Happy New
Year and welcome back!! I hope everyone
had a very enjoyable Christmas Vacation and your new year is off to a great
start. We are so excited to have our
students back and in the swing of things.
After yesterday’s professional development day, I get the feeling everyone
is ready to get back in the groove of school.
This is the long stretch of the school year, and I hope everyone is
rested and ready to take on the challenge.
While on
break, my family went to Christmas Eve Mass with my father. Mass started at 4PM, and we arrived at
3PM. My son was a little confused that
we were showing up so early for Mass. By
about 3:15PM, the church was packed and the standing room only areas were
filling up quickly. At this time, my son
said, “Dad, why are there so many people here?”
It was then I had to explain that there are a lot of people visiting their
family, just like we were visiting grandpa.
I also told him that many people only go to church on Christmas and
Easter, and that if these people would go to Mass every Sunday, then the
churches would either have to schedule more Masses or build bigger
churches.
As the New Year’s resolutions are being made
and broken, I always wonder if the Christmas and Easter visitors every make a
resolution to go to Mass more. I am sure
they are frustrated with standing for Mass, and the amount of time it takes to
do Communion with so many people, maybe they think Mass just takes too
long. Maybe they just do not know where
to start to get back into making Mass a regular, weekly event.
We have
struggled as a Church to find the ways to get people back to church. We have encouraged people to just start going
again. We have been asked to invite a
fallen away church goer to join us at church.
We have even gone so far as to make applications and websites to reach
the “millennial” crowd. We have tried so
many things of which sometimes works, and sometimes doesn’t. The way in which we try to reach out and
share our faith will always be a struggle, for like education and the different
types of learners, the way we reach people has to be different for each
individual struggling with their faith journey.
There is no guaranteed solution to work.
That being
said, a priest friend of mine has a blog.
His name is Fr. John Hollowell and he is the pastor of Annunciation and
St. Paul’s Catholic Churches in southern Indiana. His blog is titled On This Rock. He often post videos of his sermons, or
reviews of books and movies, and even gets a little political every now and
then. Over the break, he posted a
video(link is below), that he encourages everyone to share with those who are
struggling to get back to church. While
I am not struggling to get back into my faith, I am always looking for new ways
to reach out to those that are not normal church goers.
This video
is a unique perspective of a priest and his own struggles with the Mass. It is a unique perspective on why Mass
attendance is not where it should be. It
also offers some great advice to ease back into the church. Just like our New Year’s resolutions, we jump
into to them “gung ho” and in a short period of time, we drop off quickly to
the point of not even trying. Jumping
into faith might just be the same thing.
If we get all gung ho, will it last or will we eventually start to drop
off to the point of not returning.
I implore
everyone to watch this 12 minute video.
Rest assured, it is not another sermon.
This video does a great job sharing the struggles and offering a
suggestion on how to get us back into our faith. It is just one of the many ways, we can reach
out to those fallen away church goers.
Will it work for everyone, surely not, but if it works for one, then it
is one more person reaching the Kingdom of God.
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