American Pickers is a reality show on the History Channel that follows two antique dealers around the country as they discover “rusty gold” that they can make a profit on. A usual segment shows them arriving at someone’s house or barn that is filled to the rafters with everything you can imagine. The dealers zero in […]
Constructing an RCIA process is similar to building a house. An architect does not worry about the color of paint in the living room. She focuses instead on how many rooms to build and where the walls will go. After the walls are up and the roof is on, then we can focus on some
Build these six “rooms” into your RCIA process
In RCIA ministry, there are 1,000 things to do. There are things you want to do, things you should do, things you could do, and things you have to do. Start with what you have to do. Start at the heart. For example, if you are planning a dinner party, you might focus on cleaning
After “our team is too small,” the next-biggest complaint I hear from RCIA teams is “we don’t have enough.” Enough budget, enough space, enough training, enough resources. I learned a lesson about this a long time ago. My first parish job involved helping with a long-term church renovation project. The renovation took several years because
Is your RCIA team too small? Do you long for more help? Do you wonder why more people won’t volunteer? Maybe you need to think about smallness differently. There are advantages to having a small team. Once your team grows past a certain size, you might have to become more of a manager and do
Embrace your smallness: the advantages of a lean RCIA team
The neighborhoods around San José, California, are famous for their garages. Behemoth companies such as Hewlett Packard, Google, and Apple all started out in humble garages around here.The Steves (Jobs and Wozniak) didn’t sit around saying, “If only we had more help.” Instead, they said things like, “We’re here to put a dent in the
How to start up an RCIA process from a garage
During a recent trip, I looked up a parish close to my hotel and headed over there for the 9 a.m. Sunday Mass. Just before the opening song, a parishioner went to the ambo, welcomed everyone to St. So-and-So, and then read the parish mission statement. Mission improbable The statement was kind of long, and
Do your catechumens know your mission? Do you?
“There just aren’t enough hours in the day.” I hear that all the time. I used to say it myself. But it’s not true. There are just enough hours in the day. If we had more hours, we’d complain that there still wasn’t enough time. The secret is not to add more hours to the
When is the last time you went to a workshop or read an article and got a great idea about how to improve your RCIA process? Did you come away thinking, “Wow, we really have to try that!” And then didn’t? When I first got into the publishing business, a prospective author called me to
Why your great ideas for RCIA never get off the ground
My first experience of teaching adults was a lector training I did in the first parish I worked in. I was soooo nervous. I typed out my presentation (on a manual typewriter, pre-PowerPoint days), which came out to be 13 double-spaced pages. Then I stood in front of those suffering souls and read all 13
The secret to becoming a great RCIA teacher
