April 7, 2014
I was at an IHOP recently – the by-product of being out on a parish mission where meals were not served in the rectory – and found myself going over the menu. My Lipitor-taking body cringes at many things on menus, so the buttermilk pancakes were not even up for consideration. Did I want this item with cream or that item with bacon? Then, mirage-like, I flipped to the back page and found a whole section under the “55+” category – a bracket I entered well more than a decade ago. Simpler, and cheaper, items were displayed for us gray-hairs, and I could make a selection that would make my doctors happy. Perhaps more restaurants should cater to this growing baby-boomer population, now retiring and with time on our hands.
Going back to the parish where I was serving, I had a weird idea jump into my aging brain. Are not most of our parishes set up for the “55+” crowd?
Not by intention, of course. Yet our parishes have evolved almost by default, taking care of the folks who come. And, as we know, survey after survey says that when it comes to attending Mass it’s the “55+” crowd who are both present and supporting the institutional fabric of most parishes. When Mass happens, what we sing, the emphases in the bulletin and parish programming, the ethos of the parish – so much of it revolves around the large, but inevitably thinning, slice of folks who have continued coming to Mass on Sunday. (One pastor recently mentioned that his Sunday attendance was down a hundred people a year. How many funerals do you do each year, I asked. “About 100,” he said. “There’s your drop,” I noted, stating the obvious.)
A lot of hay has been made of the widely-selling book, “Rebuilt,” by Father Michael White and Tom Corcoran. They have what might be considered a rather radical transformation happening in Timonium, Md., where they took a staid and predictable older suburban parish and pushed it inside-out, so that instead of catering to a diminishing number of somewhat demanding parishioners, they made the parish’s emphasis on a potentially much larger number of uninvolved, dechurched members. While this prescription, in all its force, may not be everyone’s medicine, it shows the need to think of parish from many perspectives and not just from the default of who is coming to church at this time.
Many Paulist congregations are experimenting with Sunday evening Masses which seem, in several sites, to be drawing a large number of young adult Catholics. This direction at least allows younger Catholics to imagine what a church for those not “55+” might look like. And this needs to happen, lest we Catholics become trapped by the demographics of this decade. We are Catholic. We cater to everyone. We reach out to everyone. We are missionaries – we reach out especially to those who have weak or broken connections with a family of faith. This hardly means abandoning faithful people who have been part of parish life for decades. But, on the other hand, it certainly means not limiting the emphasis of the parish to the faithful who come.
Think of what it feels like, for example, when visitors come to our homes and begin to ask for TV viewing that stretches beyond our favorite channels? Some part of us starts to say, “Wait a minute, isn’t this my TV?” Something of the same inertia can mark parish and church life. It’s only natural. And, just as naturally, our Paulist commitment to be missionaries has to push beyond the status-quo to continue asking: who is not coming? How can we reach them? How can they transform our experience of church? And how will we be transformed as well?
Mushroom omelet, without the potatoes, anyone? Or shall we splurge a bit?