RE the drop in Mass attendance (CL 14/3/04): ‘If the Church is serious about increasing attendance … it will not be sufficient to keep doing what we are doing, (but) better. Instead the … Church (should) invent completely new approaches to evangelisation and pastoral care’.
For decades the Church has had before it, and indeed has had within it, the evangelical/pentecostal example.
In this movement, the people gathered, rejoiced and sang to the Holy Spirit – God immediately and lovingly present to them in all their sin and inadequacy – ready to care for them in their many human needs.
This put a new energy into Church attendance and worship and it clearly met the spiritual needs of the young.
However, for most Catholics, clerical and lay, it was foreign to their church experience .and distrusted.
It was not assessed by its fruits, and the Catholic Charismatic movement in Queensland, centred around the Bardon prayer group (Fridays 8pm) never got that attention and support it should have.
There is little comfort in 5 million Australians identifying as Catholic. All this means is that the Catholic Church is the one they have been culturally associated with, and the one they have rejected as offering anything serious for life.
The main evangelical effort of the Catholic Church is in the schools from which most of this 5 million graduate.
These schools have, for the most part, secularised and only 2 per cent of their population is interested to attend church, and that is not necessarily because they attended a Catholic school.
We should stop trying to do the schools ‘better’. They are their own priority.
‘Grow’ advises us to give up our losing game and embrace our winning game. If we clear the deck of old, inoperative ways, new evangelical practices will come into our vision.
It is not the Church’s job to ‘increase attendance’, it is the Church’s job – this means all of us – to communicate the word of God with faith and enthusiasm, ‘People’s response to this is between them and God’.
If we are living, speaking and acting in the Spirit, our hearers/viewers will sense God’s Spirit and hopefully respond to her.
While we communicate to all, the group to focus is probably those who have gained some maturity.
In these days of expensive advertising and hard sell, the eyes and ears of the youth are too full of the good life and the good things in it.
J.K. CREEVEY
South Brisbane, Qld
