I approached Eugene Stockton’s pieces in ARCVoice 97 (Jun 2025) with interest and hope. Three ‘articles’ appeared in that issue with the rest to follow in subsequent issues.
Part 1, Times are a-Changing, seemed to strike the right notes, acknowledging that the world had changed and our church must change in response. The observation that “the ‘signs of the time’ are calling jus to let go of the culture which used to support our faith and practice…and as childhood merges into adulthood, to embrace the maturing of the Church in a new age” had echoes of Tomáš Halik’s The Afternoon of Christianity which I had been reading after seeing an interview and review in Commonweal. Both make the point that what has worked in the past may not work as the world changes and the Church will need to change for a different age as it has done more than once over the centuries. The critique of the present parish arrangement as a hangover from the feudal system of Christendom is apt. So too is the assessment that the corporate approach of clustering parishes is not a solution.
Part 2, Models of Pastoral Care other than the Parish, offers some interesting historical models of leadership and ministry in the church. All of the examples offered appear to have been responsible to the local culture and needs. Those from 5th century Palestine and (given the use of present tense) contemporary Orthodox churches seemed to reflect the earliest practices of appointing leaders for ministry from a local community with limited formal preparation. Although Halik is clear that the way forward is not through attempting to recapture the distant past, I think that we can take lessons from the simplicity of the first decades and centuries to guide future development.
Having followed those pieces with hope for what might be proposed, Part 3, Re-imagining the Parish for the 21st Century, was disappointing to say the least. It begins by reiterating the need to move away from feudalism and focus instead on the Eucharistic community and ends with a note about Vatican II placing the Mass at the centre of Christian life, echoing the frequently quoted description of the Eucharist as “summit and source”. However, I found what comes between profoundly disappointing.
In my understanding the liturgical changes emanating from Vatican II, including turning the altar for the celebrant to face the community, brought the celebration of the Eucharistic meal to the centre of communal life. In Part 1 there was criticism of the “service station mentality” but what is a Sunday communion service using consecrated hosts from a previous Mass if not a “service station”. Rather than moving the church forward to address changing needs this appears to move backward to an earlier age.
The Palestinian and Orthodox examples given in Part 2 gave me hope that the way forward might be to appoint (ordain if we must) suitable celebrants from local communities. Both examples appeared to require minimal formal preparation which must also have been the case in the early Church. Does it really require six years of philosophy and theology to prepare for celebration of the Eucharistic liturgy? That learning has seldom been evident in homilies that I have heard in my 70+ years of attending Sunday Mass. Why can we not adopt the model described for some Orthodox communities and select one or more parishioners (community members) to undergo minimal training as community celebrants? If Eucharist is truly ‘summit and source’ how can we tolerate church communities that are unable to celebrate it regularly?
Having laid the foundations for proposing a radical path forward in the first two ‘articles’ the third does not build on them but simply offers more of the same. It is neither a new vision nor a radical recovery of the past. We need to recover what has been lost through centuries of clerical feudalism and propose new ways to meet current and future needs.
What did others think about the three pieces in ARCVoice Jun 2025?
Do you agree with my comments or do you think I have pushed too far?
My experience in a semi-rural parish over the last 25 years has seen the parish set up on the basis that the local community be able to provide financial support for a parish priest chosen by the bishop to serve that community. And it is largely to ensure that there is a priest (answerable to the bishop) to lead the community and administer the sacraments.
When the number of active members falls (and financial support is not there) or there are not enough priests to go around, local communities are then either grouped together as a new parish under the one parish priest chosen by the bishop or the one priest is chosen to be the parish priest for each of the separate communities. With the number of suitable priests being limited, it is often a very poor fit. It does not do justice for each local community and is a heavy burden for the priest.
A worker priest situation where the local community chooses one of their own to be ordained (after basic training) who could work to support him/herself and also serve the community, would lead to a much better fit – to a community that would thrive, not just survive.