In my previous parish, I taught the high school youth as part of our parishes intergeneration faith formation program. One of my favorite Sundays ws making blankets for the home less. The joint effort and vision it took to carefully make each blanket was awesome to be a part of and I love this picture of it take place. It is a little symbolic of my work and ministry lately. I just finished up a major consulting gig with the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and another one coming up with the Archdiocese of New York both dealing with the issue of parishes collaboration together with great intentionaliy and joint commitment. It seems this has become a common theme for my ministry lately so my next set of blogs will reflect on issues surrounding multi-parish clustering and collaboration.
Lots of different strategies have been used lately to deal with diminishing resources of local pariah communities. One of the most popular models is the clustering of parishes with common needs, challenge, geography, or shared values, in order to pool resources for collaboration around a common purpose and outcome. Sometimes, these clusters maybe around a specific ministry like youth ministry parishes have a common program with high school youth. If you are interested in finding out more how to make clustering or multi-parish models successful contact the NFCYM Multi-Parish Inservice and ask for Doug Tooke to be your trainer for the day.
In the case of my most recent consulting work with the C3 San Fernando Pastoral Region (SFPR) Technology Cluster Pilot, conducted by the Archdiocese of Los Angeles came together to explore how to effectively integrate technology and social media with the parish community and many parish ministries.
My next two blog posts will share with you a summary of what we accomplished and what we learned in the process. If you are unfamiliar with this project you may want to check out my previous blogs on the pilot:
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