your RCIA process now—before it’s too late!
2. Can your RCIA team recognize these 6 deadly barriers to conversion?
3. 5 ways RCIA leaders can overcome “the way we’ve always done it”
4. Make the shift from “RCIA team” to “coalition for change”
5. Get an RCIA vision for your parish (angelic visitation optional)
6. 6 essential rules for communicating a new RCIA vision

Your parish is about to change. Here’s why. This Sunday, look around at the people in the pews. Then estimate what percentage of those people will be retired in ten years. Now look for the 20- and 30-somethings. Are there enough of them present to fill the shoes of those who will be retiring?

Trends that will change RCIA ministry

Here is another indicator of change. How many Masses in Spanish did your parish have ten years ago? How many does it have now? How many will it have ten years from now?

And one more trend. Ten years ago, how many people in your parish had a Facebook account? How many have one now? How many will be on Facebook (or whatever replaces it) ten years from now?

All of these trends are going to affect your parish’s initiation process. Your challenge, as an RCIA team, is to figure out how these and other trends will change your parish and what your response as an initiation team will be.

The benefits of a clear vision for your RCIA team

In other words, you need a vision for the future. Developing a clear vision for the future will help you do three things:

1. You will be able to identify the direction in which you need to move as an initiation ministry
2. You will motivate yourselves and others in the parish to take significant action to move the parish in that direction
3. You will be able to coordinate your actions within your team and across parish ministries with great efficiency

Consider the first point for example—identifying the right direction to move. If we can get everybody on the team to see that we need to do a lot more outreach to young adults and Spanish-speakers, and we need to figure out how to communicate our message through social media, we can settle a lot of smaller debates quickly. We can more quickly see if what we are currently doing or planning to do fits into our vision of the future.

A clear vision will also help us motivate others. Perhaps everything looks fine right now. But if we all agree that things are going to change in the very near future, then we can all agree that we have to do something to meet the change. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve heard RCIA team members say something along the lines of, “If it’s not broke, why fix it?” Well, what if it is broke? What if we all know it’s broke or very soon will be? Let’s roll up our sleeves and fix it.

The third benefit may be the most important. You can’t launch a ministry to the Spanish-speaking or an effective social media campaign all by yourself. But if all the ministries of the parish understand the direction we need to move in, they will quickly come on board to help move the parish in that direction. You’re work and your ministry becomes a lot easier if broad coalitions in the parish have signed onto a clear vision for the future.

How many angels have you seen lately?

Let’s say a little more about vision. We Catholics have a specialized understanding of that word. Mary and Joseph both had visions, as did Jesus. Many of our great saints have had visions. Many of us have had visions also. A vision, for us, seems like something miraculous, other-worldly, and outside of our direct control. Visions are visited upon us from angels or the Holy Spirit.

Some visions need bifocals

But that’s not usual, is it? If you have a miraculous vision about how God wants your parish to move forward, by all means, go for it! Most of us, however, are going to have to find more mundane ways to come up with a vision. In his book, Leading Change, John P. Kotter says that a good vision has six key characteristics. A good vision is:

1. Imaginable: We can really see what it looks like in our minds and hearts
2. Desirable: We really want the vision to happen; life would be better for everyone if we lived into this vision
3. Feasible: We can do this! God has given us all the talent and resources we need right within our own parish
4. Focused: We see clearly where we need to go, and we start making decisions about how to get there
5. Flexible: We know all plans change as circumstances change; our vision doesn’t change, but the details might
6. Communicable: We can easily explain the vision in a bulletin announcement or an announcement at Mass

Developing a vision that does these things is not miraculous, but it does require hard work. You will need to involve more people than jus the RCIA team. You will need to invest some significant time in shaping it and making it appeal to both the head and the heart. But we don’t really have any choice. Because everything is about to change.

What do you think?

• Are there trends happing in your parish right now that will change your community in the near future? What are they?
• Is your parish developing a vision for the future? How does that affect your RCIA team?
• Are there other characteristics you would add to the “good vision” list?

1. Start changing your RCIA process now—before it’s too late!
2. Can your RCIA team recognize these 6 deadly barriers to conversion?
3. 5 ways RCIA leaders can overcome “the way we’ve always done it”
4. Make the shift from “RCIA team” to “coalition for change”
5. Get an RCIA vision for your parish (angelic visitation optional)
6. 6 essential rules for communicating a new RCIA vision

In 1983, I interviewed for my first job as a parish liturgist. The silver-haired pastor sat behind an imposing desk in his wood-paneled office. I sat on the other side of the desk in one of those chairs that you sink into and that makes it impossible for you to sit up straight. At one point, he looked down at me and said, “We don’t operate as a team here. I’m the boss, and my word is final.”

“Team ministry” was often neither

Well, that was just fine with me! After a decade of high-school and college youth ministry, I was fed up with “team ministry.” While on paper, the idea of team ministry offered the promise of collaboration, the reality was often a confusion of roles and lack of a clear decision making process. Communication was often muddled, and people’s feelings got hurt.

RCIA was a new kind of team ministry

In the 1980s, however, we began to see a new kind of team ministry developing—the RCIA team. As RCIA teams became established in parishes, they were, at first, agents of change. They had strong support from the pastor, the director of religious education, and the liturgist or liturgy planners. Team members were sent to workshops to learn their roles, and they returned to their parishes as “experts” in initiation ministry. I know I’m sugarcoating things here a little, but this scenario, while not universal, was not uncommon back in the day.

We need to reinvent team ministry again

Today, however, initiation ministry has become “institutionalized,” and is often regarded as just one more activity in parish life. It is seldom an agent for change. In an earlier post, I said that the way to overcome this state of complacency was to create a sense of urgency. But that is just the first step. If we are successful in creating a sense of urgency in the parish, the next step is to create what John P. Kotter calls a “guiding coalition.”

A guiding coalition is team ministry on steroids. It is the best of what we all hope team ministry would be. A guiding coalition, according to Kotter, has four essential characteristics. They are:

1. Position power: A guiding coalition requires key leaders who are on board and supportive of the change required for effective initiation ministry in the parish.
2. Expertise: Today, we know that expertise means more than just familiarity with the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults. We also need people on board who are fluent in the various cultures of the parish, who can speak knowledgably about the social conditions of the neighborhood, who are skilled in organizing people, and who understand, at a deep level, the process required for spiritual conversion.
3. Credibility: Sometimes RCIA teams have everything in place and yet still seem to lack the ability to cause true change. That may be because we can sometimes operate in isolation from other parish ministries and activities. And therefore, we lack credibility with the wider parish. In an ideal world, an RCIA team members would be at every parish event, developing networks throughout the parish. Just showing up goes a long way toward developing credibility.
4. Leadership: In my experience, RCIA teams have one true leader. And that is way too few leaders to effect wide-spread change. Teams need to reorient themselves from recruiting helpers to recruiting—and training—leaders.

The new RCIA job description

Creating a guiding coalition like this is hard and sometimes tedious work. It is outside of the job description of what most people think of as the work of the RCIA team. Even so, it is what we have to do as team members. And if you are that one true leader on the RCIA team, think of the above four tasks as your primary job description. Recruit new leaders to take over the tasks on your current job description.

Start by building parish-wide credibility

If you are wondering where to start, I’d pick number 3, credibility. Start showing up at events all over the parish. Be curious, and be interested. Listen deeply for the vision and mission of each group you visit. And as you get to know the ministries of the parish, ask yourself how these groups are already contributing to the initiation ministry of the parish.

• How are the Knights evangelizing with their pancake breakfasts?
• How is the Tuesday night rosary group contributing to the spiritual growth of the parish and your catechumens?
• How are the lectors communicating the word to the parish and to your catechumens?

Our primary work is coalition-building

I learned how to lay this out in four steps by reading John P. Kotter’s book, Leading Change. But I learned the intuitive principles that underlie these steps from the “my word is final” pastor I worked for in the 1980s. For all his talk about having the final say, he was great at creating the type of coalitions Kotter talks about. He was pastor of that parish for 30 years, and he never seemed to tire of building and strengthening guiding coalitions committed to being change agents. He didn’t have superpowers or special training beyond his pre-Vatican II seminary formation. He just rolled up his sleeves every day and got to work. He did, however, understand what his “work” was and wasn’t.

That is our challenge as RCIA leaders. We have to understand that our primary work is to develop guiding coalitions of change.

What is your next step?

What do you think? How do you see your role as a leader in the initiation process? What next steps do you think you can take to develop a guiding coalition?

See also these related articles:

1. Start changing your RCIA process now—before it’s too late!
2. Can your RCIA team recognize these 6 deadly barriers to conversion?
3. 5 ways RCIA leaders can overcome “the way we’ve always done it”
4. Make the shift from “RCIA team” to “coalition for change”
5. Get an RCIA vision for your parish (angelic visitation optional)
6. 6 essential rules for communicating a new RCIA vision

In 1968, the best team in the upstart American Football league was led by a brash young quarterback who had thrown most of his passes that year for interceptions. Even so, they were slated to go up against the far superior National Football League champions—the Baltimore Colts—in Super Bowl III. Most people expected a crushing victory for the powerful Colts.

So the sports world was more than slightly amused when three days before the big game, Joe Namath, quarterback of the New York Jets, guaranteed that he would lead his team to victory. And, of course, he made good on his boast.

It was not only the Jets’ skill that won the game. Namath didn’t throw a single pass for a touchdown—making the Jets the only team in Super Bowl history to win without a touchdown pass. What beat the Colts was complacency. The Colts were so sure of their dominance, they didn’t realize they were losing until it was too late.

Okay, I know our RCIA teams are not football teams. But all teams, no matter what kind, tend toward complacency. In his book, Leading Change, John P. Kotter says the way to overcome complacency is to increase the urgency level. The more complacent your team or your parish, the more difficult it will be to create a sense of urgency. Kotter lists nine ways to increase urgency for business teams, and not all of them translate well to ministry teams. However, some of his action steps can give us some insight. Here are five.

Eliminate obvious examples of excess

Excess in the business world includes things like country club memberships and executive dining rooms. What excesses do RCIA teams have? One example that comes to mind is the number of baptized candidates in our RCIA process. Unless a baptized person is truly uncatechized (as opposed to under catechized) they are not subjects of the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults.

When I’ve said this at workshops, inevitably someone responds, “If we didn’t include baptized people, we wouldn’t have anyone at all in the RCIA!” Exactly. And that’s a crisis. That requires urgent action.

Set high targets so they cannot be reached by conducting business as usual

Business targets include things like profits and productivity. Initiation ministry has one target—hearts converted to Christ. Our single purpose is to find people who have not heard the good news and lead those people to Christ. Most of us are not used to thinking of finding people who need to hear about Jesus. We wait for them to find us.

• If you set a target of annually finding at least two or three or five or twenty-five people who have never heard the good news, you will come closer to creating a sense of urgency
• Set the goal high enough that it will shake things up in your parish
• But also make it realistic enough that people don’t give up before they even try

Insist more people be held accountable for broader measures of performance

Who in your parish is responsible for finding people who have never heard the good news? I’ll tell you who it is in my parish. It’s the Holy Spirit. We wait for the Holy Spirit to send us people. And that is the only person we hold accountable. If no one shows up, well, the Spirit must not want us to initiate anyone this year. That, of course, is a terrific example of complacency.

• To get past this complacent attitude and increase the urgency level, get commitments from everyone in parish leadership to reach out to those who need to hear the good news
• Start with getting commitments from everyone on the RCIA team
• And then schedule regular times to follow up on how everyone is doing

Use consultants to force more relevant data and honest discussion

Let’s face it. Most of are not good at evangelizing effectively. We need help. Fortunately, there is lots of help available.

• More and more chanceries have staff people with expertise in evangelization. Bring someone in to talk with your team
• In most dioceses, there is a priest or a youth minister or a choir director who always has great success at drawing large numbers of people. Bring that person in to consult with you
• When I go to church every Sunday, I have to go through a traffic jam at what is usually a quiet neighborhood intersection. On Sunday morning, however, the local Pentecostal parish hires private cops to direct traffic in front of their church. Same neighborhood and same demographic as my Catholic parish. And we have Mass in two languages! So why are they so much more successful at attracting people? Somebody should ask them

Bombard people with information on future opportunities and rewards

What rewards do you get from initiation ministry? Here’s what it is for me. When I meet someone who really has no idea who Jesus is, and then I witness them turning their life around and experiencing, for the first time, the hope and peace I’ve known all my life—it’s like drugs. I’m addicted. When I help a faithful Protestant-married-to-a-Catholic experience his faith more deeply, that’s a thrill too. But it doesn’t compare to walking with someone who is meeting Christ for the very first time.

It is possible you have team members who have never experienced leading someone to Christ for the first time. Tell them stories. Tell them what it’s like. Increase their level of urgency to go out and share the good news with those who have never heard it.

Share what’s worked for you

I know from talking with lots of teams across the country that some of you are already good at increasing the levels of urgency in your parish. And some of you have been trying to initiate change, but you get stymied by high levels of complacency—”the way we’ve always done it.” If you’d be willing to share your stories, you can help the rest of us get better at this.

• What are your successes?
• What are your frustrations?
• What have you tried?
• What are you planning to try?

Thanks for your thoughts and for all you do to bring people to Christ.

See also these related articles:

1. Start changing your RCIA process now—before it’s too late!
2. Can your RCIA team recognize these 6 deadly barriers to conversion?
3. 5 ways RCIA leaders can overcome “the way we’ve always done it”
4. Make the shift from “RCIA team” to “coalition for change”
5. Get an RCIA vision for your parish (angelic visitation optional)
6. 6 essential rules for communicating a new RCIA vision

The number one roadblock for most organizations—including RCIA teams—is complacency. Allowing complacency to grow can be deadly. RCIA teams are supposed to be all about conversion. And complacency kills conversion.

Most teams start out with a high level of enthusiasm for the conversion mission. And then one of two things often happens.

• The complacency level of the parish is high and so the initiatives of the RCIA team sink from lack of broad community interest.
• Or the RCIA team has some initial success, and they themselves become satisfied and complacent.

Has “complacency” become the goal in your RCIA process?

What we say to catechumens and candidates is also true for us. We are never finished growing. We are in an ongoing conversion process. If we find ourselves resisting change, perhaps we have replaced “conversion” with “complacency” as our goal.

So how do we shake off complacency and get back to the conversion mission? In his book, Leading Change, John P. Kotter says we have to begin by creating a sense of urgency. But creating urgency is hard. Kotter lists these barriers:

1. We overestimate our ability to create major changes in the team or the parish
2. We underestimate how difficult it is to move team members or parishioners out of their comfort zones
3. We don’t recognize how much we, ourselves, contribute to complacent attitudes
4. We lack patience
5. We get scared by the risks involved in pushing too hard for change
6. We, or the team, or parishioners confuse urgency with anxiety, and then resistance to change increases even more

First step—identify the crisis

The way to create a sense of urgency is to identify the crisis that requires urgent action. So what is the crisis in your parish? More specifically, what is the crisis that your RCIA team is mandated to deal with?

Perhaps as you look around you don’t see any crises, or at least not any that fall under the umbrella of RCIA. If that’s the case, then why do you exist as a team? Think about that for a minute. If you don’t exist to solve a crisis, what do you exist for?

As a way to start identifying the crises that might be happening in your parish and your neighborhood, use the four markers of catechesis from RCIA paragraph no. 75 as a lens:

Four crisis zones

Word and tradition

• What percentage of people in your parish deeply understand the level of sacrifice required by their belief in the Word Made Flesh who died for us and rose on the third day?
• What percentage of parishioners are living that sacrifice in their daily lives in a way that is recognizable by others?
• What percentage of your team members can summarize the entire teaching of the church in less than five minutes—in a way that sounds like good news to inquirers?
• How many people in your neighborhood have not heard any good news today?

Community

• In the last year, how many parishioners or potential parishioners have stopped coming to Mass because they didn’t feel connected?
• How many families who, in the last year, celebrated a baptism, confirmation, first Communion, wedding, or funeral are active your parish today?
• Last Sunday, how many strangers were at Mass? How many of them were given a meaningful welcome? How many will return next Sunday?
• How much of your parish resources are directed “outward,” toward those who don’t know about your parish, and how much is directed “inward,” toward those who are already members?

Worship

• How many families who are preparing their children for a sacrament are at Mass every Sunday?
• How strong is the response from inquirers, catechumens, and candidates to the preaching in your parish? How about the music?
• How clear is the connection between the inquirers’, catechumens’, and candidates’ encounter with the Word Made Flesh in the liturgy and your subsequent catechetical session? How do you know if the connection is being made clearly?

Service

• How effective is your team, your parish, and your RCIA participants at converting systems that facilitate homelessness or food insecurity?
• How effective is your formation process at helping the RCIA participants understand the difference between charity and justice?
• What percentage of your team members can effectively summarize the social teaching of the church?
• What percentage of your team can identify and teach Pope Benedict XVI’s position on the current economic crisis in the world and in the United States?

If you spend some time reflecting on these questions, you will find that crisis is all around us. So what do we do about it? We’ll look at that question in a future post.

1. Start changing your RCIA process now—before it’s too late!
2. Can your RCIA team recognize these 6 deadly barriers to conversion?
3. 5 ways RCIA leaders can overcome “the way we’ve always done it”
4. Make the shift from “RCIA team” to “coalition for change”
5. Get an RCIA vision for your parish (angelic visitation optional)
6. 6 essential rules for communicating a new RCIA vision

Last June, a new pastor was assigned to St. Zephinia Parish where Sally Soothewright was the director of the RCIA team. The pastor was an affable guy, and he quickly established himself as the leader of the parish. Sally was happy to have him on board—until it was time to celebrate the Rite of Acceptance. The pastor was not used to the way St. Zephinia celebrated the rite, and he asked Sally to make some changes. When Sally resisted, the pastor changed his request to a directive. When Sally informed the team of the new rules, three of them quit on the spot. The two that were left seemed sullen and withdrawn during the celebration of the rite. Sally began to pray about whether or not she should resign as team leader.

Is change in your RCIA process good or bad?

Has change like that ever happened to you? Or to someone you know? While a new pastor is often the catalyst for change, it could also be a new team member, a new director of religious education, a new liturgy director, or a new policy from the diocese. The point is, change happens. It happens continuously. Sometimes change happens for good reasons and sometimes for silly, unsubstantial reasons. Was the change at St. Zephinia good or bad? Was the pastor right or wrong? Were Sally and her team too inflexible or not? All of those are the wrong questions.

The question RCIA leaders need to ask

The question is, did either Sally or her her new pastor handle the change process as well as possible? And the answer is no. Neither were prepared for change themselves and neither had prepared either the RCIA team or the parish for change.

From Sally’s perspective, everything was running smoothly and had been for the previous ten years. Why mess with a good thing. “If it’s not broken, don’t fix it,” was her motto.

From the pastor’s perspective, the rites were not being celebrated correctly. There was something lacking in the ritual that he could not accommodate himself to. As the leader of the parish, he saw it as his duty to ensure that all the public rituals of the church were “by the book.” His solution was to simply enforce the rules through the authority of his office. Or you could switch the scenario so that it might have been the pastor, not Sally and her team, who was actually breaking the rules. The root problem is still the same.

The Number 1 roadblock for most RCIA teams

The root problem here is complacency. Sally and her team had grown complacent about their RCIA process. In any group that has found a comfort zone, complacency becomes the norm. Once a group becomes complacent, they are almost impervious to change. Another key characteristic of complacent groups is they often think of themselves as dynamic. The mistake activity for change-oriented, growth processes. Because they are busy—sometimes overwhelmed—they assume change is happening all the time. In most cases, however, all of the group’s activity supports “the way we’ve always done things” and is a barrier to true change.

If you don’t think this is true about your team, ask yourself what would happen if your pastor or your team leader suddenly left the parish. The team then gets a new pastor or a new leader who has a completely different idea of how the team should operate. What would happen next?

Take the long view in planning for change

If something like that happened tomorrow, my assumption is most teams would have a difficult time absorbing the change. But suppose a change in leadership is down the road a bit. Perhaps your pastor is only in Year 2 of his six year assignment. Or perhaps your team leader is planning to retire in five years. You have a little breathing room. What should you do?

You should get started on your change process now! Before it’s too late. In another post, we’ll look at how to start breaking out of complacency.

1. Start changing your RCIA process now—before it’s too late!
2. Can your RCIA team recognize these 6 deadly barriers to conversion?
3. 5 ways RCIA leaders can overcome “the way we’ve always done it”
4. Make the shift from “RCIA team” to “coalition for change”
5. Get an RCIA vision for your parish (angelic visitation optional)
6. 6 essential rules for communicating a new RCIA vision

I was once part of an RCIA team along with another catechist who had a great devotion to St. Michael. Whenever she would lead a session, somehow the conversation always got around to St. Michael. On the team I’m currently with, one member is a dedicated supporter of our parish food pantry for the poor. His examples of conversion are always connected in some way to the parish food pantry.

RCIA teams: make good news sound good to everyone

While personal devotions and ministries should absolutely be part of the conversation with RCIA participants, we have to be careful that our personal passions don’t dominant message. If our goal is to wow the catechumens and candidates with the good news of Jesus Christ, we have to communicate that good news in way that is universal.

If you look at blockbuster movies, for example, you can get a sense of this. Why was Toy Story 3 such a big hit? I personally thought The Triplets of Belleville—another animated movie with a similar message—was a much better film. But Triplets only grossed about $7 million while TS3 raked in $636 million. Clearly, Woody, Buzz, and the gang have much more universal appeal.

The top, all-time Christian hits

When we are catechizing folks who are new to the faith, look for experiences that have wowed Christians throughout the ages. What might those be? We can start with the Creed. We don’t usually think of the Creed as a “wow” experience, but break out some of the mysteries we profess to believe in every Sunday. We believe in:

• An all-powerful being who made absolutely everything out of absolutely nothing
• A human being who, while still human, is also the pure essence of that all-powerful being—God of God, Light of Light, completely the same nature as the source
• A death that ends all death; a resurrection that definitively recreates all creation as a relationship of harmony, justice, and peace among everyone and everything
• A sacred and holy Spirit that breathes in and through that creation and (wow!) makes us just as holy
• A church, a place, a community of friends that accepts us just as we are; friends (brothers and sister really) who are willing to die for us; who are even willing to die for strangers to fulfill the mission of the Light of Light

These are the universal experiences every Christian shares in. Devotions to St. Michael, dedication to food pantries, and the thousands of ways all of us have found to explore these universal truths more deeply are important. But our first task as catechists to the newcomers is to wow them with the blockbuster hits of our faith.

1. Wow! What RCIA teams can learn from Steve Jobs
2. Wow! The importance of “surprise” in the RCIA
3. Wow! Build anticipation in your RCIA process—without walking on water
4. Wow! Give your RCIA participants the gift of fear
5. Wow! Do you know the secret for creating real presence for RCIA participants?
6. Wow! The universal truth RCIA teams can learn from box-office hits

If you have been working in RCIA ministry for a number of years, you may have already noticed some shifts in the way you need to minister. These trends in the United States are upending our usual patterns and causing us to rethink our processes.

Catholics are leaving the northeast

Catholics are leaving the northeast and repopulating in the southwest. According to the American Religious Identification Survey, published in 2009, “Catholics increased their share in California and Texas to about one-third of the adult population and in Florida to over one-fourth. In terms of numbers they gained about 8 million adherents in these three states in the past two decades.” In the Northeast, Catholic adherents fell from 46 percent to 36 percent of the adult population.

Total Catholic population is increasing

Overall, the total number of Catholics in the U.S. is growing, according to another study, the General Social Survey (GSS), published in 2010. While the percentage of Catholics in the U.S. population remains stable at about 25%, the total population is growing, and therefore the total number of Catholics in the U.S. is also growing. However, if you are in the northeast, where churches are empty and parishes are closing, it can feel like the U.S. church is collapsing.

Catholics are leaving at an alarming rate

But here’s the bad news. The retention rate is dropping, according to the GSS. We are growing because we are gaining more Catholics than we are losing. But we are losing a lot. In 1973, the retention rate was 84%. Today it is 68%. In 2050, it will be 54%. That means that three of every ten Catholics will leave this year. By mid-century, almost five of every ten will be leaving.

Hispanic numbers are flat

Many people assume the growth in the U.S. Catholic Church is coming mainly from immigration. If that was true a decade ago, it no longer seems to be the case. For example, the percentage of Catholics who self-identify their ethnicity as Hispanic or Latino has dropped from 38% in 2006 to 32% in 2010 (GSS). That statistical difference is too small to say there is a decline, but there certainly isn’t a growth trend.

This also has to do with retention, however. There are more Hispanics immigrating to the U.S., but fewer of them are identifying as Catholics. 70% of Hispanic immigrants called themselves Catholic in 2006. Today, that has dropped to 63% (GSS).

What is our next step as RCIA teams?

So what does this mean for your RCIA ministry? If you are in the northeast, are you noticing a drop in the parish population? Are able to find enough volunteers for your team? If you are in the southwest, are you noticing increased numbers in your community? Is that putting pressure on your team?

And no matter where you are in the country, are you watching as people leave and don’t come back?

I don’t think those of us in RCIA ministry can reverse these trends all by ourselves. But we have to do our part. So let’s brainstorm some things we can do.

• What is it about the Catholic Church that you love? Why do you stay?
• What are some ways we can tell other people about what we love about the church?
• Do you have systematic, strategic ways of sharing your love of the church with your catechumens and candidates? Please share your ideas.
• How do you discern the level of commitment on the part your catechumens and candidates before their initiation or reception?
• What other questions should we be asking?
• What other strategies should we be attempting?

• Emerging U.S. Catholic Trends: GSS 2010
• General Social Survey
• Study reports ‘stunning’ U.S. Catholic population shift alongside growing secularization

In the Eastern rite churches, just before Eucharist begins, the deacon chants, “Kairos tou poiesai to Kyrio” (“It is time [kairos] for the Lord to act”); indicating that the time of the liturgy is an intersection with eternity.

One icy fall away from eternity

Have you ever been to a liturgy like that? Or have you ever experienced a time like that—when the here-and-now seemed to intersect with eternity? I remember the first time I skied down a blue-diamond (medium difficulty) slope. I’m afraid of heights, so the chair lift up to the top of the mountain was not a spiritual experience. I got off the lift and shuffled over to the edge of the slope. “Slope” is a nice euphemism. “Sheer wall of vertical ice” seemed like a more appropriate description at the time.

I made the Sign of the Cross and pushed off. My skis were pointed straight down the mountain, and I was accelerating way too fast. I turned hard to the left and almost summersaulted into the snow. But I caught my balance at the last second, s-turned back to the right, and all of a sudden I was skiing! My feet and my knees seemed to know exactly what to do. As I glided downward, I looked up and saw mountains all around me, wrapped in dazzling white. The sky was crystal blue, and the high sun made everything sparkle. The Lord was acting in that moment, joining my small human time with the eternal time of creation.

How do we create kairos in the RCIA?

When we are forming the faith of RCIA participants, our goal is to bring them to that kind of time—kairos. It is the time when the Lord acts. It is the time when the Lord is present in a way that absorbs all our attention. Time seems to stop, and everything is about right here, right now. And in a mysterious way, that eternal moment is also about everything in the past and everything in the future.

All of us in this ministry have had those time-out-of-time experiences. But for me, they have most often been surprises. I didn’t get on the chair lift that day expecting kairos. If we are going to wow our catechumens and candidates, how do we create moments of kairos for them? How do we bring them to the intersection with eternity? How do we help them experience “real presence”?

Your thoughts?

(This series on creating “wow” experiences is based on the ideas of Michael Hyatt, chairman of Thomas Nelson Books.)

1. Wow! What RCIA teams can learn from Steve Jobs
2. Wow! The importance of “surprise” in the RCIA
3. Wow! Build anticipation in your RCIA process—without walking on water
4. Wow! Give your RCIA participants the gift of fear
5. Wow! Do you know the secret for creating real presence for RCIA participants?
6. Wow! The universal truth RCIA teams can learn from box-office hits