Catholics answer key question: What is 'mission?'

As Called to be Church begins this month with town meetings on the topic of "mission," The Evangelist asked John Manning, director of the Albany diocesan Office of Pastoral Planning, and two parish leaders to reflect about that topic.

Two town meetings are being held in parishes in October and November. October's session will ask Catholics to put their focus on "mission;" November's topic is "ministry."

At the October meeting, Catholics will consider ways they and their parish communities have been "helping to be Christ for one another," Mr. Manning said.

They will discuss what a thriving Catholic community looks like and how each community serves "as if Christ were physically walking the streets of Albany, Schenectady and Hancock with us today. What would He be asking us to do? What is our essence and our core?"

Mission everywhere

"In the past, mission was always connected to priests, religious and deacons. It was always the 'Church personnel' that was looked upon to carry out the mission of Christ," said Sister Mary Mazza, CND, parish life director of St. Patrick's Church in Athens.

She prefers to consider mission as something all-encompassing, that "happens in our homes, in the places that we work and in all aspects of our life."

Mission, she tells children, happens in school and on the playground. For adults, it's what happens in their families and daily lives, when people focus on "who we are as a people of God, that we are called to bring the good news of Jesus" in all the realms of their different experiences.

Lay calling

Sister Mary believes that lay Catholics should see the mission of bringing Christ to others as part of their everyday existence and have an awareness of mission in encounters with people in social gatherings, faith formation programs, volunteering outside the Church and the daily grind of the workplace.

Mission, she said, is "integrated into our lives as disciples of Jesus -- not only to share love, but to extend love. To go beyond ourselves. Unless we do that, we are incomplete as a community."

One of Sister Mary's "greatest challenges is to help people realize the significance of Baptism in our lives, and the fact that we are anointed and sent forth to be Christ for the world.

"It's all of us together. As a parish leader, one of my biggest privileges and responsibilities is to help all of us do our part in carrying out the mission of Christ, because that's the only way it is going to happen."

People of God

For Rev. Lawrence McTavey, pastor of St. Bernard's Church in Cohoes, mission starts from "a sense of Church as the people of God" and explores the Church as a whole instead of looking only at a single parish.

"The mission of pastoral planning is to stay away from simply worrying about staffing and buildings," he continued, "and to realize why we're we doing it: to hand on to our children not a fractured community, but a community that is held together" by that mission and "a real sense of the totality of the Church."

He believes that the changing mission of the Church may require Catholics to "look beyond parochial thinking" and "come together."

Changing needs

In Cohoes, he said by way of example, churches were built to house different ethnic groups of immigrants. Nearly a hundred years later, populations and demographics have changed -- and so have the needs.

"We need to be more united in approaching the needs of our Church for our kids and what we are going to hand on to them. That is terribly important." he explained.

Example of Jesus

Responding to a changing world is also key to the process for Mr. Manning, who noted that while physical expressions of the Church may have changed throughout the centuries since Christ, the mission has not.

"The mission is constant," he said, "but the way it is lived out changes over the years.

"We need to go back to the fundamentals of who we are as a people of God. The essence of that is that we are called to be Christ for one another. That is the heart of mission. He gave us a model. He lived it during His three years of public ministry. That ministry is about faith, hope and love. We are followers of Christ, called to serve the poor, to be people of sacrament and Eucharist, and to love and serve each other."

Relevance

One of the goals of the Called to be Church process, said Mr. Manning, is to talk about and envision the mission of Jesus "in this day and time," making it "relevant to the world today. The mission is the same, but we have to adjust to new realities as well. If we stay [where we are], we'll die. We can no longer be the Church of the 1960s."

For Sister Mary, Christ's message of love remains the touchstone and foundation of the pastoral planning process.

"Every homily that's preached has to have mission in it, and every activity we do as a parish," she said. "Years ago, it was always 'Father's parish.'"

Now, she sees it more as a partnership: "A partner is someone you work with on a big thing that neither of you can do alone. If it's going to happen, it's going to happen because all of us are a part of it."

(10/5/06)