Community Leadership – Call for Prayer and Discernment

Easter blessings to you and your family!!

Friends, the essence of the resurrection – if we were to capture it in several words – is the Good News that Jesus is risen and in our midst, but this news is inseparable from the beautifully powerful command to go and tell this Good News to others.

Indeed, every baptised person has this call and vocation given to him or her by God.

Regular reception of the Body of Christ in the Eucharist strengthens our member in the Body of Christ called the Church; it also magnifies the rights and obligations we receive at baptism to become missionary-disciples. It can’t be overstated how crucial it is that we recover this awareness in our Church and actively live it out in our lives. Paul’s imagery of the Body in 1 Corinthians 12 is key here: “As it is, there are many parts, yet one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you,’ nor again the head to the feet, ‘I have no need of you’” (12:15-21).

He also tells the Ephesians that God’s gifts “were …to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all reach unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God” (4:11-13).

Multiple Church documents and many Popes have explored the role of the laity in significant depth, including the Catechism of the Catholic Church (nos. 897-913, ‘The Lay Faithful’), Pope Benedict XVI’s letter of 2012 on the Co-responsibility of the Laity, Pope Saint John Paul II’s beautiful 1988 exhortation Christifideles Laici, as well as Lumen Gentium (the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church) and Apostolicam Actuositatem (the Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity), documents from Vatican II.

For our present purposes, the message could hardly be clearer: lay people are full members of this Body of Christ, the Church, and have a beautiful co-responsibility alongside priests and religious as active agents of our Church’s evangelising mission: to be in and bring others into relationship with Jesus Christ.

Over the past six months, it has become clear that in order to become a parish that actively accompanies others to encounter Jesus, we need lay leaders. In a parish like ours, with its multiple venues, schools and Mass communities, it is vital that we create a leadership structure that informs and supports every single parishioner to feel included and fully part of the parish and our mission. Your prayer and discernment is invited as we seek to identify lay leaders who will make up the Faith Communities Council.

Over the next six weeks as we journey towards Pentecost and the launch of our parish’s Strategic Plan, Our Lady of the Rosary Parish is inviting your prayer and active discernment to identify lay leaders who will make up the Faith Communities Council. Discernment is the means by which we discover God’s will for us and requires reflection, prayer, dialogue and letting Scripture speak to us. We have a dream that our Faith Communities Council will consist of local community leaders on fire for the mission of the parish.

While excellent lay leadership happens in many of our parish communities already, this Council will exist to facilitate the communication and implementation of the parish’s Strategic Plan across all worship communities within the parish. Members of the Council will help to place evangelisation at the center of our parish. We ask that you, and every single member of our parish, prays for the Holy Spirit to call forth women and men with the charism of leadership at this time. Come Holy Spirit.

Peace and Easter Blessings

Fr Josh and the Senior Leadership Team