SPE Program Spotlight
The Place Where Miracles Happen
Conversatio guides Wis. parish into the wilderness and back
At first glance, it would be hard to imagine a more successful, even ideal, parish than St. Elizabeth Ann Seton in Green Bay, Wis. Located in an upper-middle class area on the west side of Green Bay, the church has grown from 460 families when it opened in 1978 to more than 1,550 today. With lots of kids and families, it’s long been a bustling parish rich with activities and ministries, a church whose members live full and busy lives.
But a few years ago, the pastor, Msgr. James Dillenburg, began having a nagging sense that something had gone wrong. After 42 years as a priest, and 10 years at St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, he increasingly wondered what role, if any, the church actually played in parishioners’ lives. True, the parish had a committed core of active believers, but beyond that group, most people seemed to be going through the motions. Beneath the busyness, when all was said and done, how effective was the church’s ministry, really?
“Few were complaining about anything, but nobody was getting on fire either,” Dillenburg recalls. “We talked about it and went around in circles about it among the staff and the parish council. But I didn’t know what to do.”
The answer—the “what to do”—fell literally into his lap. While reading the alumni magazine from his alma mater, St. John’s School of Theology/Seminary in Collegeville, Minn., Dillenburg saw an article about a new program at the school, Conversatio, a Sustaining Pastoral Excellence project funded by Lilly Endowment Inc. In particular, he was intrigued by one specific initiative of the multi-faceted project—the Ministry Colloquium, a program in which small teams of clergy and laity from four parishes throughout the region come together to address issues they have identified as important in the life of their parishes.
For Dillenburg and his church, that alumni magazine article was the start of a roundabout journey, a Lenten wandering in the wilderness, first into darkness and then back into light. Along the way, they were to discover that maybe their situation wasn’t as bad as they had thought. In fact, it was worse. Much worse than they had imagined. Not only was the parish ineffective, parishioners told them, it was basically irrelevant.
But all that gets ahead of the story, which began in earnest two years ago. Shortly after enrolling in Conversatio, Dillenburg convened a team of five clergy and lay leaders to identify the issue or problem they wanted to address in the Ministry Colloquium. In the colloquium, teams from four parishes gather at St. John’s three times over two years to consult with seminary faculty and each other about issues in their parishes. Before the first session, each team prepares a narrative identifying and describing their parish’s particular problem.
Gathering in a parish conference room on a Saturday morning in Lent, Dillenburg and his team struggled to get a handle on the situation they and their parish were facing.
“We all wanted the parish and our parishioners to do more and to be more,” he says. “But we were feeling stuck.”
Staring at one another, drinking coffee and eating donuts, Dillenburg and the others reviewed the evidence. Mass attendance was down. Parishioners seemed disengaged. Turnout for events and activities was light. Confirmation candidates recited words without passion, without the slightest indication they understood or were interested in what they were saying.
“They want to have their children baptized, but they don’t want to participate in the faith,” Steve Meyer, a deacon, later wrote in the group’s Colloquium narrative. “They want to receive Communion, but they don’t want to participate in community. They want to be married in the Church, but they don’t want the Church in their marriage. They want redemption, but they don’t want to admit their brokenness. And they want their children raised and educated in and by the Church, but they don’t want to participate or educate themselves. So it goes.”
Reading like a hard-boiled detective novel—a “tone poem,” Conversatio director Vic Klimoski calls it—Meyer’s narrative describes the group’s encounter with a sinister character called Reality, who tells them they and their faith are irrelevant. “Sure, people in this culture want to stay tethered to the ideology of Catholic Christianity,” Reality says. “But hey, it’s not like they want it to run their lives.”
In that encounter, however, the team finds the words to identify their problem: “How do we build a parish model that fosters integrative faith growth in this culture of individualism?”
A few months later, in their first retreat at St. John’s with the other parish teams in their cohort, the group from St. Elizabeth Ann Seton presented their narrative. Beforehand, Klimoski cautioned the other parish teams to pay close attention.
St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, he warned, was at the crossroads of U.S. culture. If the other parishes couldn’t identify with the problem at St. Elizabeth Ann Seton they shouldn’t feel too smug, he said. Sooner or later, they would all experience it. It was just a matter of time.
“We began to realize that it wasn’t just us and our parish and it wasn’t unique to Catholicism,” says Meyer. “We were at the same place as just about every parish in mainstream religion in America, Catholic and Protestant.”
But now, with the team gathered at St. John’s, the challenge was to figure out what to do about it. Normally, when a church has a critical problem, Klimoski says, the almost reflexive response for the pastoral staff is to start a new program to “fix” things.
The St. Elizabeth Ann Seton team, however, chose a radically different approach. Rather than panicking and immediately designing a new “program,” Dillenburg and his team did something almost unheard of in pastoral ministry today, says Klimoski. They decided to find out more, to test their assumptions. They decided to listen to parishioners, deeply and intensely.
“That’s what I was happiest about,” says Klimoski. “They didn’t rush to come up with a new program. They realized it was deeper than that. They decided they needed to know more and to listen more if they were really going to find out what was wrong.”
Using a Lilly stipend that came with their participation in the Colloquium, the St. Elizabeth Ann Seton team conducted an in-depth research study of their parish. Using an outside facilitator, they held a series of focus groups with randomly selected parishioners representing the entire gamut of parish life: young and old; active churchgoers and infrequent attenders; big contributors and those who gave little if anything.
The results were devastating, confirming the team’s worst fears. Virtually all groups reported a total disconnect between what happens at Mass and what happens in life. Church, they said, was entirely unable to relate to their lives. Although most had positive attitudes about the parish, they spoke negatively about the Mass, describing it as “boring,” “monotonous,” and “a downer.”
As rough as their metaphorical encounter with Reality had been, it was a cakewalk compared to the debriefing with the focus group facilitator, says Dillenburg.
“We had still hoped that maybe we had been doing a good job,” he says. “But when the facilitator gave us the results, we couldn’t say we had been touching people at all. We had not been converting anybody here. We hadn’t been connecting anybody to God. There was a kind of depression that everybody at the table felt.”
They didn’t know it then, but the team had just reached the darkest point of their journey. They had just come to the end of their wandering in the wilderness and were already making the turn back to home and to light.
“At first, it was distressing,” says Meyer. “We realized that we had to come to terms with whether or not we were going to face the reality. And once we decided that, yes, we are, we began to see in the bleakness that there was hope.”
Now, at least, they knew where they were. Their people had told them where they were at and what they thought and felt, and that was a starting point, says Meyer.
“We began to realize that, no, this is all right to know,” says Dillenburg. “Now we could begin to put some goals together.”
As they reflected on the focus group results, the team realized that their gut instincts had been correct about the state of their church, which gave them confidence in planning their next steps. As they pored over the study findings, they became increasingly convinced that, just as they had suspected, many of the parish’s problems stemmed from inadequate spiritual formation, not just among the children and youth but also among the adults.
“We now understood that if the kids weren’t learning, it wasn’t necessarily our fault,” says Dillenburg. “It was because nobody was talking about it at home. We found out in the focus groups that parents were unsure about their faith and about what God was for them and they were for God. No wonder they couldn’t talk about it at home.”
Basically, much of the church had a spirituality divorced from religion, a spirituality without God. Most adults had learned the basics of the faith in catechism class long ago, but had never advanced beyond that elementary-school understanding, says Meyer. Unfortunately, years later, that kind of shallow faith cannot stand up under the struggles and burdens of adulthood, he says.
“We taught people superficial notions and truths because we needed to make Christianity understandable to a seven-year old, and that’s what they carried with them,” says Meyer. “And then they’re 25 or 35 or 40 and they’re looking back and thinking ‘This is pretty shallow stuff. I don’t believe this.’ We live shallow superficial lives so we assume God is shallow and superficial.”
In that vacuum, adults turn to alternative spiritualities, “picking up New Age books and burning incense and getting their chakras adjusted,” says Meyer. They never realize or understand the deep and profound spirituality that can be found in mainstream religion, Catholic and Protestant.
“The Gospel message is deep and meaningful and profound,” says Meyer. “But we dumbed it down to be understandable to a seven year old and never brought it back up.”
As a result of the focus group findings, St. Elizabeth Ann Seton has undergone a pervasive shift, now emphasizing faith formation throughout the church and its ministries, says Dillenburg. Homilies are now written to tie more directly to parishioner’s daily lives, exploring, for example, how the Holy Spirit might be present even at 2 a.m., when a parent is awake, walking the hallway, with a crying infant. The liturgy, social outreach ministries, everything in the church, now ties back to faith formation.
The biggest change, however, was to abandon the parish’s traditional catechism classes in favor of a new program of intergenerational faith formation. Starting last November, entire families now participate together in religious education, meeting on Wednesday nights and Sunday afternoons. After gathering together for a brief catechesis session, the families break out into age-appropriate classes—children, middle- and high-schoolers, and adults—all covering the same subjects at different levels.
Going to the new system, dropping traditional classes that had been the mainstay of Catholic catechesis for generations, was the most difficult decision he ever made as a priest, says Dillenburg. Though it was a risk, he and others ultimately decided it would be even riskier to let the parish continue as it was. That would only guarantee failure, he says. Fortunately, Dillenburg already sees hopeful signs, though it’s too early to know for certain if the new approach is working.
“I hear conversations going on within families and between families, talking with each other about what they’ve studied in the faith formation classes,” says Dillenburg. “They’re asking each other, ‘What do you think about this?’ and ‘What do you think about that?’ They’ve never talked about this stuff before, but now it’s making sense to them. We’re even getting some comments that it’s fun to talk about religion.”
Though he has no hard evidence, Meyer agrees with Dillenburg’s assessment, saying he too sees change happening.
“I know it sounds weak, but I feel a different energy level in the parish,” he says. “What I hope and believe I’m feeling is the stirring of the Spirit.”
Whatever is at work at St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, Klimoski says the parish’s experience illustrates the power of conversation, of talking with and listening to one another.
While conversation would seem to be the first thing church people would turn to in addressing their problems, it’s usually the last, says Klimoski.
“We act too much and talk too little,” says Klimoski. “And that’s too bad. Because when we create space for people to settle down and be quiet and talk and listen deeply, that’s where miracles happen.”
Miracles indeed, says Dillenburg.
“Conversatio was pure gift,” he says. “We came with a big question that we barely had the courage to ask out loud: ‘How effective are we?’ Nobody had any expectations. Nobody knew where this was going to go. Whatever happens, it’s been a gift.”
