The parish you hate might need you

Against church-hopping

Every Catholic knows someone who drives 30 minutes to Mass, passing three parishes along the way. Maybe you are that person.

But church-hopping is killing our parishes.

I get the appeal. The music, homilies, or community are better somewhere else. But when faithful Catholics scatter across a diocese chasing the perfect parish, nobody builds anything. It causes a dilution of resources. People aren’t working together because they don’t see each other.

That parish you hate might need you.

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Imagine a kid who never eats dinner at home. You’d probably assume something is wrong with his home. He might not feel welcome there, there might even be abuse.

Plenty of young Catholic adults are acting exactly like that kid. Our parishes are supposed to be our spiritual home and our children are eating their spiritual food at a different parish every week. That’s an indication that something is deeply wrong with our parishes and something needs to change.

Now, the kid in the analogy can’t do much to change his home situation. But, young Catholics can. We can make the parish home welcoming so other Catholics don’t feel the need to church hop.

Someone needs to be the first person to stop the hop. Someone needs to pick that parish and commit.

So, consider you might be that person.

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In an address to Roman clergy, Pope Paul VI what a parish is supposed to do:

“This old and venerable structure of the parish has an indispensable mission of great contemporary importance: to create the basic community of the Christian people; to initiate and gather the people in the accustomed expression of liturgical life; to conserve and renew the faith in the people of today; to serve as the school for teaching the salvific message of Christ.” Pope St. Paul VI, Discourse to the Roman clergy (June 24, 1963)

You can break that down into four key jobs for a parish:

1. Create basic community of the Christian people

2. Initiate people into the faith

3. Conserve and renew their faith

4. Teach people how to teach Christ’s message

The cool thing about these jobs is anyone can do them. You are your parish, not just the priest or the lay parish staff. You are the parish. You can do these things.

Some ways the average person can do these jobs:

1. Have people over for dinner

2. Go on small “retreats” with other parishioners

3. Get together for bible study

4. Go pray with strangers in your town

It will happen at a small scale at first with only a few families, but over time if you do those things, they will catch on and grow.

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I understand the immediate pushback. This is hard and takes a long time. It can feel fruitless at times.

But this is how the Catholic Church operates. We don’t think in months or years, we think in decades and even centuries.

The healthy parishes we admire didn’t get that way overnight. They were built by men and women who came before us, who committed, who stuck around, who did the unglamorous work. The things they did 30, 40 years ago are bearing fruit in their parishes today. And that’s how we need to think about our parishes.

Commitment looks like joining a ministry and staying in it. It looks like weathering a bad pastor’s tenure instead of fleeing. It looks like building relationships with families you’ll see at the same Mass for the next twenty years.

But church hopping guarantees we won’t build anything.

I’m not saying it’s going to be easy to build and change a parish. But what I am saying is that a lay person with a few friends can do it. I’ve seen it happen and been part of it.

It might even be the parish you currently can’t stand.

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Over the years I’ve learned a lot about how one person can change their parish.

I took all of those lessons and put them into a book to help you, even if you have zero ministry experience and no institutional support.

The book launches on February 2nd

If you want a preview of the first chapter, click here:

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