What you owe your parish
Every Sunday, before the bread and wine are consecrated, laypeople carry them to the altar.
Most of us watch this happen and think nothing of it. The priest's words are routine, and we've stopped listening. He says, “Pray, brethren, that my sacrifice and yours may be acceptable to God the almighty Father.”
Despite this being said at every Mass, many Catholics don’t think of themselves as giving anything to the Church. In fact, many are repelled by the very idea that they ought to give anything at all.
We treat our parish like consumers
We treat our parishes the same way we treat a school or a restaurant: as providers of a service. If we don’t like it, we leave. And some say this explicitly. Back in January, when I released my anti-parish-hopping article, many people compared the reason they parish hop to the same reason they don’t go back to a McDonald’s that gave them poor service. They had a bad experience, so they left.
This is a consumerist mentality that is prevalent in our churches. It needs to end.
A parish is not merely a building or an institution. A parish is a family of families, and a family has a different logic than a restaurant.
Now, a family does have rights and responsibilities that run in both directions. Children have rights. If those rights are being violated badly enough, they need to be removed from the family. That’s true. And if a parish is genuinely toxic or harmful, there are legitimate reasons to leave. I’m not arguing otherwise.
But children also have responsibilities.
As children grow up in the faith — as they become spiritually mature, as they leave home and start families of their own — those responsibilities grow, too. You help with your younger siblings, and you care for your parents as they age. You endure your mother’s less-than-great cooking. You show up to your sibling’s play even when you don’t want to. You do these things not because you owe a strict legal debt but because you love your family.
For some reason, it is very difficult for Catholics to apply this same logic to the parish.
What we actually owe
Priests often frame this as time, treasure, and talent. That’s fine. But I think the offertory gives us a better image.
We owe our parish membership in the body. The lay people of the parish are the ones who bring up the bread and the wine — the things that are going to become the body and blood of Christ. We offer ourselves too, as members of the Body. And that membership is going to look different for everybody.
For some men, it looks like being a priest. For some, it’s working at the parish or serving as a ministry volunteer. But for most of us, it looks almost nothing like that. It might be a devout Catholic in a secular office who evangelizes his coworkers quietly over lunch. It might be someone who reconnects with an estranged family member and gently encourages them back to the Church. These are ways of giving your sacrifice too. They all belong to the same offering.
Another way to phrase what we owe is our contribution to the parish mission.
“To whom much is given, much is required,” and you have been given much. As an adult in the faith, as a well-formed Catholic, you have been given something most people on earth don’t have: a clear-eyed understanding of what is right and what is wrong, the revelation of God and His law, the Eucharist itself.
You’ve been given that gift not to bury it but to reinvest it and make it multiply.
The mission of the Church is totalizing. It encompasses everything we do. And the moment is dire. If the only people doing the work of the Church are the ones wearing clerics or drawing a W-2 from St. Mary’s, there will be wheat left unharvested in the field.
You are not a spiritual infant
I’m not saying you owe heroic sacrifice to a parish that is actively failing you or that you can’t leave a genuinely harmful situation. The duty to your parish is subordinated to your duty to your family and your own spiritual health.
But you are not an infant in the pew. You are a spiritual adult, and spiritual adults owe something back. The question is what it looks like for you, in your life, with your particular gifts.
The offertory happens every single Sunday. We say the words together: May the Lord accept the sacrifice at your hands. The sacrifice we offer the Church is bread, wine, and ourselves, all of which (in different ways) become the Body of Christ
So what are you bringing?
I wrote a book to help laypeople save their parish (even with no experience).
The first chapter is free here: