Pope Respecter@poperespecter1
"The Catholic Church's Connection Problem" by Pope Respecter
The priest said the mass is ended. The final hymn was sung. The priest led the procession up the aisle and out of the church doors. My kids grabbed their coats and we started to head out. Then everyone around us kneeled down and started praying. We looked around confused. We saw a few people genuflect and head out and so we followed suit. The church had about 500 people that morning but we were probably the third family out the door. We shook the priest's hand and walked out. We spoke with no one else. After years of being an evangelical family, this was our first visit to a Catholic Church.
Prior to this visit, I had been in leadership in an evangelical denomination. Our evangelical church had been vibrant from a social standpoint. And it was vibrant by design. The pastors at the church emphasized the need for the whole congregation to help make sure we connected with every visitor. We had a team of people who were specifically charged with greeting everyone, looking for visitors, telling people how they could get connected, and encouraging people to fill out visitor contact cards. When people did fill out cards, we made sure someone in church leadership emailed them that week to thank them for visiting, tell them about ways to get involved and offer to answer any questions they might have. We had a general principle that almost always proved true: if someone visited but spoke with no one from our church, they would not be back. This is why the visit to the Catholic Church seemed so off to us. It was a large parish yet it seemed to have zero people interested in evangelizing a young family visiting for the first time.
Fortunately, I was committed to returning. I had done a lot of private study of the theology and history of the church and was convinced it was true. And so despite the lack of any sort of outreach, we came back the next week. But things did not get better from a connection standpoint. We attended for months and the only personal connection was saying goodbye to the priest on the way out.
Because of my convictions on the truth of Catholicism, I looked into getting my kids enrolled in OCIA so that they could join. This was perhaps the most frustrating part. The email listed in the bulletin was wrong and the email went no where. I called and no one answered and I left a voicemail. A month passed and no one returned the call. I called again. An admin picked up and said that the OCIA director was out but promised to tell him to call me back. He didn’t. Finally, after waiting another week, I called again and again the OCIA director was out but this time he did call back. He apologized and said he had been busy. We arranged a meeting in which he promised to get us set up for OCIA classes. But it was several more weeks before he got back with us.
By this time, we had decided to try a different parish. We liked the priest’s homilies, the music, and the building was magnificent but my kids had been so connected to our evangelical church and now had no friends, connections or involvement. I hoped I could make that change. We started attending another parish where I knew a few people and the kids knew their kids. This parish was much better but only because we knew people there and it was smaller and the priest himself took interest in us. He told me to email the OCIA director, I did, didn’t get a response, talked to the priest again and he called the OCIA director over while I was standing there and got us set up with classes.
I am so grateful we joined and I love the Catholic Church so much. But even at our parish, I see that we have many of the same problems. People pray after mass. Visitors come and go without talking to anyone. And lest you take this as two bad examples, I posted about this on X and my comments were flooded with former evangelicals who were seeking to join the Catholic Church and had had similar experiences - no one greeting them, impossible to get connected with OCIA directors, and an overall failure to connect.
What is going on here? I think the answer is that it is a cultural problem rooted in the history of the two churches. Evangelicalism was a movement that, from the start, was in competition for souls. It came out of mainline Protestantism and assumed that most people were not saved. Jonathan Edwards preached “Sinners in the hands of an Angry God” as a way of waking up normal protestants to the fact that they were lost. In the early days, Evangelical churches were poorer, smaller, and lacked institutional structure. If they were going to exist at all, they had to reach people. And they got good at it.
Evangelicalism is no longer the underdog in America. Recent polls show that up to 25% of the population is evangelical - larger than the Catholic share of 22%. They have some of the most famous pastors, best selling books, TV channels, and massive churches. But the scrappy DNA remains. The largest most established evangelical churches still have sophisticated outreach programs. In fact, the larger the evangelical church the larger the outreach team is. Often they will have several paid staff and a large volunteer team.
Catholicism on the other hand, may have had this DNA at one point but it no longer does. After centuries of being the official state church and present in countries where almost 100% of the population was Catholic, the learned behaviors of Catholicism were just different. Further, men were much more likely to go into the priesthood in years past. Since the 1960s, the number of priests in the US has almost dropped in half at the same time that the Catholic population has risen from 54 million to 70 million. Before the drop, the parish might be able to count on a priest to do whatever outreach and evangelism was needed. But priests today have more work and fewer clergy to do it. The average parish in today’s Catholic Church has over 1000 people attend one of the weekend masses. There is no way for a priest (or two at the most) can effectively notice who is or is not a visitor let alone properly greet them, get contact information, and follow up.
The fact that Catholicism continues to grow in the US despite doing absolutely everything wrong at the ground level for evangelism is therefore a miracle. Catholicism is blessed with great apologists, lay apostolates, and most of all is blessed with being the truth but since the 1960s, Catholicism has bounced around in the low 20% range of the US population. With all our advantages we should be growing like crazy. American Catholicism (and truthfully Catholicism in every country in today’s world) no longer has the benefit of assuming the whole population is Catholic. We, like evangelicals of old, should assume that most of the visiting people desperately need their souls saved.
So what should the Catholic Church do? Here are some very basic things that would make a world of difference:
Every priest should appoint a Outreach/Evangelism leader. This could clergy (a deacon or priest) but for most parishes it might make more sense to use a lay leader. This person needs to be theologically solid (people visiting often have done their homework and will get confused if the person meeting them knows less about the faith). But this person must also be dedicated to outreach and evangelism. They must view it as part of their mission in life. They also need to be able to recruit and coordinate volunteers. Ideally, this would be a part time paid position but if the parish doesn’t have funds, recruit a volunteer leader.
This Outreach and Evangelism leader needs to recruit and coordinate an outreach team for every weekend mass- at least 1 person for every hundred worshippers in attendance. These people need to sit toward the back, and head out immediately after the procession and stand wherever the priest is greeting people on their way out and they need to look for visitors, shake their hands and talk. Tell the visitors about bible studies, pot lucks, youth groups, or whatever other community events the parish has. If possible, the greeter should have the fill out a visitor contact information card and then make sure someone reaches out that week.
The Website needs to be good with the right information. The biggest thing is on the main page as soon as someone clicks on your parish website it should say Mass times and the address of the parish. Most people go to the website to get that information. But there should also be a clear link to how to contact OCIA and the priest. There should also be a “what to expect” link in which basic instructions are given for what the mass will look like. Catholics often have no clue how intimidating and different it is to attend a Catholic Church. Non-Catholics are confused by the kneeling, the bowing, the standing and the sitting. They are confused with the missal and what is going on. A page explaining the mass, how they should behave, and etc. is very important.
OCIA has to respond immediately. My own OCIA experience is waaaaay too common. If a priest hears his OCIA director is not following up promptly, that OCIA director needs to find a different job. This is the most important thing. Further, the OCIA needs to be flexible. Fixed class times at one time of the year can make it impossible for some to join (or have to wait many months to begin). This will leave people dejected and they will either leave the parish or even give up on becoming Catholic. It is fine to have a set OCIA class time but if someone cannot make that have an alternate plan (videos, private classes, etc).
Again, this cannot all be left to the priest. The priest needs to either find a very solid volunteer or a very solid hire and then largely leave it up to that person to make this happen. Calls for volunteers should be regularly part of the announcements. What I found from my time in the evangelical church is that this sort of thing becomes contagious. It only takes a few leaders who give it the importance it deserves for others to catch on and start following suit.
Postscript: One last thing- Catholics need to be the fun ones. If you read about Medieval Catholicism it sounds like a lot of fun. They had processions, carols, feasts and festivals. They wore costumes and put on plays to celebrate holy days. The mass itself is supposed to be reverent but once the mass is concluded, Catholics should have more fun than anyone else and historically we did. But today evangelicals have sort of created their own bad imitations of our feast days and festivals. They have Super bowl parties, Valentines Day date nights for parents, Christmas spectaculars, and rock n roll style music. We should not imitate this (our traditions are much better) but we should rediscover some of the awesome fun traditions we used to haves. For example, at the Feast of St. Nicolas have dress the boys up like bishops. For Candlemas, do a procession with candles from down the street from the parish, dress everyone like characters from the story (Simeon, Mary, Joseph, etc.) and sing along the way. For Corpus Christi, have a team of people decorate the path of the procession to honor the Body of Christ as it processes by. For every feast day, have a feast of some sort - potlucks in the parish hall and include beer. Encourage lay leadership in all this. Have a lay volunteer in charge of making every feast day an actual celebration. And try to pick people who are magnetic people. If you pick the serious old lady who may be holy and shows up to daily mass but cannot be described as fun, whatever she plans probably will not be fun. Pick someone with a lot of energy who smiles and tells jokes. Evangelicals might have evangelism in their DNA but there is absolutely no reason they should be outdoing Catholics on fun. And fun is contagious too.
