“As a body is one though it has many parts, and all the parts of the body, though many, are one body, so also Christ.” 1 Corinthians 12:12

God designed us to find meaning and purpose in community. Just like Legos are made to connect with one another, God designed us to connect with one another. In his first letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul challenges us to see that although we are all different, together we complete the body of Christ. We belong to one another--each of us needs all the others, and together we can accomplish what we never could on our own. Belonging to the Body of Christ helps me know who I am, and be who I am, in a way that no other community can do quite as well. God gave us this gift of belonging to his family, being a part of the body, the Church, because he knows that we need it. We need to be connected to each other, we need to support one another, we need to hold one another up. Because we belong to one another. We were made to belong to one another. 

Want to take your next step with this week’s message?

• There are plenty of people in our wider community that don’t come to church, that maybe don’t feel like they belong here at New Roads. Greeters at the doors of the church play a crucial role in creating an environment that is welcoming and inviting for all--an environment that communicates to all who enter our doors that they belong here with us, as part of God’s family. Consider serving as a greeter in 2016, even just for a couple of weeks, to try it out. To learn more, join us for our greeter meeting tonight, Wednesday, January 27, at 7:00 p.m. at St. Joseph. Please RSVP to Kathy Rushe, [email protected].
• Think about someone in your life who doesn’t belong to a church community. Maybe it’s a family member, friend, or neighbor who has been away from the Church, God’s family. Invite them to join you this Sunday at New Roads. Share an experience of how being part of God’s family, having that sense of belonging, has helped you find meaning and purpose.
• If you didn’t get to hear this week’s message, you can listen to it here on our Web site.

This is week two of our Advent message series, Making Room, in which we are exploring together how to make room in our hearts and in our lives for Christ, and how to make room in our churches for those who don’t worship with us regularly. When we think about making room in our churches for guests, sometimes it can feel like someone else’s job, or maybe just the greeters’ job. But the reality is that every interaction a guest has in our churches contributes to their decision to come back again or not. Each of us has the power to affect a guest’s experience in a powerful way! How can you welcome guests? Here are seven practical ideas (adapted from thomrainer.com):

1. “Thank you for being here.” It’s just that basic. I have heard from numerous church guests who returned because they were simply told “thank you.” Gratitude for someone’s presence is powerful!
2. “Let me help you with that.” If you see someone struggling with umbrellas, young children, diaper bags, purses, and other items, a gesture to hold something for them is a huge positive. Of course, this comment is appropriate for member to member as well.
3. “Please take my seat.” Have you ever seen a family struggling to find a pew with enough space to fit their whole family? This offer can have a huge impact on someone’s experience.
4. “Here is my email address. Please let me know if I can help in any way.” Of course, this comment must be used with discretion, but it can be a hugely positive message to a guest. If a guest asks a question about church activities and you aren’t sure of the answer and can’t find a team member nearby, simply take down their email address and promise that someone will follow up with them. (Then share the question and contact info with any member of the pastoral team!)
5. “Can I show you where you need to go?” Even people who have been coming here for a long time can have a hard time locating our restrooms at both churches! Guests will not know where to find the restrooms, the hall for coffee and donuts, a changing table for their child, etc. Offer to walk with guests to their desired location.
6. “Let me introduce you to ___________.” The return rate of guests is always higher if they meet other people. You may have the opportunity to introduce the guest to Fr. Thom, a member of the pastoral team, and other members of the church.
7. “Would you like to join me for coffee after Mass?” This is a great way to make newcomers feel welcome and to help them get connected to other members in our community.

Saying these things may be outside your comfort zone. That’s OK! Stepping outside our comfort zone is how we grow as people and as disciples. Take a shot at saying one of these phrases to someone in our church during Advent--it’s one small way of making more room for Christ in our hearts by making more room for all of God’s children in our churches! 

This Sunday we celebrate the solemn feast of the Most Holy Trinity. The doctrine of the Trinity is not easy to grasp and certainly falls into the category of a mystery of our faith. Central to this mystery is relationship. Our God is a community of persons. Whether you think of the persons of the Trinity as Father-Son-Spirit, Creator-Redeemer-Sanctifier, or Lover-Beloved- and the Love between them, the three persons of the Holy Trinity are one God, and they exist in perfect union with one another.

Most of us, I suspect, learned at an early age that we are made in the image and likeness of God. If then, this is true, we are meant to be relational and to seek unity with God and with one another. We have heard repeatedly throughout the Easter season, which ended with Pentecost last Sunday, Jesus’s instruction: “Love as I love you.” In Jesus’s teaching, preaching, healing, and forgiving, he consistently sought to unite himself with the persons he encountered and to restore them to union with God. Even when he chastised the disciples or the Pharisees, Jesus was loving them in a way that sought to draw them into union with him.

As baptized Christians, we have been incorporated into the relational life of the Trinity and share in the mission of Christ. What are the implications of this? Just as Jesus’s mission focused on drawing those on the margins closer to him; so too, we are charged with reaching out and responding to those who are separated from the Church, those who have become discouraged and disenfranchised. Last week Rachel quoted Pope Francis in her column saying that “we can fear to lose the saved and we can want to save the lost.” That fear can paralyze us by letting it take over, or it can be a starting place in our prayer, asking God to deliver us from our fear and strengthen our resolve to follow in Christ’s footsteps, seeking those who are absent from our midst.

Our incorporation into the life of the Trinity and our sharing in the mission of Jesus—that all may be one—make perfectly clear what choice we must make. Let us not fall short of the goal of living out a love based in union with God that seeks to draw others to Christ. Let us make room not only in our benches in church but in our hearts for those who have left us for any reason in the past. As Jesus told us that he was leaving to prepare a place for us, let us prepare a place for our brothers and sisters. Let us put aside the fear that impedes our attempts to make disciples of all people.

~Sr. Kathleen

Take your next step: Each day for the next month (or year—whatever it takes!), ask God to give you the courage to reach out to someone you know who has left the Church, to welcome them to join you at Mass.

This Sunday we celebrate Pentecost, the birthday of the Church. Birthday celebrations often seem especially significant or poignant when we are at a turning point in our lives--when we’re about to graduate or have a child or make a big move, or when we are facing a serious illness or grieving a loss. Pentecost this year seems especially poignant and significant because our Church, locally and globally, is at a turning point. Both in our own local community and in the universal Church, through the leadership of Pope Francis, we are asking ourselves some big questions: Why does the Church exist? What is the purpose of the Church? More and more it seems that, although there are many ways of answering these two questions, there are two basic approaches: One is that the Church exists primarily to serve the needs of its members. The other is that the Church exists primarily to reach out to and connect with nonmembers. 

It is essentially a question of priority, not an either/or. Is the faith community’s first responsibility to those who are already within its walls, or to those who are still outside of them? It seems clear that if a church does not address this question in an intentional way, the default position will be to serve the needs of those who are already within the community. As Paulist Fr. Robert Rivers puts it: “The people we need to reach out to are not around to tell us what their needs are. The people who don’t feel welcome aren’t present to tell us why. The poor who don’t feel at home in our church simply remain on the margins.” 

A difficulty arises, in Jesus’s time as in our own, when religious people feel threatened by efforts to reach out to irreligious people. The sentiment often emerges that their gain must be our loss. But in the logic of Christ, we only stand to gain when we share with others the gift of faith that we have been freely given.

On February 15th of this year, Pope Francis gave a homily addressing these two basic possibilities for the essential orientation of the Church, inward and outward. The homily was based on Jesus’s healing of lepers and the way that the authorities often responded to such acts of healing with outrage and suspicion. 

“There are two ways of thinking and of having faith: we can fear to lose the saved and we can want to save the lost. Even today it can happen that we stand at the crossroads of these two ways of thinking. . . .

The way of the Church is precisely to leave her four walls behind and to go out in search of those who are distant, those essentially on the ‘outskirts’ of life. It is to adopt fully God’s own approach, to follow the Master who said: ‘Those who are well have no need of the physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call, not the righteous but sinners’ (Lk 5:31-32).

In healing the leper, Jesus does not harm the healthy. Rather, he frees them from fear. He does not endanger them, but gives them a brother. . . . 

[T]his is the ‘logic,’ the mind of Jesus, and this is the way of the Church. Not only to welcome and reinstate with evangelical courage all those who knock at our door, but to go out and seek, fearlessly and without prejudice, those who are distant, freely sharing what we ourselves freely received.”

Here in the New Roads Catholic Community, we stand at a crossroads, too. What will our priority be? Are we going to be a church that fears to lose the saved, or are we going to be a church that wants to save the lost?

~Rachel

Take your next step: Set aside a few minutes when you can listen to God. Read Luke 15:1-7 (or even just one verse, Luke 15:4--“What man among you having a hundred sheep and losing one of them would not leave the ninety-nine in the desert and go after the lost one until he finds it?”) several times, and notice what strikes you about this passage and what feelings emerge in reading it.

Well, OK. The Scriptures don’t actually say “Belmont, Watertown, and Waltham.” Technically the passage says “Judea, Galilee, and Samaria.” That’s who St. Luke was writing to and about, so of course those are the areas he mentions. But we believe that the Word of God is alive and active, speaking to us and our situation today just as surely as it spoke to the earliest Christians. We recognize in this description what God also desires for our community--God wants us to be at peace and consoled by the Holy Spirit, to be built up and growing in numbers, to be worshipping God in all that we do--and we trust that God is present among us, actively working to bring about his vision. It is up to all of us together to try to understand God’s vision, and to recognize what God is currently doing in our community to bring about that vision, so that we can cooperate with God’s action and try not to get in God’s way!

One large part of understanding God’s vision for our community is looking at why we exist as a community at all. Like all the other collaboratives formed by Disciples in Mission, the pastoral plan for the Archdiocese of Boston, our collaborative’s purpose is to help our two parishes become better at two things: 1) reaching those who have become disconnected from the Church, and 2) helping those who are already connected to grow as intentional disciples. From the local level to the global level under the leadership of Pope Francis, our Church has been growing in recognition that we must take seriously Christ’s call to seek the lost and to make disciples.

There are so many pieces to figuring out what this means on the local level--how will our partnership actually help St. Joseph and St. Luke to respond to Christ’s call more effectively? From worship to sacraments to service to communications, there are so many ways that working together can help our two parishes reach more people and help more people grow, and we have a long way to go in figuring out all the details. One thing that became clear early this year was that the working name for our partnership, “Saints Joseph and Luke Collaborative,” would not help us to reach people who had become disconnected from the Church, who knew of the existence of either St. Joseph Parish or St. Luke Parish but were convinced that Catholic churches had nothing to offer them.

In considering this, we were particularly struck by these words from Pope Francis in his September 2013 interview in America magazine: “Instead of being just a church that welcomes and receives by keeping the doors open, let us try also to be a church that finds new roads, that is able to step outside itself and go to those who do not attend Mass, to those who have quit or are indifferent. The ones who quit sometimes do it for reasons that, if properly understood and assessed, can lead to a return. But that takes audacity and courage.” 

That is exactly what we feel God is calling us to be: a community that finds new roads, new ways of reaching out. We chose the name New Roads Catholic Community (and accompanying logo) for our partnership as a way of signaling this new perspective to those who have become disconnected from the Church--that perhaps there is more to the Catholic Church than they think there is; that if they give us another look, they will find that we have something more relevant and meaningful to offer than they had previously imagined. Our name also signals something important to those of us who are already actively participating in the life of our community: each of us is called to new roads on our individual journey of faith; we are all called to growth and discipleship.

Yes, using a new name and logo takes some getting used to, but as Pope Francis says, journeying down any new road takes audacity and courage. We will have many new roads to travel together as we try to bring about God’s vision of growth for our community, but we are confident that God will be with us.

~Rachel

Take your next step: Spend a few minutes reflecting on Pope Francis’s call for “audacity and courage.” As a member of the New Roads Catholic Community, what step might you take to reach someone who has become disconnected from the Church, to help someone grow as a disciple, or to grow as a disciple yourself? Ask God to give you the gifts of audacity and courage to take this step.