Work continues among the four parishes in our Renew My Church Grouping — Queen of Angels, St. Matthias, Transfiguration of our Lord and St. Hilary.
On Tuesday, August 6, the Grouping Feedback and Discernment Team (GFDT) met to evaluate church and school data from the four parishes of our grouping and to discern our own parishes’ strengths and challenges. The lists specific to Queen of Angels discerned by our team members were as follows:
Our Strengths:
- Sacramental life — many people being served through receiving sacraments; staff welcomes and accommodates
- Enrollment — strong numbers in both our Catholic School and Religious Education program; lots of kids in the neighborhood
- Diversity — able to meet different learning needs in the school; serving people of different ethnicities and in two languages in the parish
- Lack of debt — savings in the bank; paid off archdiocesan debt a few years ago
- Community-building — especially among families with children in our school
Our Challenges:
- Engagement of youth & young adults — so many youth drift after Confirmation; neighborhood attracts many young adults but very few are connected to the Church
- Exodus to suburbs — families moving out of the neighborhood due to property taxes, high rents, local crime
- Isolation — hard to get to know others in the parish if you don’t have kids and aren’t in a ministry group
- Integration of language groups — limited contact between English-speaking and Spanish-speaking persons; feeling of divided parish
The entire team then identified common threads present across the parishes and schools, to see where we stand as a grouping and to gain a broader sense of the realities of the Lincoln Square community.
This past week, parishioners were invited to attend our first Parish Sessions on Renew My Church, in English on Thursday, August 22 and in Spanish on Sunday, August 25. A further report on these parish-wide meetings will appear in a future post.
Over the next few weeks, our team will be prayerfully considering a set of possibilities that show potential scenarios of how parishes and schools in our grouping could be structured in the future. The scenarios are conversation-starters only at this point. No decisions have been made. As this conversation continues, your Grouping Feedback & Discernment team has also been invited to consider alternative scenarios they may discern.
Let us hold each other and the other parish and school communities in our grouping in prayer. This is important work as we rededicate ourselves to our faith in Jesus Christ and plan for our future.
