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.
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.
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:
Create basic community of the Christian people
Initiate people into the faith
Conserve and renew their faith
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:
Have people over for dinner
Go on small “retreats” with other parishioners
Get together for bible study
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.
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.
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:
My experience had been that the pastor sets the tone of the parish and there's nothing to be done if the tone he sets us not great. If he doesn't like the Legion of Mary, it's gone. If he doesn't care about liturgy, you'll get what the songleader likes. If your peace doesn't rest in a town, Jesus told his disciples, shake the dust from your sandals and go to the next town. And that's in the Bible.
There is something distinctly not Catholic about church-hopping. In fact, up until Vatican II, if you wanted to church hop, you had to essentially get permission to do so (in order to get any sacraments of initiation, you had to have permission from your priest. You still have to seek the permission of your bishop if you wish to get sacraments such as marriage outside the diocese.)
One of the critical issues of church-hopping is what we owe to our neighbors. We have all become a bit cavalier about the responsibility we have to build up our local community. Traditionally, one had to go to the parish in which they lived, regardless of the priest, quality of the liturgy, the facilities, or the youth group. This can be a deep penance at times, certainly. It's often the people closest to us that are the most irritating. And we don't get to choose them! How undemocratic is that! But its also the people whom we see at the grocery store, in our neighborhoods and who deliver our mail. The ones we are supposed to encourage, support and show up for.
That isn't to say there are no times when changing parishes is necessary. But it should be the rare exception, not the common practice.