Parish Decision-Making: Part 4 – The Survey
How we make decisions in parishes is important. We entrust this responsibility to fellow parishioners.
Many generous people decide about our liturgical life, parish and social life and financial needs.
Most parishes have liturgy committees, finance committees and parish pastoral councils.
In the days of old, the parish priest was the one person who linked these three leadership groups. He attended them all and knew what was happening across the parish. Often the decision-making came down to “what does Father want?”
In our new pastoral or parish world, we have many decisions that need to be made based on “what do the parishioners need?”, “what helps the mission of the Church?”, “what helps the youth, the elderly, the new parishioners?”
Decision-making needs to be aligned with the reality of the context of decision-making.
Co-Governance of the Baptised
Co-Governance is based on our baptismal charism to share in the Mission of Christ by sharing in the life of the parish. Baptism is important for liturgical inclusion, pastoral inclusion and decision-making inclusion. In Baptism, we announce our call to the Vocation of Christianity and our willingness to participate in the work of the Master. I think we already have good inclusion based on baptism in many places and ways. So we are not stepping back from what we already have, but stepping forward, based on our present inclusive model, to make it more inclusive and transparent.
Please click here for the survey
Nine Questions
There are eight (8) questions I hope you will answer. Many questions have a comments field.
Your comments are valuable, so please offer your insights. All your feedback is anonymous.
All the responses from this survey and the responses from the leadership groups will create a Response Document.
The Response Document will go first to the Leadership Group Members for their consideration.
Here is the link to the survey
I am being helped in the survey by Ms Lisa Wilkin-Krug and Mr Gavin Lees.
The survey closes on Wednesday, March 15th at 5 pm.
There will be paper copies of the survey in the church foyers. These will have to be dropped off at your parish office or the Cathedral parish office by midday on Wednesday, March 15th.
Thank you for participating in this process.
Fr Joe Grayland