Pastoral Collaborative Relevancy within a Parish Pastoral Council

Pastoral Collaborative Relevancy within a Parish pastoral Council .

Today, and only today are we called upon to take seriously the element of pastoral collaborative excellency to a higher level. In our parishes, we have very many qualified professionals that sometimes look at us priests and simply laugh at us, why? the way we do things in our given parishes, is very wanting and disgusting to the extent that even the same professionals fear to confront the pastor for fear of falling out with the pastor and in this context the parish priest. They usually take the parish priest’s decisions sometimes with a lot of doubt at heart. This comes as a result of suppressive or mitigative collaborative leadership.

The big question is? What is this we call pastoral collaborative excellency? And is it a healthy practice that we need to build up in most of our parishes and Christian communities for healthy pastoral ministers and the lay leaders?

Creating Space for Dialogue Over time teams learn to make informal talk points regarding more than simple professional confidentiality but really getting engaged in what is really happening at their parish level. Threat rises when people become aware of differing perceptions, opinions, and levels of awareness, skill, knowledge, or access.

Threat rises exponentially when a problem, especially a long-standing one which as if no one wants to talk about it yet exists, but turning out to be who will bail out the cat fiasco or simply talking with deep undertones. There are questions of culpability. Threat begins to suffocate the meeting rooms when problems include personal behaviors, performances, character, health, wellness, or dysfunction.

Collusion becomes a better option. Sometimes it becomes too hot that dealing with avoidance issue technique or simply a cover-up. The pastoral agents ought to create space for dialogue, engaging with the professionals on how to run the given parish and it’s never bad for the priest to ask for assistance, ask and be sure your Christian professionals will be free and willing to chip in more than you never expected, why? The skill will be at work.

Consultancy often begins by coming to terms with the deeper threats, and building the skills that make one productive, honest conversational and calling things for what they are. The parish council team begins on learning on how to build agreements and identify intentional behaviors that reduces those threats and temptations into cover ups.

One group member may use the word cultivation to describe the proactive process: patterns of trust-building are cultivated by the Pastoral Leadership Team which is usually in the care of the parish priest, bishop or any Christian competent, efficient and relevant to the given task. Dialogue is indispensable in any given task as far as church evangelization is concerned. Appraisal of mission/parish, programs, budget allocations, team performance, individual performance, admissions of need, and even failures ought to be fully zeroed in. Dialogue reduces blame and finally makes blame valueless. Moreover, dialogue makes learning of everyone’s work and the relevancy of one in each team, team spirit works best when there is constant mutual dialogue among the team members. This in the secular world could be termed as consultancy, in that in case of anything let me know and see if I may be of great assistance to you.

What brings us together? The discipline of sharing appreciative awareness of each other’s spiritual lives nourishes growth of the capacity to share and build common spiritual awareness. This has been a rising need for spiritual growth and self-worth in search for personal vocation and what type of church one wants but above all for healthy pastoral leadership encounters in the building of the reign of God.

 The parish council team is not a political team and ought not to be seen that way, or a team of friends of the parish priest to defend and cover up weaknesses of the priest but a team that has the whole parish at heart and always alert at any happenings within a given parish jurisdiction.

Collegial attitude of members. The team that is talented values achievement, task assigned or cut out awareness of mission requirement and lack of wastage of time, because time is money and that money needs to be accounted.

A parish council member should not be chosen because he or she has nothing else to do, that is wrong and ought not to be encouraged. The same productivity that is put in daily work should be the same productivity for your church, you don’t do it as a holiday hobby, if much is given unto to you then its right that much will be asked of you.

The parish loses out if it has the same parish priest for twenty years or fourteen years, that means that given parish can renew itself, its left to die. Imagine such a parish how many talented persons are left scot free without participating in the building of that given parish. We priest too have to know that as a priest once you clock six years or also in one parish the flavor and taste of priesthood fades. The parish gets lost in endless successions of fleeting moments and your relevancy as a priest is lost.

Awareness of Church Documents. To be elected to be a parish council member or pastoral council means that you are a known Christian grounded on church documents. Most of our parish council members are very green of some ecclesial documents or the parish library itself has no church documents, it’s a shelf there with very old books that have never been read.

The Parish priest ought to avail those documents to the members. Thanks be to God everything today is digitized, they need to upload those apps that have church documents and read them, or take ten minutes to read through documents before each meeting. An important capacity for pastoral teams that need to review, develop, and assess parish mission is the ability to understand the contexts people they bring to the conversation and whether such conversations existed within the catholic church before.

Growing a Culture of accountability. The Parish council owe the parish Christian the general accountability of their plans, work and progress so far done and what is needed to make the parish a better center of spiritual renewal of all parish families.  

To get at what really happens, everyone must learn to bypass impulses to talk in secret joints about what is ailing the parish or the parish priest. Hence, avoiding the conflicts and maneuvers that occur along the way to truth telling and trust making. Naming the obstacles or pointing out the ailment bedeviling the parish are daring acts that typify true collaborative practice. Pastoral ministers live by the stories found in that particular parish.

However, over successive years in ministerial life, pastoral persons become adept at telling scripture stories, and uncovering and sharing new meanings each time they tell them. That skill set, we learned, can be leveraged to document what we are learning about both the sidetracks and the pathways to collaborative pastoral excellence in accountability of being part of the history of a given parish.

Poor Execution of Transitions Some parishes ultimately lost what they gained when a new pastor arrived; one parish team literally withdraws and disbands. However, smaller instances of failure rise up in practically all team settings. The art of dealing with small failure, of course, includes practices of acknowledgment, assessment, and adjustment.

When there is isolation or cover-up, prospects are dim. When persons and team can bring issues to light, hiding and collusive behaviors become non-options. We usually find that remediation efforts are needed, and are often a more economical matter of retrieving or reapplying previously learned practices than starting from scratch.

Colliding Cultural Paradigms Cultural problems rise up with pastoral council teams in two ways. One, when cultural deference to the pastor as sole authority has been the tradition within a community, or the mental model transported from another culture, collaboration needs to be approached as a remedial discipline. Some parish council members have a tendency of looking at the parish priest for all solutions yet they forget together with the parish priest can come up with a wonderful inclusive strategy in parish pastoral plan.

Secondly, when pastoral persons come in parish communities from other national/international cultures and church communities, their personal histories may prevent them from making sense of African pastoral roles and relationships. Some cannot fathom the concept, for instance, of why women can’t be involved in decision-making and leadership roles given the African context, themselves forgetting to see the bigger picture of where they are coming from, and where this very same topic is still  hotly contested within the general overview of the ecclesial panorama.

THE CHURCH  OF TODAY DOES NOT NEED A VOICE THAT IS RIGHT WHEN THE WORLD IS RIGHT BUT A VOICE THAT IS RIGHT WHEN THE WORLD IS WRONG...