SUCCESSFUL STRATEGIES: DOING CHURCH DIFFERENTLY AT THE PARISH LEVEL

Paul Butler, President, GlobalEdg

Rev. Joe Donnelly, Pastor, Sacred Heart Church, Southbury, Connecticut

What we’re going to address today is how we approach our strategic planning process, what the process consists of, and what are some of the results. We’re a suburban parish of about 2,200 households in the western part of Connecticut. I came to the parish about 11 years ago and immediately dove into a few things, in- cluding what I like to call big projects. We twinned with a parish in Haiti. We left CCD and went in favor of intergenerational catechesis, which we’ve been doing for about seven or eight years now. We tried to expand the staff. I followed a very talented and gifted guy, who was a classmate of mine, but he was a bit of a one-man show. One of the first things I did when I got to the parish was to spend some time with each of the committees or groups or ministries, and I kept hearing the same refrain. I’d say, “Tell me, how do you do this in the parish?” and they’d reply, “Well, we do it that way,” and then inadvertently they’d say, “But you’re the pastor, Father, you can do whatever you want.” That could have been the response to the prayer of the faithful on Sunday.

Clearly, there was a need to expand the leadership on the staff, which, in fact, we did. But when I came to the end of my first six-year term and was ready to begin a second, I asked the question, “What now? What are we going to do?” After some conversations with Paul, who was on our Parish Council, we came up with the idea of doing a strategic plan. Maybe we needed to think strategically about the next six years in terms of continuing the mission and ministry of our parish. with that ball and how are they going to be held accountable?’

The Parish Council was a particularly appropriate place to have this discussion, since it was one of the most visible ways to involve different people in the work of the Church. I say this really respectfully, but the Church has wrestled before with working collaboratively, and democracy is not our strong suit. Pastors and even parishioners in different parishes know that the Pastoral Council and the Parish Council have not always gone as smoothly as they should. We’re still looking for that model that works, that draws people in, that taps into the energy of the community and the many gifts of our members.

Early on, parishes would have a Parish Council -- sometimes called the Council of Ministries – where the various ministry and committee heads would come together each month and talk with the pastor about what they were doing. This group would also be in charge of the fundraising for the parish. But the problem with this model was that it became very boring after a while and difficult to keep people engaged. After all, why did they have to attend a meeting listening to somebody review what they were doing when they could just read a memo. But the bigger flaw was that there was no vision. There was nothing to move the council forward, so many parishes turned to what then became known as Pastoral Councils. A Pastoral Council would either elect representatives on behalf of the parishioners or, as in our case, create a discernment model where we brought people together who were interested in being part of the group. We’d then go through several weeks of discernment with a facilitator, and determine who should serve on the Pastoral Council.

So, we began talking about a strategic plan and process, and formed a Strategic Planning Committee to drive the project. One of the things we wanted to do was select people to become part of the process not because they were the best known in the parish or had been there the longest, but because of their background, skills and interests could really bring something to the process. So, we were very purposeful about who we drew to these committees. We consulted widely and ended up with a wonderful group of people to undertake the strategic planning process.

My own planning world had consisted of 30 years with companies like Proctor & Gamble and Gillette. That proved useful when we brought these members together and began fine-tuning a set of three strategic planning goals. The first was to make strategic choices about where to invest our time, resources and energies.

So, we wanted our people to start thinking along those lines – about “choices,” about “ongoing,” and about “future and disciplines.”

This group would brainstorm various topics. For example, ‘How do we keep young people in the Church?’ Its ideas would then be sent to the appropriate parish committee, like the Faith Formation Committee or the Evangelization Committee, for further consideration. We did that for a while, maintaining an emphasis on prayer and consensus, rather than actually voting on anything. The flaw in this model was that there was little accountability. It was like, ‘We want to do this and that for our young people, but who’s going to run

The key word here is “choices” – strategies are about choices, what you choose to do and not to do. The second goal was to address ongoing financials, and the key word here is “ongoing.” We were in a pretty good place with our parish financially. We were known as a parish that people wanted to come to, and where they became engaged. So, how do we really protect our finances for what we needed to do in the future? And the third goal was to determine future direction and operating disciplines for the organization. In the case of our planning process, this could be as simple as asking, “What’s going on?”

“What do you recommend?” and “What will the results be?”

The other key development is that we began working with the Leadership Roundtable. And what I’ve learned, and would recommend to anyone on a path similar to our parish, is to follow the Standards for Excellence. If you’re going to bring an outside group in to help, use the Standards as your checklist. There are a lot of people out there doing consulting work, but it’s not grounded in what we (the Roundtable) believe is important. Personally, I had to learn how to speak the language of the Church, and it’s been quite an education for me.

We also focused our team on a strategic thinking methodology as seen through five key principles. First, we gave everybody the ability to “Challenge Assumptions.” Secondly, we asked them to “Scope the Issue.”

We had a lot of stuff we had to think about, so we made it clear the scope was really the parish and the surrounding communities, not their faith formation team. How big is our parish compared to the community? Are we the largest faith? The third principle was “Focus on the Vital Few.” What are the most important things this group needs to focus on? We had 55, 60 ministries, and we were all over the place. Fourth was “Facts Inform Outcomes.” When we started looking at some data, we said, “We’re a vibrant parish.” But what does vibrant mean? We did an engagement survey so we could measure what we meant by vibrant? And fifth was “Linkage: Connect the Dots.” As part of our project, we did an internal and external analysis, looking at strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. These informed the key issues we needed to address. We didn’t have 30 or 40 key issues, but a list of eight on which to focus our energies. They became the mainstays of the three-year strategic plan we developed. We don’t see five-year plans in our business much anymore, by the way. Instead, we see three-year rotating plans. Every year we take a look at our SWOT analysis and at our internal/external analysis and ask, “Where are we?” And that sets the stage for what we call key issue sessions, which are held over a four or five month period. From these, our key issues emerge.

The first key issue was Evangelization. We have a large 55-and-over community in our town with a lot of retired people, as well as an abundance of young families moving in. So we needed a way to actively engage both ends of this age spectrum.

We noticed there were many concerns around families in crisis, as we called this group. So, our second issue was how do we identify and address and support families in crisis? What do people have a right to look for from their parish community when they face some kind of difficult issue in their family life or their individual life?

The third key issue was how do we communicate the new model of the Church? It may sound kind of hackneyed, but this is not the Church that most of us grew up in. This is a whole different moment of grace, and we need to be aware of that. I think those in leadership are pretty aware of it, but how do we make the larger community aware of it? How do we move people beyond, “Oh, I go to church,” to “I am the church.” And that gets into areas like the role of the laity, a non-pastor-centric model (“You’re pastor, Father, you can do whatever you want”), a collaborative style of leadership, and the introduction of nonordained people to leadership, like pastoral associates. So, we needed to get people more comfortable with that model.

The fourth issue was human resources: how do we ensure we have the right human resources to meet the needs of our parish, whether that’s structuring the staff or rethinking the types of jobs. And fifth, communication: how do we promote and enhance the image of Sacred Heart and the Catholic Church as a positive force in the community and beyond? One arm of evangelization is obviously nourishing faith in the people of the community, but the other is the public face the Church has, both in a small town like ours and much larger. People tend to have all these bizarre ideas of what Catholics do, often fed by the secular media. So, how do we work that? Next issue was Haiti. We established a relationship with a parish in Haiti about seven or eight years ago, and we did it not just to do something for all those poor people in Haiti. We did it knowing they had something special to bring to us, and we’ve attempted to get to know them a bit, which sometimes has meant going down there (unfortunately, they couldn’t be brought up here). Bridging that gap was really important to us.

Outreach was another key issue. We had a lot of social ministries, so how do we continue them and keep them vibrant so they’re not relying on the same handful of people. And finally finance: how do we pay for all this future growth?

We had these key issue meetings with the parish staff, and we invited people to come weigh in. And for each key issue we asked, “So what? What’s the implication? What should we be thinking about?” And the key issues informed what we call our strategic options, or our priorities. Originally we had a list of 10 to 15. We got it down to seven, where probably two of the seven are what we call enabling priorities: finance and communication. In the end, we had five core priorities, and two enabling priorities. We then decided which of those were feasible. “If this is what’s possible, what can we really do based on the talent and resources we have?” Just as important, though, was what we chose not to do.

These were the seven priorities we came up with once we zeroed in on the key issues: Evangelization; the idea of today’s Church; people in crisis; social outreach; public relations; our commitment to the people of Haiti; and the financial stability to sustain all of these. The overall umbrella – and the value that I personally found –was the ability to think strategically, to be purposeful about what we did as opposed to just taking the approach, ‘Well, it’s Lent again, do we have any ashes left over from last year?’ These priorities are what led us to a unique way, a different way, of structuring our Parish Council, which we’ll describe in a little bit. members? What was their scope and objectives? We also asked each team to give us some measurements, and list their interdependencies? Some teams, like Financial Stability, touched multiple teams. The team charter also asked: ‘What are you focused on over the short-term, and over the course of the three-year plan?’ By the way, the plan was started in 2010, and by the end of the year we had largely finished it. We renew it each year; we don’t start over, but simply ask, “What’s changed? What data is different from what we had earlier in the year? What’s the data telling us about our community? About our finances?”

The movement from, “Okay, these are our priorities,” to “Okay, what do you do with them?” was a major step. We set up seven teams, a team for each priority. Each team had a staff liaison or a sponsor -- one of us on the pastoral staff – to work with them. There was also a team leader, and here we sought out people with backgrounds and experience to draw into the ministry of the Church. One of the things I think that parishes sometimes suffer from is having the same people doing the same things all the time. Our approach meant reaching out to people we saw at Mass all the time, people we knew were committed to the Church, but never came forward to do anything, and invited them directly? “We need somebody with your skills to work with our evangelization group, would you be willing to do that?” Each team had about four or five people, in addition to the staff liaison and team leader, and they met three or four times a year.

Each team was asked to fill out what we called a team charter. Who were their month at our Vigil Mass, and in little more than a year has turned into the most highly attended Mass of the month.

The model we came up for the Parish Council is something we’ve come to call the Pastoral Advisory Council. It’s consists of myself as pastor, three pastoral associates, and Paul as the facilitator. And there are the chairs of each of the seven priority teams. We meet about three times a year, though we try to stay in touch throughout the year, and once a year we reassess the plan to determine how we roll it out in the coming year.

What we found is that the strategic plan offers us something to focus on. It calls on us to not just manage things, or repeat what we did last year, but to move forward as best we can. I’ve found it to be much more effective than the models I used in other parishes where I served. It’s worth noting that unlike the Parish Finance Council, which is mandated by Canon Law, the Parish Council is recommended by the Church. So there’s not really a universal model that works for everyone.

We’ve also undertaken five major service projects, especially outreach to the poor. For example, once a year we have a group of our young people go down and minister in Haiti at our twin parish there. Today’s Church has been trying to get people to talk about their faith, because we Catholics are notoriously shy, we don’t talk about politics, we don’t talk about our religion. Can we get people to talk about their faith? Because when they talk about it, they’re able to be reflective, they have to wrap words around what they believe, and that sometimes is a real challenge for people. So we initiated what we call Sacred Hearts to Hearts, where a dozen parishioners are invited into someone’s home, with a pot of coffee going and a member of the pastoral staff on hand to start the conversation, and we delve into subjects such as, “What’s your experience like being a Catholic?” “Is your life better because you’re Catholic?” The approach is, let’s start a conversation and see where it takes us.

What are the results from all this work? As one small example, out of the concern we had for engaging young people, we initiated what we call ROC Mass, for Rely on Christ. It’s held the first Saturday of every

This summer we’re actually doing some thematic conversations, because people have particular issues that are very controversial and oftentimes confusing. For instance, “After the sexual abuse crisis, I don’t believe in the Church anymore.” That was the topic for our first thematic conversation. Others have included: “I raised my kids Catholic, but none of them go to church anymore. I feel like I’m a failure as a parent.” And “I’m gay, or my child is gay, and they don’t feel welcome in your Church.” Thematic conversations like these are getting people talking.

Because the communication and PR areas are so vast, we decided to actually hire someone to be our communications and information manager. They now oversee our bulletin, website and quarterly newsletter -- all of which needed work – and also write press releases to try and get the story out to a wider audience of not only our parish, but the Catholic Church – a task that was difficult at times.

Another encouraging result of our planning work is that finances have gone up, which is always a great measuring stick for the bottom line, and something pastors like myself love to hear. We made a simple little appeal about a year ago and found that the last two months, April and May, set a new record for revenues. Which reminds me of what Kerry Robinson taught me about Catholic philanthropy: when people see what’s going on, they want to invest in it, they want to be part of it. So that’s what we did.

As a final thought, there have been flaws in our program -- it hasn’t been without difficulties, it hasn’t been without some struggles, and there are some pieces that haven’t been put in place yet. But we’re proud of what we’ve accomplished so far, and proud that we are Partners in Excellence with the Leadership Roundtable on Church Management.