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Servant Church.Pdf St Peter’s Community, Hinckley “The Servant Church” A programme of adult formation for 2013-2014 “The Church is or should go back to being a community of the people of God. Priests, pastors and bishops who have the care of souls are at the service of the people of God….” (Pope Francis- September 2013) “The Servant Church” - Introduction “The Servant Church” is a new project on the Church. It will take the form of three sets of six discussion / conversation evenings on Sundays to reflect on what the meaning of ‘the Church’ is to us and what it means to belong to it. We all know only too well that many people are now drifting away from faith and church life and this is especially upsetting in the “Year of Faith”, which was intended by Pope Benedict to stimulate and invigorate our lives with the Lord and with each other in his family. This is a very sad scenario, particularly for young people, who run the risk of rather aimless, purpose-less lives without some ‘anchor’ to sustain them. We also know that the Church as an institution has been perceived as rather authoritarian, centralised and lacking in compassion and the ‘scandals’ which have come to light in the past few years have served only to shake the faith of good souls, and given the media ample ammunition to beat us with. However, this is not the whole picture. There are many people also who, because of the ministry of Pope Francis, have taken a renewed interest in their life with the Lord within the Church. There are also those who, though they do not formally belong to the Catholic Church themselves, have faithfully come to Mass with their partners and families for years, perhaps without realising that they were in fact Catholics in all but name. This may be the time to ‘take the plunge’ and think seriously about finally accepting the call of Our Lord to fully belong to the Catholic family. There are also a few of our young people who are thinking about ‘confirmation’ of the promises their parents made on their behalf when they were baptised. So what do we mean when we say ‘the Church’ and how do we picture it and our place within it? 50 years ago, the Vatican Council defined the Church as the ‘people of God’ and there are many who now argue that this definition has never been fully worked out. The spectre of those pre-Vatican 11 dark days of control and centralisation has returned to haunt us, but is being slowly but surely blown away by this wonderful gift to us who is Pope Francis. Recently he said that he aimed to make the Church less ‘Vatican-centric’ and closer to ‘the people of God’ as well as more socially conscious and open to modern culture. He has also emphatically stated that he wishes the Church to be ‘the Church of the poor, for the poor’. His words are at one and the same time a delight and also a huge challenge to us, and this is what we intend to explore together in “The Servant Church”, and hope that many parishioners and friends will come to join us in reflecting on what the future holds for us, our children and grandchildren as members of the Church in the midst of a highly secular world from which we cannot escape into the ‘ghetto of our minds’ as so often happened in the past. None of this detracts from our great respect for our fellow Christians, particularly in the churches of our town, with whom we have such a close relationship and who are ‘on the road’ with us. Any consideration of what we mean by ‘Church’ in the future cannot take place without them, and indeed the vision of the Church of the future will certainly be that of a more united ecumenical community called together by Our Lord to honour and serve Him. In all of this we have so much to give each other, in sharing the ‘lived’ experience of our faith with its challenges and difficulties. No one, in the Pope’s words, is more important that anyone else and the days of the ‘top-down’ Church are certainly gone. We hope that these evenings will be an exciting exploration of what this implies for us and our families and let us pray that this will be a time of great renewal and enthusiasm for everyone. SECTION 1 Session 1 - What does ‘Church’ mean to you? The group was asked for their opinions and some replies were: A family or community; a building with a spire on it; the physical manifestation of connection to God – a reference point; ‘home’; a place to meet and make friends; somewhere to speak to God The Church is a community of believers, the followers of Jesus Christ, who are ‘called together’ (cf. Greek – ‘ecclesiastical’) for a purpose – not just an institution or casual group of people. Institutions (e.g. golf clubs, political parties) make rules to ensure their survival. This was the way with the Church, but now we see the ‘rules’ as expressions of our behaviour if we believe that Jesus is our Saviour, in other words what we will be and do if we believe in him. There are only two references to ‘the Church’ in the gospels: “You are Peter and on this rock I will build my Church” (Mt.16:18) and “But if he (your ‘brother’) refuses to listen to these, report it to the community” (Mt.18:17). There are many more of course in the Acts of the Apostles and the letters of St Paul, which we will consider later. The Second Vatican Council said: “The Church is the people of God”, and this notion was fundamental for all its documents. It is echoed very strongly in the words of our new Pope, whom we will quote extensively during this course: “The Church is or should go back to being a community of the people of God. Priests, pastors and bishops who have the care of souls are at the service of the people of God….” From Pope Francis: This is the Church, a word that is different from the Holy See, which has an important function, but is at the service of the Church. A church that limits itself to just carrying out administrative duties, caring for its tiny flock, is a church that in the long run will get sick. The pastor who isolates himself is not a true pastor of sheep but a ‘hairdresser’ for sheep, who spends his time putting curlers on them instead of going to look for others. Today we have one in the pen and 99 we need to go looking for…. The Church must not become ideological by proclaiming its own ideas and claiming the Gospel as its own possession. Instead the Church must be like the moon, receiving and reflecting the light of Christ. The Church’s light must diminish so that he increases. This is the model John (the Baptist) offers us today, for us and for the Church; a Church that is always at the service of the Word, a Church that never takes anything for herself. The Church must listen to the Word and courageously use its voice to proclaim Christ, pointing people to him and leading the way until martyrdom. Jesus did not gather the apostles so that they lived in isolation. He called them so that they formed a group, a community. The Catholic Church must find a new balance between insisting on its moral teaching and proclaiming the gospel in a missionary style; otherwise even the moral edifice of the Church is likely to fall like a house of cards, losing the freshness and the fragrance of the gospel. The proposal of the gospel must be more simple, profound, radiant. It is from this proposition that the moral consequences then flow. The Church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently. Proclamation in a missionary style focuses on the essentials, on necessary things: this is also what fascinates and attracts more, what makes the heart burn, as it did for the disciples at Emmaus…The thing the Church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds, and to warm the hearts of the faithful. It needs nearness, proximity. I see the Church as a field hospital after battle. It is useless to ask a seriously injured person about if he has high cholesterol and the level of his blood sugars! You have to heal his wounds. Then we can talk about everything else. The Church has sometimes locked itself up in small things, in small-minded rules. The most important thing is the first proclamation: Jesus Christ has saved you. And the ministers of the Church must be ministers of mercy above all…Those who today always look for disciplinarian solutions, those who long for an exaggerated doctrinal ‘security’, those who stubbornly try to recover a past that no longer exists – they have a static and inward-directed view of things. In this way, faith becomes an ideology among other ideologies…. This is the beginning of a Church with an organisation that is not just top-down, but also horizontal….The Church that Jesus and his disciples preached was missionary and poor and is still valid today….Our goal is not to proselytise but to listen to needs, desires and disappointments, despair and hope.
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