Dear Friends,

We look forward to worshipping with you online tomorrow morning. We’re adding a 9:00 a.m. broadcast starting tomorrow. Below is the full schedule with links.

9:00 a.m. from St. Joseph: 
newroads.online.church

10:00 a.m. from St. Luke: 
YouTube Live (channel trailer here)

10:30 a.m. from St. Joseph: 
newroads.online.church

Masses will be available to view on demand on our Website after they are broadcast at the above times. Resources for kids and families can be found here.

Peace,
The New Roads Team

Dear Friends,

We hope and pray you are staying safe and well during this time. Although it was a very different kind of Holy Week & Easter, we loved celebrating with you online last week. Thank you for your continued support, engagement, and participation in the life of our church. 

We want to let you know of our “new normal” Sunday schedule. Going forward indefinitely, we will be broadcasting Sunday Masses at:

• 10:00am from St. Luke: YouTube Live
• 10:30am from St. Joseph: newroads.online.church

Both Masses will be available to view on demand on our Website after they are broadcast at the above times. Weekly resources for kids & families will be posted on our Website by Sunday morning. If you haven’t seen them already, be sure to watch these short videos:

• A virtual welcome to New Roads!
• Mass at St. Luke Parish trailer video

Blessings and peace,
Fr. Thom

Hi New Roads,

We’re looking forward to worshipping together (online) this weekend!

• We’ll be joining the Church of the Nativity at 10:45am tomorrow. Use this link to join: https://live.churchnativity.com/ Or join via Facebook Live. (Be sure to say hi using the chat feature!)
• The Saturday Vigil Mass will be live-streamed from St. Luke’s at 4:00pm today (and available to view on demand anytime after that!) at this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OW4aRmRSMmM&feature=youtu.be

No matter how you join in worship this weekend, take a photo of yourself, or your family, or your setup joining in worship this weekend. Send the photo to us or tag us on social media and we’ll share the photos to help us all feel more connected. And finally, invite a friend! Forward this email to friends or family members or post the link on your social media to invite everyone to join us for worship online this weekend.

See you online!

Love,
The New Roads Team

Connect with us online:
Instagram
Facebook
Twitter

Hi Friends,

We wanted to reach out with an update on things going on at New Roads these days.

Both churches remain closed until further notice. This includes daily and weekend Masses, funerals, and any other gatherings or activities. There is no public access to our buildings at this time since we cannot ensure the safety of people coming and going. 

We’ll continue to worship together online on Sundays. As the situation continues to evolve, we are determining what’s possible and safe in terms of video taping Masses at New Roads, joining the Church of the Nativity online, or some combination. As we’re sure you can appreciate, there are many variables to consider. We’ll continue to send an email out on Saturday with the link(s) to join us online for worship each Sunday.

Below are some resources for you and your family to continue to grow in faith during this time:

• New Roads’ Lent message series, Enough, continues online. Watch Week 4 (new today!).
• Fr. Fleming’s blog, A Concord Pastor Comments, is a great source for daily inspiration and prayer.
• New Roads’ Spotify profile features a new playlist (“What we’re listening to”) with songs to help us to live out of hope and love during this season.
• We’ll continue to send out weekly resources for kids & families.
• Cardinal Sean and the Archdiocese of Boston are offering a Virtual Lenten Retreat.

Some other notes to make you aware of:

• Gifts to New Roads can be made using online giving or by mailing a check (please make checks payable to either St. Joseph Church or St. Luke Church).
• The collection of Easter baskets at St. Luke’s is suspended due to health concerns. If you’d like to continue to support St. Vincent de Paul at this time, donations may be made by mailing a check to the offices: 130 Common St, Belmont. Please make checks payable to: St. Luke's St. Vincent de Paul Society.
• CORI (background check) renewals for all volunteer ministers are on hold at this time. If you have a CORI, please hold on to it until our churches reopen. The deadline for renewals will be adjusted.
• The Archdiocese of Boston has indicated that we will not be gathering publicly for the celebrations of Holy Week & Easter. We are working on ways we can share in these most special holy days as a community.

While so many things are cancelled right now, please know that in the truest sense, church is not cancelled. We are a Body, not a building. Things are shutting down all around us, but as the people of God, we are called to rise up--together--in faith, hope, and love. Please know of our prayers and gratitude for you.

Peace, blessings, & love,
The New Roads Team
--
Connect with us online:
Instagram
Facebook
Twitter

Hi Friends,

We wanted to reach out with an update on things going on at New Roads these days.

Both churches remain closed until further notice. This includes daily and weekend Masses, funerals, and any other gatherings or activities. There is no public access to our buildings at this time since we cannot ensure the safety of people coming and going. 

We’ll continue to worship together online on Sundays. As the situation continues to evolve, we are determining what’s possible and safe in terms of video taping Masses at New Roads, joining the Church of the Nativity online, or some combination. As we’re sure you can appreciate, there are many variables to consider. We’ll continue to send an email out on Saturday with the link(s) to join us online for worship each Sunday.

Below are some resources for you and your family to continue to grow in faith during this time:

• New Roads’ Lenten message series, Enough, continues online. Watch Week 4 (new today!).
• Fr. Fleming’s blog, A Concord Pastor Comments, is a great source for daily inspiration and prayer.
• New Roads’ Spotify profile features a new playlist (“What we’re listening to”) with songs to help us to live out of hope and love during this season.
• We’ll continue to send out weekly resources for kids & families.
• Cardinal Sean and the Archdiocese of Boston are offering a Virtual Lenten Retreat.

Some other notes to make you aware of:

• Gifts to New Roads can be made using online giving or by mailing a check (please make checks payable to either St. Joseph Church or St. Luke Church).
• The collection of Easter baskets at St. Luke’s is suspended due to health concerns. If you’d like to continue to support St. Vincent de Paul at this time, donations may be made by mailing a check to the offices: 130 Common St, Belmont. Please make checks payable to: St. Luke's St. Vincent de Paul Society.
• CORI (background check) renewals for all volunteer ministers are on hold at this time. If you have a CORI, please hold on to it until our churches reopen. The deadline for renewals will be adjusted.
• The Archdiocese of Boston has indicated that we will not be gathering publicly for the celebrations of Holy Week & Easter. We are working on ways we can share in these most special holy days as a community.

While so many things are cancelled right now, please know that in the truest sense, church is not cancelled. We are a Body, not a building. Things are shutting down all around us, but as the people of God, we are called to rise up--together--in faith, hope, and love. Please know of our prayers and gratitude for you.

Peace, blessings, & love,
The New Roads Team
--
Connect with us online:
Instagram
Facebook
Twitter

Hi New Roads family,

Let’s worship together *online* tomorrow. While we’d love to live stream from New Roads, realistically at this time we’re not set up to do that well. And, we want to allow our staff team, worship team, and their families to make safe choices given their own personal circumstances. So, here’s our plan for worshipping together tomorrow…

Join us tomorrow, Sunday, March 15, as we tune into the live stream of the 10:45am Mass at the Church of the Nativity in Timonium, MD. Link here: https://live.churchnativity.com

This is a dynamic worship experience with modern music, message series, and more. The live stream is very well done and invites you to not just watch but truly participate in worship. There’s even a way to chat as well as volunteer hosts to answer questions or take prayer requests during the service. For our New Roads community, we’re also inviting you to take a photo of yourself or your family joining in worship tomorrow which we’ll share out on social media to help our New Roads community feel more connected. Just tag us or send us a photo or video and we’ll be glad to repost it and share it out!

You can access Nativity’s online campus through your computer, smartphone, or via the Church of the Nativity App on Apple TV. Even better, you can AirPlay or screen share from your device to your TV so that the whole family can watch and worship together.

We wanted to pick one time for our community to come together--virtually--to keep up our regular rhythm of weekly worship as a faith community. However if 10:45am tomorrow doesn’t work for you, Nativity also live streams Mass at 5:00pm tonight, and tomorrow at 9:00am, 10:45am, and 12:30pm and offers rebroadcasts of the service at 3:00pm, 5:30pm, and 8:00pm tomorrow. Another option is to view Mass by accessing CatholicTV if you have cable programming or by visiting www.catholictv.org.

Please be sure to follow us on social channels (links below) as we’ll be updating much more frequently there. We are still working on plans for so much more including:

• Determining some specific days & times our churches will be open for private prayer
• Resources for kids and families
• Opportunities to connect & pray during the week
• Ways our community can help one another and serve the needs of our wider community during this time. One way to start is to fill out the form here created by the Belmont Parents Facebook group if you need help OR are able to offer help to neighbors in need.

Finally, if you are in need of any help or assistance, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at any time. Our whole community is here to support and love one another.

Hope to “see” you online tomorrow!
The New Roads Team

Connect with us online:
Instagram
Facebook
Twitter

Dear New Roads friends,

We have been closely monitoring the impact of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) in Belmont and around the world. There have been several local developments this week including the closure of Belmont Public Schools for 2 weeks beginning today and the Executive Order from Governor Baker this afternoon prohibiting all gatherings of over 250 people throughout the state of Massachusetts. Therefore, based on the Governor's Executive Order and in accordance with the Archdiocese of Boston guidelines, here's what you can expect from New Roads in the weeks ahead:

• Both churches, St. Joseph and St. Luke, will be closed effective immediately and continuing through March 29th.
• We are working on ways to praise God through teaching and worship online. Stay tuned for more details to come by following us online: Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and our email list.
• We invite parishioners and guests to stay safe, to stay healthy, and to join us online.

As a church community, our first and foremost concern is for the safety and well-being of people--those who attend New Roads as well as our wider community. While many are cancelling events “out of an abundance of caution,” we prefer how our neighbors at Highrock Church phrased it -- “out of an abundance of love.” Our decision is based on love and care for our community. Many members of our community are over 65 years of age, which the CDC considers at higher risk for severe outcomes related to COVID-19.

As a community, we have an obligation to protect the most vulnerable among us, even if it inconveniences those of us who are not at higher risk. It seems that right now, the best way to follow Jesus’ command to “love your neighbor as yourself,” is to support the federal, state, and local efforts to slow the spread of this virus so that our neighbors are protected and our healthcare system is not overwhelmed. We are choosing not to act out of fear, but to be responsible and proactive, and to lead with love and care for our neighbors.

Finally, like many churches, we rely on our weekly offertory collection to cover our operating expenses (staff salaries & healthcare benefits, heating & maintaining our buildings, etc.). We are making an intentional choice to prioritize the health and safety of our community, but also know that cancelling Sunday Masses will be a challenge for us financially. If it’s at all possible for you and your family, please consider making a one-time gift or a recurring gift online. Thank you for your continued support of our community! 

To keep informed of further updates, we encourage you to be on the lookout for future emails as well as to follow us online using the social media links above. This is a powerful moment to be the church, to lead and live not out of fear, but out of love, to step up and to serve those in need, and to be thoughtful and creative in doing so. This is certainly a “new road” for all of us, but our God is with us and for us; God goes before us and will lead us to new life. 

“For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power, love, and self-control.” 
2 Timothy 1:7

With love for you, your families, and all our neighbors,
The New Roads Team
info@newroadscatholic.org

The start of a new year is always a time that draws us to two opposite but related tasks: to reflect on the past and to look forward to the future. As we reflect on the past six years of being a collaborative, what rises to the top is the mix of highs and lows, failures and successes, challenges and joy, progress and pain; as well as the unpredictable nature of this new road we’ve been journeying on. 

New Roads Catholic Community, St. Joseph and St. Luke, was formed as a collaborative in 2013, in response to the reality of declining churches. The reality of declining churches is a complicated problem without a simple or easy solution. But since day one we’ve been eager to jump in and work on it together.

Over the last six years, we’ve made mistakes to be sure--in communication, implementation, and more. One significant miss early on was to try to do more than was possible given our limited resources. We started off with an ambitious--and ultimately unrealistic--plan to transform all six Masses at both parishes. 

We worked to make various changes to create a dynamic experience of worship that would help grow disciples as well as welcome back the overwhelming percentage of Catholics who have disconnected from church. Attempting to create an engaging, relevant, accessible, and transformative experience at six Masses simultaneously was unsuccessful. 

Around 2017 we began focusing specifically on one Mass, the 10am Mass at St. Joseph. More than two years later we’re seeing some of the growth and fruit we’ve been praying for. People are growing in their relationship with God and deepening their commitment to following Jesus. Others are reconnecting with church for the first time in a long time. Children and families are overflowing. We consistently have over 60 children at Kids’ Church, our Children’s Liturgy of the Word program, as well as a dozen or more children in Tiny Disciples, our worship experience for kids ages 2-5. 

On a weekly basis we are over 75% full at the 10am Mass, a metric that points to the need to add an additional Mass to accommodate our current size and continuing growth. We need to pause here and say: wow! God is at work here. Our vision at New Roads is to be a growing church and because of the people who serve at New Roads, this vision is becoming a reality.  We’re at a point where we need to expand what we’re doing at the 10am Mass to an additional Mass time. 

Meanwhile, all of our other Masses, at both St. Joseph and St. Luke, have continued the decades-long pattern of slow to moderate decline in attendance over time. This decline is not something with a single cause or an easy solution. Churches everywhere are facing this reality.

At St. Luke’s we are at the point where we do not have enough people coming to Mass overall to justify the number of Masses we have on Sunday morning. Given that, we need to reduce the number of Masses at St. Luke by one.

Initially, our plan was to continue the 11:30am Mass, in thinking like a collaborative and wanting to offer a variety of Mass times between the two parishes, as well as to create the least disruption in the current schedule overall. However, after conversation and consultation with the community over several weeks, it seems that a Mass time between our two existing Sunday Mass times at St. Luke (9:00 and 11:30) would be the best time for our community to invest in, to join together and to serve. Given that, at St. Luke we will continue our 4pm Saturday Vigil Mass and we will have a 10:00am Mass on Sunday mornings at St. Luke. This change will take place starting March 1, 2020, the first Sunday of Lent.

At St. Joseph, given the increase in attendance, we will have a 9:00am and 10:30am Mass, also starting on March 1, 2020. Both those Masses will be the same experience as the current 10am Mass at St. Joseph--the same message series, music, hospitality, and kids programs. To make this additional Mass at St. Joseph a reality, we’ll be expanding all of our ministry teams at the 10am Mass. If you’re wanting to join in and support this effort, contact anyone on our team for more information.

Those who currently attend or serve at the 9:00 or 11:30 Masses at St. Luke are invited to come and serve at the 10:00 Mass at St. Luke--or of course to any other Mass time in our collaborative. To be clear: there is no plan to close St. Luke’s. The vision of New Roads always has been--and still is--to become two healthy, growing parishes. The fact that we have successfully created a Mass in our collaborative that is growing is truly good news for both parishes. 

Our plan, our hope, and our prayer is that the growth we are seeing at the 10am Mass at St. Joseph will one day expand fully to all Mass times at both parishes. We are excited and committed to continue to journey together toward that vision. It will take all of us working together to get there. 

Thank you for your love for this church and commitment to it. Let’s keep it up. The future might not be certain, but what is certain is that realizing our vision of becoming a collaborative with two growing parishes will require more love, more commitment, and more collaboration from all of us.