SPE Program Spotlight:
INSPIRE Teams Find New
Resources in Unexpected Places
A few years ago, when officials from the Archdiocese of Chicago and Loyola University Chicago’s Institute of Pastoral Studies began designing the INSPIRE project—their joint Sustaining Pastoral Excellence program-- they immediately realized that more would be involved than simply writing a prescription for excellence.
From the outset, they knew that, in one of the world’s largest and most complex Catholic communities, no one path to excellence would work for everyone. In all, more than 2.3 million Catholics live in the archdiocese’s 266 parishes, which blanket two Illinois counties from the poorest inner-city neighborhoods to the most affluent suburbs. Because worshippers come from an extraordinarily diverse range of ethnic groups, Mass is conducted each Sunday in 32 different languages.
Clearly, the INSPIRE planners were not going to be able to create a “one-size-fits all” curriculum or template for excellent ministry. So instead, they designed a program in which teams of ordained and lay parish leaders—priests, directors of religious education, youth ministers, parochial school principals and others—would find new resources for leadership in the most unexpected places: themselves and each other.
“The INSPIRE project is based on the firm belief that parish leaders, and not us, are their own and each other’s first and best resource,” says Daniel Gast, the project director. “Basically, we turned a traditional approach to learning on its head, and it has made all the difference.”
Lay and ordained leaders in local church ministry know better than anyone the needs of the parishes they serve, says Gast. What INSPIRE does is give leadership teams in selected parishes throughout Chicago the time, space and resources to sit down, work through their experiences together, and come up with new and richer plans to meet those needs. (An acronym, “INSPIRE” stands for “Identify, Nurture and Sustain Pastoral Imagination through Resources for Excellence.”)
The one constant in the project—indeed, INSPIRE’s ultimate goal--is to foster more collaborative leadership. It is a quality, Gast says, that is greatly needed in today’s parish.
In Chicago, as in many other Catholic dioceses today, parish ministry is provided by a mix of ordained and lay leaders, with the specific combination differing from parish to parish. Along with the priests who preside at Mass and other sacramental celebrations, parish leadership typically includes many other people, both lay and ordained, who provide teaching, pastoral and social service s, and administrative functions, working either full-time, part-time or as volunteers.
While these parish leadership teams aspire to common mission and purpose, the challenges and problems of day-to-day parish life often prevent that from occurring, says Gast.
“Most of them are never able to spend more than a few minutes on any given task without being distracted or interrupted,” he says. “Each member of the team has particular performances to make, deadlines to meet and publics to serve.”
As each person focuses on his or her own area—whether worship, youth ministry, social outreach or pastoral work—the parish leadership becomes separated from one another, working in isolation. Typically, what should have been a “team” devolves instead into a “staff,” and then into a loosely affiliated group whose members occasionally cross paths, says Gast.
“The school becomes an entity in itself; the director of religious education’s work is a mystery; the youth minister keeps hours no one else understands; and the pastor is never ‘around’ but is expected to attend every meeting,” says Gast. “And all of them are at risk of personal fragmentation and burnout.”
But, collaboration in parish ministry is about much more than improving administrative efficiency, or making ministry more effective or even having a common vision and purpose. Ultimately, it gets to the very heart of what Catholics are about, says Gast.
“Collaborative leadership is essential because you don’t divide the Body of Christ,” he says. “It’s who we are as Catholics. We believe at our core that we are a Eucharistic community and that, together, we become Christ’s visible body in the world.”
When parish leadership is fragmented, parishioners are shortchanged, Gast says. They fail to experience the common Catholic vision and mission that makes real the Body of Christ in the world.
To begin nurturing that kind of collaborative leadership, INSPIRE will enroll pastoral leadership teams from 36 parishes over a five-year period. The first six parish leadership teams—one from each vicarate in the archdiocese--began the program in September 2004 and another six in April 2005. Twenty-four more teams will join the program over the next two years.
After enrolling in the program, the teams work with INSPIRE parish consultants to develop their own plans for both personal and team learning in four areas: human and personal formation; spiritual life and formation; intellectual and theological “rootedness”; and ministry skills. Once the learning plans are created, INSPIRE provides the teams with ongoing professional consultation and the financial resources needed to carry out the plans.
As one would expect in an archdiocese as large as Chicago, the learning plans developed by the first 12 leadership teams have been as varied as the parishes they serve. Team plans, for example, have sought to address an array of issues, from coping with gentrification in the inner city, to improving stewardship, to dealing with pastoral transitions. In those and other areas, team plans have included specific steps ranging from team-building retreats to conflict management workshops to establishing a workplace wellness program.
Likewise, individual plans have also run the gamut. One person proposed—and was approved for—joining a weight-loss program in order to shed 30 pounds. Others are taking computer classes, going on spiritual retreats, and taking classes in iconography, pastoral and theological studies, homiletics and other areas.
As the parish team members prepare their individual learning plans, the INSPIRE staff and parish consultants strongly encourage them not to work so much on areas where their skills need improvement, but to instead focus on areas where they already excel.
“We encourage them to go where their heart takes them, to go where their passions and their interests lie,” says Gast. “We tell them to go there and build on that.”
The theoretical underpinnings for that approach, says Gast, is at once both old and new, drawing from both modern educational research and the letters of St. Paul.
Studies on leadership conducted by Howard Gardner, a noted Harvard psychologist and professor of education and cognition, found that people are more likely to excel and to have greater personal integrity when they build upon their strengths, according to Gast.
“When people work on addressing their weaknesses and deficits, they usually end up having at best a chance to achieve mediocrity,” he says. “Where is the passion in that?”
As strange as it might initially sound, one of the keys to collaboration and effective team work is for each team member to focus on their own gifts, to develop and use them to the utmost, and to excel in areas in which they have talent and passion.
“In designing the project, we drew a lot from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians,” says Gast. “We reflected around that little community in Corinth and how it got itself so disordered and out of joint arguing about who was the most important and who had the biggest and best gifts.”
Paul, however, insisted to the Corinthians that an individual’s gifts are not given to them for their own self-aggrandizement, but for the life of the world.
“Excellence, then , is about becoming a healthy Body of Christ, drawing upon the gifts of all its members,” says Gast. “INSPIRE is a project to help people draw from each others’ gifts and the charisms of their ministries so as to enhance their own work and the work of their parish.”
Giving such control to the program participants, allowing them to chart their own courses, has been exhilarating, Gast says. While it’s been a little scary at times, letting the parish leaders take off in multiple directions, it’s been gratifying to watch them find new strengths they never knew they had.
“It’s exciting to watch these rich and wonderfully talented persons, persons of genuine depth, come to greater levels of awareness of their own talents and ministry in mission and awareness of the difference they make in the life of the parish.”
