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 Only
15% of our parish are celebrating their faith in church each
week. We want to get to know the other 85%.
We are working towards being a parish of Base Ecclesial Communities (or Basic
Ecclesial Communities) (BEC). We have re-organised into small neighbourhood groupings where a team of parishioners takes responsibility for visiting all the Catholics in their area.
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Base -
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means it’s local, organized at street level. |
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Ecclesial
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means that we belong to the universal church and that our small groups are also a new way of being church. |
Community
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means we are trying to build bridges between people, make contact with everyone, help and support each other when we can. |
BEC also means Bringing Everyone Closer - which is what
we are all about!
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"I often think these small communities
are the secret for the future of the church"
"Basic communitites can be the source
of new inspiration, of new hope and new evangelisation for the
church of the future"
"Most Catholics in the future.....will
need to belong to some form of small community"
CARDINAL CORMAC MURPHY-O'CONNOR
Sept. 5th 2001. NCP Conference
www.rcdow.org.uk
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Firstly, a census of the whole parish has to be
undertaken to discover where the Catholic families reside.
Then the organizing team will put together coherent areas of
between 80-120 homes. They will then recruit a group of parishioners
who will each visit between 12 and 15 homes. These are called
the Neighbourhood Pastoral Team. They meet weekly for eight
weeks to get to know each other and to reflect together on their
visits and to pray for those visited. They follow a specially
prepared programme written for our parish.
Once the initial formation period is complete they are commissioned at Mass in front of the whole parish and continue to meet monthly and to follow-up their visits.
The experience so far has been extraordinary. We gained all
our inspiration and ideas from the Archdiocese
of Adelaide, South Australia.
For more information, please email
us.
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