November 7, 2009
Parishioners, pastors discussing stewardship as a way of living
By Denise MacLachlan
Herald staff
Father Soane Kaniseli, pastor of St. Maria Goretti Parish in Elk Grove, stands in the chapel where parishioners gather for weekday Mass. The new parish community has scores of volunteers involved in many parish ministries. Luis Gris/Herald photo
Ray Patron understands stewardship. He is chairman of the stewardship committee for St. Maria Goretti Parish in Elk Grove, a parish so new that it doesn’t yet have a church.
“Every single person’s gift is essential,” Patron said.
“At first, we celebrated Mass at the homes of 13 different families,” reminisced Father Soane Kaniseli, pastor of the parish established in 2007. Then the Diocese of Sacramento bought a tract house in one of Elk Grove’s suburban neighborhoods. So now the community meets for weekday Mass at the house and gathers at nearby Sheldon High School for the Sunday Masses.
Parish members pack up everything needed for Mass and transport it to the school each Sunday morning and back again in the afternoon. They take the handcrafted wood altar and podium, carved floor-standing candlestick holders, and when necessary, the wood and glass baptismal font — all items created by parishioner Steve Ruch, whose hobby is carpentry.
In the nearly three years since its founding, the parish has grown to 320 registered parishioners, Father Kaniseli said, but the number of people who regularly contribute is even higher: 478.
It’s an unusual reversal for a parish to have more givers than registered parishioners, Patron noted, but it is part of the joyfulness and energy of creating a parish community from scratch. Patron and his family come from St. Ignatius Parish in Sacramento, where they were happy, he said, but they wanted to be part of the “once-in-a-lifetime” opportunity to build a church. He adds: “I love the connectedness of this new community.”
When new people join the parish, Patron welcomes them and gets to know what they like to do and what they have a gift for, he said.. Then he tries to find a place in the community where they fit and where they’re needed.
“Registration forms alone are too mechanical,” he said.
Patron noted that the parish is an almost all-volunteer organization, so everyone who joins is needed somewhere in the community. He keeps track of the volunteers and their ministries, creating binders for each ministry so that people can hand off their work to the next person when they move on to another ministry.
“The binders aren’t anywhere near complete, but they’re a start,” he laughed.
As stewardship committee chair, his goal is that every parish family has a parish ministry.
Patron notes that in most parishes, the “20-80 rule” applies: 20 percent of the people do 80 percent of the work.
“Let’s not have a 20-80 parish. Let’s have a 100-100 parish,” he told The Herald. “If every family has a ministry, we’ll have such an involved, committed community.”
Patron’s approach is the essence of stewardship, according to Michael Halloran, director of stewardship and development for the Diocese of Sacramento.
Halloran is the author of the parish stewardship planner titled “Stewardship — A Way of Life.” He spent a year traveling throughout the diocese and listening to pastors and parishioners tell him what they need, he said, and the result of his listening tour is the parish stewardship planner.
“It’s a set of resource materials that explains what stewardship is and helps people put stewardship into practice,” Halloran said. The stewardship planner has been made available to all parishes in the diocese.
Parishioners usually hear talk about stewardship as just another way of asking them to give money, he said, which makes it hard for them to hear what stewardship is really about. So Halloran assembled reference materials: a list of Gospel passages in which Jesus discusses money and resources; the U.S. bishops’ pastoral letter on stewardship; a reading list of Catholic thinking on stewardship.
He also included practical elements that help parish office staff organize and focus on their community’s developing understanding of stewardship. He included a template for a parish accountability report, so that parishioners can see which ministries they put the most and the least energy into; instructions for coordinating a successful parish ministry fair; templates for sample bulletin announcements about stewardship; and even a list of songs and hymns that celebrate stewardship.
The materials are available online through the diocese’s Web site at www. diocese-sacramento.org and at the Web site of The Catholic Foundation of the diocese at www.tcfsac.org.
In the past several months, Halloran has conducted stewardship orientation sessions with clergy and laypeople from across the diocese. Eighty members of the clergy and 155 laypeople have attended stewardship orientation sessions and more than 200 people from 60 parishes have participated in further discussions of stewardship.
Many parishes are in the process of implementing a stewardship program at the present time, Halloran said.
Father Michael Hebda, vicar of clergy for the diocese, has scheduled a diocesan stewardship day for priests to focus on the spirituality of stewardship.
“Yes, stewardship is about money,” Halloran said. “But money is only one aspect of stewardship. True stewardship is a way of being in world, a way of seeing the world.”
People are asked all the time to give money, Halloran said, and they give when they see a need they can address. But practicing stewardship comes from an internal shift in why they give, he said.
“Fundraising is about giving to a need,” he said. “Stewardship is about needing to give.”
The shift from fundraising to stewardship is a shift to a holistic understanding of one’s talents, resources and spirituality, said Father Jonathan Molina, parochial administrator of Our Lady of Mercy Parish in Redding.
“Most people need something concrete to do when they try to live a spiritual practice,” Father Molina said. So he suggests to his parishioners that they practice the “Three Hours a Week” rule.
He suggests that they set aside one hour each week to give their time to the Lord in prayer. Then set aside another hour each week to give their talent to the Lord, maybe by volunteering at their parish in some way, as eucharistic ministers, teachers, or groundskeepers picking up trash — whatever they can offer.
And for their third hour, he said, they figure out what their hourly wage is out of a week’s pay, and give that amount to the Lord, in a gift to the parish or to some other charity that does the Lord’s work.
“Each of these hours alone isn’t very much,” noted Father Molina, “but together, they are powerful — together these hours form a spiritual practice and they plant a seed.”
