One Small Faith Community
New Sea, New Ships
Submitted by Carolyn Wharton & Ray Classen

A Small Church Community (SCC) is a vessel rightly built for staying buoyantly afloat in the Catholic Church today. It is a group of perhaps 8-12 people who meet regularly to reflect on scripture, on paintings, literature or music that expresses spirituality, or on the news or whatever feeds the inner spirit and puts faith into action in the community.

Such a group is much more to the Saints Dymphna and Rocco Small Church Community in Portland, Oregon. Formed ten years ago, the group has ridden the tides of change within its membership and within the Church that called it to be. For this group, the SCC is a ship whose form and shape have morphed through the years.

At first, our group was a rowboat, launched from the mother ship of the Church during a cycle of parish revitalization through the Renew program. Renew provided us a plan, pre-scripted with agenda, ritual, and rubrics, with selected scripture, prayer and activities. It was guidance and education, a model that proved flexible. Our pastor joined our group for a few seasons. When a member dealt with breast cancer, the priest brought sacrament to the group, offering a healing ritual at one of our gatherings.

Later we navigated our own waters, customizing our boat into a crew scull. Canned programs felt more apt for groups in their first seasons, and so we chose our own, sometimes adrift at sea, sometimes confidently rowing forward, creating our own ritual and praying spontaneous prayers. We felt what it was like to move the boat with our unified, collaborative effort. It took each member, working with his/her unique strength and unified toward common goals. We shared responsibility for the direction of the group, for selecting programs/activities and presenting them; we became practiced dragon boat racers, rowing in unison and taking turns as coxswain. We moved outward beyond group and parish gatherings, to work with the Metropolitan East Portland Interfaith Hospitality Network, providing meals and overnight companionship for families in need.

As seasons passed, we invited speakers: lay spiritual directors, local Catholic clergy, women who served as deans of Catholic seminaries and as Episcopal priests. At times our sails luffed, losing wind when our rituals were lifeless or our examination of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey proved flat and a bit silly. At other times, our sails filled, billowing with the energy of what was true and challenging and vital. We were with each other through divorce and children marrying, through sickness and babies born, through struggles with faith and new beginnings of belief and social action. We became ready to act sacramentally within our group and at the local level. With songs, rituals of healing, of reconciliation, of new beginnings, of celebratory nourishment for body and soul, we grew able to naturally enact our spirituality. We had been trained well enough by the Church as children. We were ready to be adults in Church activity, no longer children.

Most recently, we have felt a new impetus. In the spring of 2002, we wrote a White Paper - A Response to the Multiple Incidence of Child Abuse by Priest-Pedophiles Within the Catholic Church. We shared it at the annual parish goal-setting gathering, with suggestions for Church action. Later, we drafted a letter, signed by over 300 parish members, asking our archbishop, John Vlazny, to take the concerns of the parish to the bishops' meeting in Dallas last summer. When the pastor of the parish was reassigned, we brought requests to the parish meeting that a lay committee be formed to interview candidates for pastoral leader and to send recommendations to the archbishop.

While not all of our suggestions came to fruition, there was a sense of a new role for our SCC, for Small Church Communities in general. If the mother ship of the Church seemed stilled and anchored to a structure and culture that contradicted the Christian message and mission that launched it, perhaps we could nudge it. Perhaps we could turn the ship around.

What follows is a list of recommendations for Small Church Communities: