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11 May 2014 - Fourth Sunday of Easter; Good Shepherd Sunday, Cycle A

Today’s good news: God cares! God sent God’s Son, the Good Shepherd, and the Holy Spirit to save the people. God guides and provides, the psalm says. But will humans reject these gifts? Or will they repent, hear the call, accept the blessing, and “live for righteousness”?

Shepherd guidance

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Sign & sacrament

28 Oct 2012 - Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle B

Two tourists are sitting in a small, ancient church in Wales at twilight when a girl of about 12 enters holding the hand of a boy who must be her younger brother. As the two make their way forward, the girl gently guides the boy’s hand along the rough stone wall. They stop at a statue of Mary to trace her face and feel the cold marble folds of her gown. At that altar the girl places her brother’s hands around the candlesticks; he feels the tabernacle, and the crucifix. Then they leave. As the door closes behind them, one tourist remarks to the other, “Isn’t it a pity that boy couldn’t see how beautiful this church is?” Her companion replies, “Are you kidding? He saw more than either of us.”

guidance blind

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Exploring the word

15 May 2011 - Fourth Sunday of Easter; Good Shepherd Sunday, Cycle A

GOD HAS BEEN the shepherd of souls for a long time, biblically speaking. “The Lord is my shepherd,” declares the psalmist. “Like a shepherd he feeds his flock,” adds Deutero-Isaiah. There will be one shepherd whose authority is final, Ezekiel avows. This elevation of the shepherd to divine icon is odd, because the meandering herder was viewed with disdain by villagers and city-dwellers. Shepherds were dirty, uncivilized people more like the wilderness they inhabited than the genteel and governed citizenry. Yet God is identified as an über-shepherd. Not in the same way the Lord is “king,” a title automatically conferring esteem. God is shepherd because of what the herder does: guide and guard. God is also shepherd because of the inauspicious nature of the sheep, identified with us. Jesus adopts this title agreeably for both reasons: because he sees himself as the responsible, watchful shepherd and because he knows firsthand the low-functioning acuity and high vulnerability of his flock. Jesus is also granted the title of king later, by no less an office than the Roman procurator. What’s noteworthy is that church leaders in the following generations, while they may suit up as kings and sit on throne-like chairs, will identify with the title episkopoi, “shepherd.” Before the end of the 1st century, Saint Paul’s farewell speech at Miletus as presented in Acts 20 will include the image of flocks protected from wolves by their appointed overseers. The crosier each bishop carries today is a reminder of this identification: The shepherd has risen from a despised laboring class to an ecclesiastical appointment. You can take the shepherd out of the field, but you shouldn’t take the herder’s humility out of the episkopoi. Today we intercede for our present shepherds and hope for their betterment, not to mention a swelling of their ranks. Despite the ceremonial robes, our shepherds share a task rich with humility, burdened by the care of souls still vulnerable to the dangers of the wilderness. Maybe the wolves are not the same packs prowling around Paul’s early flocks, but the need for sure guidance and vigilance is the same. All of us have responsibilities for church leadership: some to seek ordination or consecrated life, others to support the shepherds in prayer, attentiveness, and sharing of resources. But most of all we have to embrace the mutual humility of this relationship, whether as leaders or followers. Related scripture links Role of repentance: Lev. 5:5; Isa. 1:16-18; Ezek. 36:25-26; Mark 1:14; Luke 5:32 Radical nature of baptism: Rom. 6:3-11 No longer I who live: Gal. 2:20 Parthians, Medes, etc.: Acts 2:7-11 Shepherd imagery: Jer. 23:1-4; Mic. 5:3; Ezek. 34:11-24; Matt. 18:12-14, 25:31-46; Luke 15:3-7; 1 Pet. 5:1-4 Catechism links Shepherd: CCC 754; 764; 2158 Repentance in Acts: CCC 363; 1226; 1287; 1427-1429; 1433

Authors Alice Camille

church leaders guidance episkopoi responsibility acts 20

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Homily stories

03 Aug 2014 - Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle A

Because we are programmed for survival, the more negative news we receive about the essentials for life—food, air, water, and shelter—the more possessive and pessimistic we become. As director Michael Moore concluded in his 2002 documentary exploring violence in America, Bowling for Columbine, what sets violent America apart from other countries is a steady diet of gloom and doom. The fear that the world is going to hell in handbasket is causing the U.S. citizenry to send the world to hell in a handbasket. But in reality the news isn’t all bad. Engineer and entrepreneur Peter Diamandis suggests in a 2012 TED Talk, that, thanks to the exponential growth of technology, “we have the potential in the next two decades to create a world of abundance.” Look at the last century, says Diamandis: The average human life has doubled The average per captia income has tripled Child mortality has decreased by a factor of 10 The current era is the most peaceful time in history Global literacy has increased from 25 to 80 percent We have what we need to take on the “grand challenges of this planet,” says Diamandis. “Small teams driven by their passion with a clear focus can do extraordinary things.” Just ask the disciples of Jesus who chose to follow their teacher’s vision of abundance and ended up feeding multitudes with a couple of fish and five loaves of bread.

Authors Patrice J. Tuohy

Miracle challenges Pessimism abundance

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Iranians elect to protest

21 Jun 2009 - Preaching the News for Sunday

In this Sunday’s first reading the Lord addresses Job out of a storm. In response to a storm of protest, Iran’s supreme leader reversed course this week and ordered an investigation into allegations of election fraud in last Friday’s presidential election. Earlier having called the reelection of Mahmud Ahmadinejad a “divine assessment,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei Monday directed a high-level clerical panel to look into the charges of fraud. The move was not enough to placate supporters of opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, who have daily taken to the streets of Tehran to protest. Tuesday the country’s most senior Islamic cleric, an opponent of Khamenei, threw his weight behind charges that Ahmadinejad’s reelection was rigged. “No one in their right mind can believe” the official results from Friday’s contest, Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri said of the landslide victory claimed by Ahmadinejad. Montazeri accused the regime of handling Mousavi’s charges of fraud and the massive protests of his backers “in the worst way possible.” In an effort to quash media coverage, the Iranian Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance issued a ban on foreign news reporting of rallies in Tehran, revoked the credentials of those with temporary visas, and ordered them to leave the country as soon as possible. Cell phone service was cut in the city. To counter these restrictions a U.S. State Department official Monday emailed the social-networking site Twitter with an unusual request: Delay scheduled maintenance of its global network, which would have cut off service while Iranians were using Twitter to swap information and inform the outside world about the mushrooming protests around Tehran. The State Department said its request did not amount to meddling in Iranian affairs because the department did not contact Twitter until three days after the vote was held and well after the protests had begun. Source: Articles by Warren P. Strobel and Jonathan S. Landay for McClatchy Newspapers, Mark Landler and Brian Stelter for the New York Times, and Hashem Kalantari and Fredrik Dahl for Reuters

twitter ministry of culture and islamic guidance ali khamenei hossein ali montazeri tehran mir hossein mousavi fraud mahmud ahmadinejad election iran state department

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Missed you in church on Sunday

04 Nov 2012 - Preaching the News for Sunday

After Jesus skillfully answered the scribe’s question in this Sunday’s gospel, “no one dared” to ask him anything more. Americans hoping to give the “right” answer when asked in surveys about their church attendance seriously inflate the frequency of that attendance, a sociologist says. Neutral questions that measure actual church attendance suggest that about twice as many people claim to go to church weekly as really do on a given Sunday.“Nearly half of all Americans report that they attend church every week—that's every single week—compared to Western Europe, for example, where maybe about 20 percent of people say they attend church” that regularly, reported National Public Radio’s science correspondent Shankar Vedantam. For many years, however, leaders of religious denominations in the United States have said that if 45 percent of Americans were attending church every Sunday, the pews would be packed. And in many churches, in many denominations, that's simply not the case.Philip Brenner, a sociologist at the University of Massachusetts who studies church attendance, suspected that when you ask people whether they go to church, they actually end up answering a different question. “What you're really finding out here is, ‘I think I'm the sort of person who should attend church and I don't want to admit otherwise, so I might tell you I go, whether I do or not.’ ”To get an alternate number, Brenner looked at studies that use what is called the Time Diary Method to survey people. “Rather than tell people you're asking about their church attendance, what you do is you march people through their week and have them describe to you exactly what they're doing at any given moment.“And when you march people through the week in this manner, it turns out only about 24 percent of Americans actually report attending religious services in the past week,” said Brenner. What that suggests is that in actual religious practice Americans might not be that different from people in Western Europe when it comes to what they do, but they might be very different from people in Western Europe when it comes to reporting what they do, Brenner said.“I don't know if there's a better way to put it, but it turns out that when it comes to religious behavior, Americans report attending church the same way they report flossing their teeth: Lots of people say they do it, not many people actually do," said Brenner.Homily hint: The research in this news story offers an opportunity to remind listeners that church isn’t about keeping up appearances; it’s about experiencing the living body of Christ in communion with others. Source: An interview by Shankar Vedantam and Steve Inskeep for NPR.org

americans polls philip brenner church attendance

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Americans stretch the truth on church attendance

25 May 2014 - Preaching the News for Sunday

In "Ten ways Jesus remains with us," Prepare the Word scripture commentator Alice Camille offers the following about the paths where we find the post-Ascension Jesus in our midst: "Jesus said he would be with his church always, to the end of time. So that's one good place to seek and find him: within the community of faith." Most Christians would agree that makes sense, but when it comes down to it believers are prone to exaggerate the frequency of their church attendance, a new survey suggests.According to the data from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), many Christians—and nonbelievers, too—will exaggerate about attending worship in live phone interviews. When asked in an anonymous online questionnaire, however, people will answer more realistically.On the phone, 36 percent of Americans report attending religious services weekly or more, while 30 percent say they seldom or never go. But online a smaller share (31 percent) of people surveyed said they attended church at least weekly, while a larger portion (43 percent) admitted they seldom or never go.People who don’t attend worship—but say they did—may not mean to lie, said PRRI CEO Robert Jones. People respond to phone surveys as they think a "good Christian” would or should answer, he said. “There’s an aspirational quality here,” he said. “People see themselves as the kind of person who would go.”Once you remove the social pressure of speaking on the phone, “you see people willing to give answers that are probably closer to reality,” he said. “People feel less pressure to conform.”Some other of the findings by group: By phone 29 percent of mainline Protestants say they don’t go to church. Online that jumps to 45 percent; for Catholics on the phone 15 percent say they do not attend, but online 33 percent say so.People don’t even have to be religious to inflate claims of religiosity, PRRI found. Those one in five Americans who are “nones” also may feel greater pressure to fib because “they are the farthest outside general social expectations,” said Jones. On the phone 73 percent of “nones” say they seldom or never attend, but 91 percent say so when interviewed online.Homily hint: Yoga classes often begin with a moment when participants are invited to get in touch with the intention or aspiration that brought them therer that day. A similar moment might help those who are confused or ambivalent locate the reason they are present—and thus deepen their experience of the liturgy. Source: An article by Cathy Lynn Grossman for Religion News Service

church attendance

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Fudging on church attendance

28 Sep 2014 - Preaching the News for Sunday

The disconnect between what a landowner’s sons say and what they do is the theme in this Sunday’s gospel where Jesus uses the story to hold a mirror up to his audience’s hypocrisy. These days, there seems to be a disconnect between the number of people in surveys who say they regularly attend religious services and the number who actually do.In Pew Research Center studies over the past decade, the number of people who report attending services weekly has remained pretty stable, dropping only from 39 percent to 37 percent. Yet Pew says that time diary studies, in which respondents report on concrete activities over a limited span of time, often show lower rates of church attendance than data from surveys, which perhaps better reflect how people see themselves or would like others to see them rather than how they actually behave. A study at the University of Michigan looked at the rate of self-reported church attendance by Americans in contrast with actual attendance. “America maintains a gap of 10 to 18 percentage points between what people say they do on survey questions, and what time diary data says they actually do,” said the report. Among the growing share of religiously unaffiliated adults in the U.S., few (5 percent) say they are searching for a faith tradition or going to services weekly or more often. But what keeps people who have a religious affiliation—that is, who identify with a particular religious group—out of the pews? A Pew Research poll several years ago asked respondents to answer in their own words. Among religiously affiliated Americans who attend worship services no more than a few times a year, 24 percent cite personal priorities—including 16 percent who say they are too busy—as reasons they do not attend more often. Another 24 percent mention practical difficulties, including work conflicts, health problems, or transportation difficulties. Homily hint: Declining church attendance rates (whether reported accurately in polls or simply noticed in the pews) are a reality in many congregations. Aside from quality preaching and well-planned liturgies, other steps that can help reverse the trend include innovative transportation programs such as “buddy” programs that team those who have transportation up with those who need some help getting to church. Source: Articles by Michael Lipka for Pew Research and Tina Dupuy for City Watch

worship pew forum on religion public life church attendance

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Religious trends: Formal religious identity on the decline

13 Dec 2015 - Preaching the News for Sunday

In the January 3 gospel for Epiphany, King Herod is greatly troubled by news of an approaching birth that he finds threatening. Christian religious leaders have cause to be troubled by news from an extensive survey showing that the Christian share of the U.S. population is declining rapidly while the number of adults who do not identify with any organized religion is growing. While the drop in Christian affiliation is particularly pronounced among young adults, it is occurring among Americans of all ages. The same trends are seen among whites, blacks, and Latinos; among both college graduates and adults with only a high-school education; and among women as well as men, the Pew Research Center reported earlier this year. Homily hint: We can read the poll results with dismay or we can choose to take them as a challenge to present the life-changing gospel in new ways and new places. Pope Francis challenges church-going Catholics to take their faith to the people, not wait for the people to show up at the churches. Let this be at the top of our New Year’s resolutions! For more on the Pew Center study, see: America’s Changing Religious Landscape

religious identity church attendance mission

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Religious trends: Formal religious identity on the decline

20 Dec 2015 - Preaching the News for Sunday

In the January 3 gospel for Epiphany, King Herod is greatly troubled by news of an approaching birth that he finds threatening. Christian religious leaders have cause to be troubled by news from an extensive survey showing that the Christian share of the U.S. population is declining rapidly while the number of adults who do not identify with any organized religion is growing. While the drop in Christian affiliation is particularly pronounced among young adults, it is occurring among Americans of all ages. The same trends are seen among whites, blacks, and Latinos; among both college graduates and adults with only a high-school education; and among women as well as men, the Pew Research Center reported earlier this year. Homily hint: We can read the poll results with dismay or we can choose to take them as a challenge to present the life-changing gospel in new ways and new places. Pope Francis challenges church-going Catholics to take their faith to the people, not wait for the people to show up at the churches. Let this be at the top of our New Year’s resolutions! For more on the Pew Center study, see: America’s Changing Religious Landscape

mission church attendance religious identity

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