The following story first appeared in the Winter 2006 Glenmary Challenge.
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Making 'Mission' More Central to the U.S. Church

The first step was “God’s Missionary People: A New Way of Being Church.” That was the national mission symposium Glenmary sponsored in October 2004 in conjunction with the U.S. Catholic Mission Association and spearheaded by Father Wil Steinbacher, Glenmary’s Nashville-based point person for home mission leadership.

“As you know,” Glenmary president Father Dan Dorsey told those gathered in Louisville for the 2004 symposium, “part of our ministry is to keep raising questions about ‘mission’ to the larger U.S. Church.”

Now Father Wil and Glenmary are taking another step: “Making Missiology More Prominent: A Proposal for Mission.” This new three-year effort, Father Wil believes, “is critical to the future missionary outreach of the Church in the United States.”

This project, according to the proposal authored by Father Wil, addresses the concerns Pope John Paul II expressed in his encyclical Redemptoris Missio: that the present Church has de-emphasized, and thus ignored, a mission mindset and mission practice on the local level. As the pope said in this encyclical: “Missionary promotion and formation among the people of God…is not (seen as) peripheral but as central to the Christian life.”

This project, says Father Wil, “also addresses a concern that we in the United States well know: that Christianity, worldwide, is under attack from those with far more missionary zeal than is presently exhibited in the mainline Christian faith traditions.”

This ambitious project will entail a three-year examination of missiology in today’s U.S. Church, create a handbook to be used in the formation of seminarians and lay ecclesial leaders, and develop best practices with the hope of having a significant impact on local parish life.

To accomplish these goals, the project will gather a culturally, racially and sexually diverse ecumenical coalition of church leaders and scholars presently working in seminaries and universities as well as in local parishes. This team will meet for three-day reflection sessions twice a year for three years. The first session has already taken place (May 2006) at the Abbey in Gethsemani in Trappist, Ky.

This team will offer a theological basis upon which the U.S. Church can make missiology more central to seminaries, dioceses and the local parish. They will also develop strategies for sharing the fruits of this project with appropriate audiences. Position papers will be published; meetings and presentations with parishes, bishops, seminarians, and lay formation programs will be organized.

Pope John Paul’s understanding of mission is the central hope of this project, says Father Wil. “Preparation for mission is not just for those who go to ‘foreign’ missions. It is meant for all ministers of the gospel.”