I read a blog post today on delegating that has some interesting ideas for busy RCIA team leaders. Sometimes the “leader” is the whole team, and there is no one to delegate tasks to. Michael Hyatt lists seven strategies for distributing or reducing your workload. I’m going to reframe three of them for the work we do.

1. Ask for volunteers

I know you’ve probably done this already without much success. I’m going to suggest you try asking differently. First, write down your most unpleasant task or the one you find to be the biggest burden. Then, break that task apart into smaller pieces. Try to break it down into at least three to five separate parts. Next, make a list of 20 parishioners you know. Now, with your list of three to five tasks in hand, approach each of the 20 parishioners individually, and ask them if they would be willing to do one of the small tasks on your list. I’ll bet you have your volunteers before you get through the first half of your parishioner list. If so, choose your second most unpleasant task, and repeat the process.

2. Reprioritize

When I’m overwhelmed, the thing that calms me down the most is making a list of absolutely everything that is on my mind. Try it yourself. Set a timer for five minutes and write like crazy until you have everything out of your head and down on paper. Next, on a clean sheet of paper or on your computer, sort your tasks into four groups. Group 1 is all of your most important, most urgent tasks. Group 2 is all those important things that are not urgent. Group 3 is all the tasks that you need to do that are not critical. Group 4 is your delete file. If it’s not important, scratch it off your list.

3. Learn to say no

Really, how did those Group 4 things get into my head in the first place? I probably said yes to something I didn’t really want to do. An essential skill of an effective RCIA team leader is being able to set boundaries. As important as this ministry is, there are other things in our lives that are more important. Family and health, for example.

What do you do to delegate in your situation? Do you have team members to share the load with? Or are you on a small or non-existent team? How do you manage getting everything done?

It’s good to see you again. If you enjoyed this post, please share with a friend or colleague. Thanks for visiting!

Today’s readings (the third Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C) are outstanding for many reasons, but what struck me most of all is how they seemed to be speaking pointedly about things we do in the catechumenate.

Some of you may be puzzled to hear me say this. But think about it. These scripture passages for this Sunday are talking about… well, us.

•  The reading from Nehemiah talks about “men, women, and children old enough to understand”—they are the adults and children of catechetical age.
• Ezra reads from the scroll and they say Amen. It’s a powerful scene. His listeners are moved to tears of repentance—it’s all about conversion and commitment.
• But they are told not to weep but to rejoice and celebrate a feast on this day—just like Sunday.. and the Eucharist!
• The reading from Saint Paul talks about a variety of gifts—RCIA team, take note.
• He says we need each other, and that our diversity builds up the body of Christ—the community of the faithful is not a collection of competitive individuals, but a caring and graced and organic whole.

You see what I mean. In fact, you could write the rest of this post yourself. But here’s the rest of my thought.

• In the gospel reading we hear that Luke’s “orderly account” is for “you, Theophilus” (the name means “lover of God”), so that he will understand all that he has heard—I think we are meant to put ourselves into the picture here, as a sort of modern-day Theophilus. The gospel is written for Hearers of the Word, so that they may understand. In a very special way, every catechumen is the “lover of God” whom this gospel addresses.
• Finally, Jesus himself, by opening up the word of Scripture, reveals himself as the Word who has come to save us. It’s the encounter with Christ that liberates, heals, and brings the “year of favor” about which Isaiah speaks.

For the record, let me emphasize that I’m NOT seriously suggesting we create a “Catechumenate Sunday” like we have “Catechetical Sunday” or “Catholic Schools Week.” Heaven forbid. No, every Sunday is Catechumenate Sunday as far as the Church is concerned!

But it is good now and then to notice how thoroughly and well the central themes and institutions of the RCIA correspond to what we hear in the Sunday Word of both Old and New Testaments. That Word is “fulfilled in our hearing” in the very practices of Christian initiation, when we follow the vision of the rite.

One last item. RCIA catechists and team people, here’s a question for you, sparked by this Sunday’s readings: How many of you used Minor Exorcism H (found at RCIA #94) in praying with your catechumens today? This beautiful prayer is based on today’s Gospel reading.

If you haven’t discovered it yet, you might want to look it up in your ritual text and put a marker in that page for future reference. In my opinion, it’s one of the loveliest prayers of the Minor Rites. (I’ve reproduced it here, for your convenience.)

Lord Jesus Christ,
sent by the Father and anointed by the Spirit,
when you read in the synagogue at Nazareth
you fulfilled the words of the prophet Isaiah
that proclaimed liberty to captives
and announced a season of forgiveness.

We pray for these your servants
who have opened their ears and hearts to your word.
Grant that they may grasp your moment of grace.

Do not let their minds be troubled
or their lives tied to earthly desires.
Do not let them remain
estranged from the hope of your promises
or enslaved by a spirit of unbelief.
Rather, let them believe in you,
whom the Father has established as universal Lord
and to whom he has subjected all things.

Let them submit themselves to the Spirit of grace,
so that, with hope in their calling,
they may join the priestly people
and share in the abundant joy of the new Jerusalem,
where you live and reign for ever and ever.

Amen.

Happy Sunday, everyone!

This is a guest post from Father Robert Duggan. It’s one of the longer posts we’ve featured on the site, but it is well worth your time.

Father Bob is a presbyter of the Archdiocese of Washington, DC, and a frequent speaker and author on topics related to Christian initiation and liturgical and sacramental renewal.

You’ve probably heard people say the RCIA is a “process, not a program.” But what does that really mean?

Implementation suffered from pastoral exhaustion

The Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults is an extremely provocative document. The pastoral efforts to implement the RCIA in the United States were undertaken by a grassroots movement of pastoral workers and theologians who were left to their own resources. There was no national leadership, in the beginning, to guide them. Without this grassroots movement, the RCIA might easily have been ignored as a text “meant for missionary lands.”

Recall that this document came from Rome as one of the last revised texts developed in response to the Second Vatican Council’s call for renewal. By the time the RCIA was issued and translated into vernacular languages, the “reform the reform” folks in the Roman Curia and elsewhere were already attempting to blunt the spirit of liturgical renewal that had so inspired an entire generation. There was a fatigue abroad in the land, a pastoral exhaustion, after having tried to assimilate so many liturgical changes in such a short time. The bishops didn’t have the stomach to expend any more energy taking this obscure document in hand and helping the church entrusted to their care to implement what to them seemed like a marginal document at best.

RCIA embodies a renewed ecclesiology

However, a few theologians and pastoral leaders understood the significance of the RCIA and saw it as a providential instrument of the Spirit—a way to further implement a Vatican II ecclesiology that was rapidly being shut down by post-conciliar, reactionary forces. Those who understood the significance of the rite include people like Aidan Kavanagh, Christiane Brusselmans, Mark Searle, and Jim Dunning.

These prophetic voices insisted that the faith of the church is shaped by the church at prayer and that pastoral structures, Canon Law, etc., should take their inspiration from the church’s distinctive experience of God that is centered in our liturgy. They discerned in the rite a renewed ecclesiology, a renewed pastoral agenda. They discerned, in short, an operative version of the renewal that Vatican II had called for. At the core of this vision of church was an understanding that the intentional faith nurtured in the catechumenate is the norm that should be followed by all Catholics. It was a radical attempt to articulate an alternative to the cultural Catholicism that has defined membership since Constantine’s embrace of Christianity as the state religion (I exaggerate, I know!).

Essential to the integrity of this vision is an understanding of conversion that is multifaceted, progressive, and lifelong—conversion that is experienced and nurtured in the formative dimensions of the catechumenate spelled out in paragraph 75 of the RCIA.

RCIA hindered by pragmatism

I number myself among those who found these prophetic figures convincing and who saw in the implementation of the RCIA an opportunity to continue to work for the vision of Vatican II’s renewal that has been increasingly under siege. The North American Forum on the Catechumenate provided a structure around which like-minded people gathered and worked to implement the RCIA. Many of us who appear(ed) “purists” were/are convinced that implementing the RCIA faithfully is an important way to insure that the leaven of renewal remains deeply embedded in the church at the local level.

However, what we found over the past three decades of doing workshops and other training around the country is that American pragmatism wants to take a very complex and demanding pastoral challenge (i.e., implementing the rite properly) and figure out ways to do it more easily and quickly.
 
Read the rest of this entry »

• How do you know if the catechumens are ready for the rite of election?

• Who decides?

• What is the process for discerning their readiness?

Take a look at Sr. Miriam Malone’s invitation to a one-hour, live training workshop to answer these questions and more.

Click here here for more information and to register for the workshop. 60% off the registration fee if you act before January 1, 2010.

Marketing guru Seth Godin goes a bit over the top in a rant about the ineffectiveness of nonprofits to cause change in the world. But one question he asks struck me as particularly apt for parish leaders:

When was the last time you had an interaction with a non-profit (there’s that word again) that blew you away?

We might ask, when has anyone had an interaction with our parishes that blew them away?

Godin’s post could be brushed aside as a message to “big” nonprofits, but that would be a mistake. In your zip code, your parish is the most likely and potentially most effective source of change for the people of that neighborhood. Red Cross or even Catholic Charities cannot hope to have the impact your parish can have, because you live there and they don’t.

On the one hand, I wouldn’t take Godin’s comments too seriously. Some of his markers of success for a nonprofit seem silly. (e.g. having lots of Twitter posts; to read someone who disagrees with Godin’s post, click here.)

On the other hand, his underlying concern should keep us all up at night. Do our parishes really make a difference? Are we causing the world to change?

What do you think? Do you see Catholic parishes as a force for change in the world? Can you share some examples or best practices?

Nick’s “daymare,” shared in the TeamRCIA newsletter, is more truth than fiction, I fear. Our parishes are filled with kind and faithful people of good will, and many of them are ready and even anxious to respond to volunteer opportunities. Relying on the Spirit to guide them, they pour themselves wholeheartedly into “whatever you need me to do.” Such generosity is often applauded as selfless virtue. The part that can be forgotten, however, is the part about the Spirit’s gifts being many and the parts of the Body being complementary. The consequence is that faithfulness and generosity become the only criteria for ministry at the expense of the discernment of gifts.

Consider a case in point: the volunteer cantor who can’t hold a tune or who freezes in front of a group. All the good will in the world will not result in effective music ministry from this person. The same holds true for ministries of initiation. For each ministry— liturgist, catechist, hospitality minister, sponsor, dismissal leader, spiritual director—a specific set of gifts, skills, education, and formation is needed. Nick has offered some thoughts on this variety of gifts given by the same Spirit to different individuals in his previous posts. (Click here and here to read more about that.)

What are our true gifts?

Let us return to our generous volunteer cantor. What if she really believes she can sing? In fact, what if she believes she can sing well and she really wants to offer her gift to the community because there is a need she can fill? It is obvious to the rest of the community that her gifts are not musical.

This easy-to-read team training handout helps initiation coordinators learn six effective strategies for identifying and recruiting new volunteers for RCIA ministries.

Recruiting Volunteers (PDF download)
Nick Wagner
Price: $0.99 $0.64

Click here for details

The problem is that her volunteerism is coming from her own agenda and needs, and not from the needs of the parish. However, her gifts are expressed in other areas of parish life very effectively. She is an amazing lector. The Word of God seems to leap off the page and come to life every time she proclaims the readings. She is sought out time and time again to serve as minister of the word for special feasts and celebrations.

Thus the community recognizes, appreciates, and affirms her true ministerial gift given by the Spirit for the common good and the building up of the Body.

Sometimes we, like our cantor friend, are blind to our own gifts while those around us see them more clearly. When we are looking for volunteers, then, let us turn to the community around us for assistance. Following these simple steps can make all the difference in the experience and quality of effective volunteer ministers to assist in the ministry of initiation:

1. Ask your pastor for permission to seek volunteers at the announcement time following liturgy on one or two Sundays per year.
2. Provide small index cards and pencils for the members of the assembly.
3. Prepare a brief explanation of the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults and the ministries for which you are seeking volunteers.
4. Include a list of qualities, gifts, attitudes, and experience that you seek in your volunteers.
5. Invite each member of the assembly to name one or two other people whom they would recommend as team members, sponsors, etc. and ask them to list the reaons that they are recommending that person.
6. Collect the cards. Note which names are repeated and the qualities that are indicated.
7. Contact the persons whom the community at large has recognized as gifted in certain areas. Let them know that their own parish community has recommended them, and share with them the reasons that their names were suggested. (Affirmation goes a long way!)
8. Invite them to consider prayerfully the opportunity to share their gifts with the community by serving as catechist, sponsor, liturgist, or whatever role you are asking of them. Assure them of your support.
9. When volunteers emerge and have made the commitment to assist you, take time with your pastor and team to pray for them and bless them for their new ministry. (A simple adapted blessing from “Catholic Household Blessings and Prayers” would be appropriate.)

• 20 ideas for finding sponsors
• The secret to a successful RCIA team
• Who do you need on the RCIA team?

Summer is over. Well, not officially, but Labor Day has passed and school is in full swing for the new academic year. Many “RCIA programs” have begun “again.” Perhaps this is true for your parish. You’ve been working hard to get ready by having team meetings and going over your plans for the next few months. You know that an ongoing catechumenate is what the Rite calls for, but you haven’t been able to make the switch yet, so with another autumn, another program begins.

How do you break the cycle? How do you persuade pastor, team, assembly, sponsors, and even yourself that it is time to do things differently in order to provide the most effective catechumenate experience for the inquirers at your door? My advice? Take a deep breath. Go ahead with your plans. You are doing good things already. Don’t worry.

And then, follow these simple steps:

1. Know paragraph 42 of the RCIA well. Before one is ready to celebrate the Rite of Acceptance into the Order of Catechumens, the elements listed in RCIA 42 should be alive and well in the life of that person.
This is an amazingly comprehensive resource, covering every Sunday of the liturgical year.

Word & Worship Workbook for Year C: For Ministry in Initiation, Preaching, Religious Education and Formation



Mary Birmingham
Price: $49.95 $46.99

Click here for details
2. Understand that not everyone will be ready for the rite at the same time, even if they “begin” the inquiry period together.
3. Know Part II.V well. Not everyone needs the catechumenate process or even a similar formation before being received into the full communion of the Catholic Church.
4. Understand that not everyone who wants to be Catholic needs the same formation process.
5. Welcome inquirers and candidates whenever they come. Listen to their stories.
6. Repeat steps 1 -4 and determine the appropriate response to each individual.

With these six steps you will discover that you are well on your way to an ongoing catechumenate. It’s easy. It’s natural. It’s pastoral. It’s the beginning of full and faithful implementation of the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults.

And it’s not such a big deal after all!

• The six deadly sins committed during the Rite of Acceptance
• The secret to a successful RCIA team
• What makes catechumens ready?

I know. There are supposed to be seven deadly sins. I did think of seven, but one of them isn’t deadly. So this will be the six deadly and one not-so-deadly sins committed during the Rite of Acceptance. These are not based on the standard seven that you’ll find in the Catechism. Rather, these come from the ancient Celtic book of Aelwais Dunethet Way.

1. Celebrating on the First Sunday of Advent

I’m told there are still lots of parishes that do this. I’ve asked and asked, and I can’t seem to find out why. Someone once told me they do it because then the catechumens can start their journey at the beginning of the “new year.” And then I asked if the catechumens are, in fact, spending a full year in the process in that parish. No. And so head scratching resumed.

Here are three criteria for picking a Sunday for the rite:

1. When the readings are appropriate (read ahead a little and find a good day; First Sunday of Advent is not)
2. When the parish is ready (meaning you don’t have a gazillion things to distract the focus from the catechumens like lighting and blessing wreaths, making announcements about the Giving Tree, and begging people to sign up for the Christmas choir)
3. When the inquires are ready (see Sin 2)

For more, read: When to schedule the Rite of Acceptance

2. Accepting people who haven’t completed the preflight checklist

The RCIA is very clear about the criteria for readiness. Marking time in the precatechumenate is not on the list. If you knew your pilot had been to flight school twice as long as any other pilot, would you feel good about getting on the plane? What if the reason he’d been in school so long was he just couldn’t figure out how to fly, but he’d been there so long they finally graduated him? It’s the same with inquirers. If someone has been an inquirer for six weeks or six years, they cannot move on to become catechumens until they show evidence of:

• first faith
• an initial conversion
• an intention to change their lives
• a desire to enter into a relationship with God in Christ (RCIA 42)

For more, read: RCIA Discernment: How do you know if they “know enough”?

3. Accepting people into the Order of “Catholichumens”

Many parishes celebrate a combined Rite of Acceptance and Rite of Welcome (of the baptized candidates). While the team members think they are making the distinction clear, they always fail Communications Theory 101. What you say isn’t necessarily what’s heard. To anyone who isn’t reading along in the ritual book, it looks like these are all the folks are the same—people who are going to become Catholic this year.

Train your RCIA team in just four sessions with this helpful reader’s guide to the RCIA.


Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults: A Reader’s Guide to the Introduction.

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by Nick Wagner

Four sections. Price for each: $3.99 $3.79
Buy all 4 and get 1 free!

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There is one really, really easy way to solve this. Celebrate the two rites on different Sundays. And when you do celebrate a welcoming ritual for baptized candidates, don’t use the one in the RCIA (which is optional). Instead, use a modified version of the “Order for the Welcoming of New Parishioners” from the Book of Blessings.

If you simply must celebrate the two rites together, then begin with the baptized candidates inside the church, while the unbaptized are waiting outside the church. Call the baptized candidates forward, introduce them to the community, and then all process outside to celebrate the Rite of Acceptance with the unbaptized.

4. Knock, knock, who’s there?

Gosh, I was floored when I heard this one. Some parishes are making the inquirers bang on the church door at the beginning of the liturgy. My, what kind of symbol is that? Our doors are closed; you have to bang on them to get in. We are saying they have to come to us instead of us going out to them. Let’s knock off the knocking and stick to the flow of the rite.

5. Keeping warm and cozy

What’s the flow of the rite? It’s very simple. We, the insiders, go out to get them, the outsiders, and bring them in. The rite says some of the faithful gather with the unbaptized outside the church. When the priest goes out to meet them (from inside the church), the rest of the faithful can join him, singing a song of welcome or joy (see paragraph 48). This isn’t what happens in many places, however. What often happens is, every good Catholic is in their own pew that had been specially reserved for them by their guardian angel before they arrived. It would be a huge inconvenience to ask them to now get up and go outside. They just came from there. What’s the point of going back out now? So instead, we pare down the ritual a little (who will notice?) to cut down on the grumbling.

Well, it’s true no one will notice. And that’s what’s wrong. The point of this rite is to notice that something new is happening. These are not just people who are joining the parish. They are turning to Christ for the first time in their lives. It’s worth standing up and going outside for.

6. Sticking to the script

Okay, are we all outside now? Great! What’s next? First the seekers are introduced to the community, and then the presider asks them why they’ve come and what they want. The “deadly” part is, thousands of seekers across the country this year will say they have come for the same thing and want the same thing (faith and eternal life). How is that humanly possible? It’s not. They don’t really say what they want. They say what we tell them they want. They say the words exactly as written in the RCIA—which they have never even seen! People! Let’s make this real. The text given in the rite is only an example. How do I know? Read the little tiny print just before the dialogue in paragraph 50. It says so, right there in black and white. (Well, it’s red and white in my book, but you know what I mean.)

For more, read: Why catechumens shouldn’t ask for faith

7. Dismissing the children

This is the not-so-deadly-sin. Once, when I was visiting a parish in another diocese, the pastor dismissed the baptized children for their own liturgy of the word service before celebrating the Rite of Acceptance. It’s not deadly to the rite itself, but it sure doesn’t help the children much. What could possibly be going on in the little room over in the parish hall that would benefit the children more than witnessing new people being brought into the church? There’s lots of processing, and gestures, and singing, and other cool stuff kids love. So this year, let the children stay and participate in welcoming the newcomers.

Now I have to come clean and admit I’ve been guilty of more than a few of these deadly sins. But never more than once. Okay, maybe twice. The point is not to be perfect. The point is to get a little better each time. A good challenge for your team would be to choose one thing about the Rite of Acceptance to improve the next time you celebrate it. And then another the next time. And so on. Once you’ve got it down perfectly, let me know. I’m still trying to get there.

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? If he’d just stop smoking, he’d be healthier. He knows it. You know it. Everyone knows it. Simple. But not.

The bad team habits are like that. The habit gives us something we like, even if it might be bad for us. So it can be very difficult to give up some things we’ve come to rely on.

Executive coach and management consultant Marshall Goldsmith recognized this behavior in business teams. He says that some of the habits we get into may in fact have led us to our current level of success. So we hold onto what has worked in the past, even though those same behaviors are keeping us from moving forward into the future. In his book, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful, he describes 20 habits, many of them unconscious, that business leaders fall into that prevent them from becoming the best leaders they can be.

One habit he says leaders need to break is continuing to do things that we should just stop doing. He suggests that leaders take a break from making to do lists and, for a time, make a “to stop” list. What would that look like if we applied it to our catechumenate processes?

If we could stop doing some of things team often wind up doing—things that do not directly pertain to the RCIA—perhaps we could reach a deeper, more powerful level of initiation ministry.

For example, what would happen if teams stopped doing some of these things:

• Helping faithful Catholics who missed confirmation as teenagers “catch up” on their sacraments
• Putting faithful Protestants through the same process as the catechumens
• Celebrating the Rite of Acceptance before the inquirers are ready to make a true commitment
• Celebrating the Rite of Election with catechumens who are not ready to be baptized
• Relying on sponsors who are not fully participating Catholics

Those are all things I used to do, and each of them eventually wound up on my “to stop” list. I can’t say that taking the steps to break these bad habits, all by themselves, made our teams successful, but the process of examining what the rite was really asking of us—and then trying to live up to it—did get us a lot closer to what we thought of as successful.

How about you? What’s on your “to stop” list for the coming year?

• What makes catechumens ready?
• Do you run your RCIA like a business? Maybe you should
• Sponsors: Nine must-know facts

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 look for talented, gifted, faith-filled Catholics to serve on your team, the jobs will take care of themselves.

Here’s a helpful resource for putting the talents of the entire parish to work.

Dreams and Visions: Pastoral Planning for Lifelong Faith Formation
Bill Huebsch
Price: $14.95
Click here for details

The Lutheran Church has a comprehensive list of spiritual gifts on their Web site. Are most of these gifts represented on your team? Two that caught my attention and that I could do a better job recruiting for are “mercy” and “artistry” Take a look at the list and then click on the comment link. Let us know which gifts your team is strong in and which you need to develop.

And if you want to discern what your own spiritual gifts are, the Lutherans have a tool for that too. Click here to take your own assessment.

• Who’s on your team?
• Call your mother: Human experience as a locus for catechesis
• Is a complete catechumenate possible with a small team?