3rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A
Preached for the announcement of the Archdiocese of Seattle’s “Partners in the Gospel” initiative to the Church of the Assumption in Bellingham, WA
Previous years (on these readings): 2020
Recording
Emotional version, without all the points: https://moorejesus.podbean.com/e/partners-in-the-gospel-emotional/
Straightforward version with all the points: https://moorejesus.podbean.com/e/partners-in-the-gospel-straightforward/
Transcript
According to the CDC at this point, 1.1 million Americans have died from Covid. Every one of those deaths is a tragedy. It’s an individual that’s lost to their family and to their friends. And whether you agree with the methods used or not, the United States upended every aspect of our lives in order to try to keep that number as low as possible. We closed borders, we locked people in their homes, we shuttered businesses. We had a lot of economic interventions which are now struggling to right themselves. All these things we did to try to keep deaths as low as possible, and yet 1.1 million people still died.
Well, since 2009, this country has had 1.1 million fewer Christians every year. That is 1.1 million souls that have walked away from Jesus Christ. And what have we done about that? Nothing. We upended every aspect of our national’ political and cultural life just to try to keep Covid deaths to 1.1 million. And that’s physical life. That’s those things that can threaten the body but not the soul. When it comes to eternal life, the salvation is offered by Jesus Christ. We’ve allowed 1.1 million Christians in this country every year to walk away from Jesus. And we’ve done nothing. We’ve changed nothing. We’ve said the status quo is fine. We’ll just keep doing what we’re doing. We’re just going to keep on keeping on.
This is fine? It’s not! If Covid had urgency, the mass apostasy that we’re experiencing, the number of people who are walking away from Jesus every year has 13 times the urgency. We should be doing 13 times as many things to try to bring those people back, and to lower the number of people who are walking away from Jesus every year. But have we lived that urgency? Have we brought that urgency into our churches and into our pews and into our families and into our lives? Are we willing to upend everything as we upended everything for a disease? Are we willing to upend everything for the disease of secularism that’s taking over our country? Our church is full of resources. We have a deep strength, we are the Church of Jesus Christ, the people called by the Lord out of darkness to bring his light to the nations. We have the sacraments. We have the Holy Spirit. We have guaranteed teachings that we know are true. We have dedicated volunteers and staff members who have given up wealth. I don’t know if they’d be wealthy, but certainly a big pay cut just to work for the church doesn’t help. We have dedicated clergy. We have strong sacrificial giving people who are making sure the church survives financially. We have all of these resources, and yet those resources seem to be applied to managed decline. We seem to use them just to maintain what we have, and we’re unwilling to make big changes to make these resources have the effect we want them to have, which isthe preaching of the gospel in the world.
In my 24 years as a Catholic, I have experienced the church as a house that is on fire, where everybody’s just fighting about what color to paint the living room. I’ve seen all of our energies, all of our resources, all of our creativity, applied to internal debates. We’ve been fighting about liturgy. How do we make it more creative, more innovative, instead of just doing what the church asks us to do, which itself is beautiful and ancient. We’ve used the church as a proxy battleground for our political fights, trying to co-opt the church or the faith for our own political pet peeves and hobby horses, trying to make sure that our own issues are brought up in the bulletin or from the ambo. We’ve crippled ourselves with doctrinal debates, including on issues that are settled. Consider, for example, these doctrinal debates. Not only do they distract us from the work of evangelization, not only would I stand up here and say that they are against the truth and will of God, but I’ll also tell you they’re ineffective.
The Episcopal Church in this country, which is known for having all the trappings of Catholicism, but also with married priests and women priests and progressive sexual ethics. In the Episcopal Church in this country, 90% of Episcopal congregations have 100 or fewer congregants, 90% have 100 or fewer people in their pews each Sunday. The median age of the Episcopal Church is 69 years old, meaning that in 10 to 15 years that church will no longer exist or not in the form that it has today. We’ve crippled ourselves with debates that aren’t taking us in a positive direction, that aren’t going to bring people back to Jesus Christ. Other people have had those debates and we know where it’s going. Our energies need to be focused single mindedly on the bringing of the gospel to the world. We need to be confident in who we are so that with that confidence, we can bring the gospel to people who need Jesus Christ desperately. It is the only thing we should be focused on. It is the only thing that should drive us. It should be the object of all of our energies and desires and zeal. We didn’t lose this many Christians in the Reformation. And even then, we lost a lot of Catholics, but at least they still worshiped Jesus Christ. We haven’t seen a crisis like this since maybe the Arian crisis of the fourth century, or maybe the Muslim invasion and assimilation of the seventh century. And by sheer numbers, because of the world population today, we have never lost this many Christians.
Never in the history of Christianity have this many people walked away from the source of their salvation. We have to know that this is the only thing that matters, preaching the gospel is the only thing that matters. We can do a lot as an individual community. We can have that focus. We can talk about evangelization. We can learn to love Jesus individually and learn how to bring that love to others, how to invite people into that loving relationship with Jesus. We can do that here at Assumption, but at some point we are going to run up against systemic issues that are beyond our parish. We are blessed in this parish to continue to have a lot of resources and a lot of strength. But I’m a priest of the Archdiocese of Seattle, not a priest of Bellingham. And I can tell you the overall picture in our diocese is something that you might not realize while sitting in these pews today. We have churches that are 25% full, churches that look like the Episcopal Church, with only a hundred people there on Sunday. This Mass is our busiest Mass. You don’t know what it’s like to have an empty church, but our 8 a.m. Mass is maybe 40%-50% full. We’re crippling our ability to preach the gospel by maintaining a parish structure that no longer serves our needs. Our parish structure in this archdiocese is from the 1960s, the zenith of Catholic population.
In 1970, 43% of Catholics went to Mass on Sunday. Today, that’s 17% of Catholics going to Mass on Sunday. From that zenith we have had, let’s just call it a lack of success, in our evangelization efforts. But the structure that we have continues to assume that we are still in the 1960s. We no longer have that luxury if we want to use the strength that we have, and we do have strength. We cannot cripple ourselves by spreading our resources over too many needs. When I was in the Skagit Valley, I thought a lot about the fact that we had five campuses and four of those campuses had a receptionist. If we just used a cloud phone system and had all our phone calls go to one place, we could have saved resources which were instead spent on three receptionist salaries. But by maintaining those four locations and saying, we have to have somebody at the desk physically at all of these locations, we hindered ourselves. We spread our resources too thin. What would I not sacrifice for the sake of the gospel? What would I not give up to bring the saving message of Jesus Christ out into the world? I would sacrifice anything. I would sacrifice everything. Well, we’re very blessed that today we have an Archbishop who understands this. He understands that the house is on fire and we have to stop debating paint colors. He understands that we cannot artificially cripple ourselves. We have the resources to preach the gospel again. Jesus and the Holy Spirit are on our side. But we also have the natural resources. We do have the people and we do have the zeal. But we have to make sure we structure ourselves in such a way that we can preach it effectively. To that end, our Archbishop is asking us to join a process called Partners in the Gospel. A process that is being carried out from every ambo in the Archdiocese of Seattle this weekend. Every single Catholic in the pews this weekend is hearing about this. Every single parish will be touched by this. The summary of the process is that every parish, or nearly every parish in the Archdiocese will be asked to join a parish family, which is to say, join with other neighboring parishes. Now, this is not the old cluster system that I came from in the Skagit Valley, because a cluster was a temporary situation, pairing parishes together with the idea that someday we will have more people and more priests, and then we can split them apart again. Parish family is a temporary structure with a mandate, a three year mandate. The idea being that after three years, these parishes that have been family together will work together to create a plan to be one canonical parish, remembering that the canonical definition of a parish is a community of people.
Which is to say, we’re not talking about buildings and we’re not talking about campuses. That’s not the point. The point is, we have communities that are artificially divided. We have people who are jumping from one church to the other because they’re so close they can choose when. Instead, we need to use the full resources of a Catholic community for the sake of preaching the gospel. We no longer have the luxury to be divided according to preference or geography or whatever else. If we have a community where we’re all working in the same place and going to the same schools, then we should work together as the same church to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ. We’re tapping into the creativity of the people of God. The mandate from the Archdiocese is that we will join in these family structures, and at the end of three years, we will be one canonical parish. But everything else is up to us. We have to decide how we are going to use the combined resources of our parish family to preach the gospel. How do we use our buildings? How do we use our volunteers? How do we use our clergy? How do we use our money? Can we use it more effectively to preach the gospel? I think the answers are absolutely yes, because whatever we’ve been doing up to now hasn’t been working.
Absolutely, yes we can use it more effectively, and it’s up to us to figure that out. It’s up to us to pray and to be creative and to work together so that Jesus is always preached to the nations as powerfully and as effectively as possible. Some specifics. Today you are learning about this process. I learned about it back in June. What the diocese does is this. It consults with small circles, moving out to larger circles because it wants to do it right, and consultation helps them make sure they’re making good decisions along the way. And many times they’ll consult with the priest and they’ll consult with the Presbyteral council, with the Chancery staff, and then with the people of God. We do not know our parish families yet. That’s an unknown, and I don’t even know yet. I will probably know before you because they’ll consult with the priests. But right now, I don’t know what our family structure is going to be. The timeline they’ve given us is that we will first have a draft from a consulting company. They’ve crunched a lot of numbers. They’ve looked at demographic data and financial data and parish data, and they have a pretty good idea of what kind of communities we need, where our resources are, and how we can combine together to be more effective in preaching the gospel. That draft, I think, has already been given to the Archbishop, or it soon will be then the Presbyteral Council and the priests, probably in May or June.
The people of God will see this probably in October. Everybody will have an opportunity to comment on these parish families, to talk about what works and what doesn’t and what their experiences might suggest. They will be made official in January of 2024. And then July 1st, 2024, we will begin that three year process of working together. Over those three years, we will work with our parish family to learn about who we are, to learn our shared histories, to figure out what it looks like to work together, and to ask… What resources do we have? Who’s doing a better job with faith formation? Who’s doing a better job with outreach? What can we learn from each other so that we can be the most effective evangelizers possible? And then on July 1st, 2027, we will submit our plan to the Archbishop and to Rome to become one canonical parish. The other unknown is that we don’t know how this is going to affect our clergy. Imagine being in a parish family and imagine what you need to feel like so you can enter into that process. Well, we don’t know what the answer to this question is, but there are two things to think about. Is it better for the people of God in Bellingham, in Whatcom County, to have this process led by someone who already has experience here, albeit as the pastor of one of the parishes in the family? Or is it better for the people of God to have a new pastor who is not seen as biased toward one parish or the other, who might be a neutral third party? We don’t know.
We’re talking about it. We’re consulting. We’re trying to figure that out. But I just want to be honest with you. I don’t know if I’m going to be the priest to lead you through this process after July 1st, 2024. I’ve asked to be that priest, but like I said, I would sacrifice anything for preaching the gospel. I will do whatever is necessary to make sure that this process works well. And if I have to step aside for your sake and the sake of these other parishes, and for the sake of the people of God, I would do it in a heartbeat, because I love Jesus Christ and I believe in his gospel. What do we do from here? Unfortunately, the next nine months is a lot of waiting and speculation. We won’t know what our parish families look like until probably October. Or at least I won’t be able to talk to you about it until October. So what do we do in the meantime? What do we do before we can start doing this work of combining our resources and working together for preaching the gospel? Well, a couple of things.
One, I would encourage all of us to spend nine months reflecting on this second reading from Saint Paul, perfectly timed for today. “I urge you, brothers and sisters, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree in what you say and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and in the same purpose”. He’s speaking to a community that was divided, a community that was already in divisions. I belong to Paul, I belong to Apollos, I belong to Cephas. No, we all belong to Jesus Christ. And so the work that we have to do, first and foremost, is to remove any division in our heart. If there’s any part of us that has resentment toward other Catholics or other parishes or other priests in Whatcom County, the people we may very well find ourselves in a family with, it’s time to lay that down. There are no divisions in the body of Christ. We have to forgive and we have to heal. We have to be of one mind and heart. We have to get to the point where we can honestly say, I do not belong to Assumption. I do not belong to Sacred Heart. I do not belong to Saint Joseph. I belong to Jesus Christ and His body, the Church. If there is a division that is hampering us, that division must go away.
We have to be united in mind and heart. Otherwise, we cannot save 1.1 million Christians walking away from Jesus every year in this country. Specific to our parish, I want to make sure that we specifically do not become triumphalist in this process. If you’re good at math and if you know the lay of the land, you will know that we are the largest parish in the county. So when we’re paired with other parishes, it’s going to be very easy for us to dominate. We need to pray for the next year and a half to lay that attitude down. What we’re doing is for the sake of the gospel, and we have to be willing to sacrifice everything for the gospel. Ask yourselves, what would you be willing to sacrifice so that this process goes well, so that all of the Catholics in Whatcom County feel like they’re working together? We cannot approach this process as though we’ve somehow won. That would be the opposite of what we’re trying to do. We are the same church. We all belong to Jesus Christ, and we all have to make the same sacrifices as all of our fellow Catholics in the Archdiocese of Seattle. We will not succeed if we can’t do that. I want to remind you, success is not optional. We’re talking about eternal life.
We’re talking about salvation. We are talking about the saving gospel of Jesus Christ. We cannot fail, and we won’t, because the Lord tells us that the gates of hell will not prevail against us. But we have to do everything in our power to be good co-workers with the Lord, whose work this is. We cannot allow the things that we’ve taken for granted for so many decades to impede our preaching of the gospel. We no longer have the luxury of internal debates. We no longer have the luxury of maintaining small, distinct communities. We are one church with one mission, and it is time to combine our resources when necessary so that we can be creative. We can be zealous and we can be effective. The Lord is calling us into a new era. He’s calling us apart from the status quo, which has not served us well for the last 50 years. He is calling us to lay down our sacred cows so that we can do what we are called to do. At times this process may be difficult, it may fill us with anxiety, with fear, with resentment. But I believe in it. I believe that it’s necessary. I’ve seen our house burn too much, and it’s time to do whatever we can to put the fire out. It’s time to preach the gospel come what may. It’s time to be together, Partners in the Gospel.
Fr. Moore 