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An abundant gospel in a time of institutional scarcity

Short essays about observed trends in Roman Catholic life - Pastoral trends

The single greatest trend in parish life today is scarcity: fewer personnel available, fewer parishioners attending, and, above all, fewer resources. Everything is relative of course in this regard: Some new parishes are being established and some parishes are growing, even dramatically. But those individual cases do not overall trends make. The most common organizational response to such trends is fear, but it does not need to be so. The challenge for our time is to proclaim a gospel of abundance within an organizational context of scarcity. This gospel—of hope, faith, and love—should win out before suspicion, distrust, and disconnection. It will not do, however, to deny real trends of scarcity and real declining numbers with happy talk that refuses to see things as they are. It is quite clear in the gospels that Jesus is not about happy talk. What Jesus offers instead is a focus on fundamentals. Gospel fundamentals come down to witnessing and living the Reign of God, not maintaining old structures for just a few years longer so someone else might close them down later. It is not for nothing that Jesus says, “Let the dead bury their dead” (Matthew 8:22; Luke 9:60). Today’s trends of scarcity and diminishment are a clear message that the cultural and social ground around us is quaking. To struggle to keep structures functioning which are barely prepared for survival is foolish. It is time for a proper Christian burial: to let dead and dying things go and creatively build new possibilities even while selectively retrieving and retrofitting critical ways and structures of the past. In the words of church historian Jaroslav Pelikan: “Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. Tradition lives in conversation with the past, while remembering where we are and when we are and that it is we who have to decide. Traditionalism supposes that nothing should ever be done for the first time, so all that is needed to solve any problem is to arrive at the supposedly unanimous testimony of this homogenized tradition.” Parish trends of scarcity might just be nudging us to do creative new things for the first time, in conversation with the past but looking fearlessly to the future strengthened by Christ’s witness and the life of the Spirit. © 2012, Bryan Froehle.

Authors Bryan Froehle

scarcity tradition traditionalism

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Word of the Week

17 November 2024

Presider’s Chair

\'pri-sīd-ərs 'cher\

Also known as the presidential chair, the seat in a parish church from which the celebrant leads the assembly during Mass. Its meaning derives from the chair, or cathedra in Latin, from which the diocesan bishop presides (from Latin meaning “to protect” or literally “to sit before”). The chair is a liturgical symbol of authority and pastoral leadership.

Pronunciation Read more

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