In 1983, I interviewed for my first job as a parish liturgist. The silver-haired pastor sat behind an imposing desk in his wood-paneled office. I sat on the other side of the desk in one of those chairs that you sink into and that makes it impossible for you to sit up straight. At one point, he looked down at me and said, “We don’t operate as a team here. I’m the boss, and my word is final.”

“Team ministry” was often neither

Well, that was just fine with me! After a decade of high-school and college youth ministry, I was fed up with “team ministry.” While on paper, the idea of team ministry offered the promise of collaboration, the reality was often a confusion of roles and lack of a clear decision making process. Communication was often muddled, and people’s feelings got hurt.

RCIA was a new kind of team ministry

In the 1980s, however, we began to see a new kind of team ministry developing—the RCIA team. As RCIA teams became established in parishes, they were, at first, agents of change. They had strong support from the pastor, the director of religious education, and the liturgist or liturgy planners. Team members were sent to workshops to learn their roles, and they returned to their parishes as “experts” in initiation ministry. I know I’m sugarcoating things here a little, but this scenario, while not universal, was not uncommon back in the day.

We need to reinvent team ministry again

Today, however, initiation ministry has become “institutionalized,” and is often regarded as just one more activity in parish life. It is seldom an agent for change. In an earlier post, I said that the way to overcome this state of complacency was to create a sense of urgency. But that is just the first step. If we are successful in creating a sense of urgency in the parish, the next step is to create what John P. Kotter calls a “guiding coalition.”

A guiding coalition is team ministry on steroids. It is the best of what we all hope team ministry would be. A guiding coalition, according to Kotter, has four essential characteristics. They are:

1. Position power: A guiding coalition requires key leaders who are on board and supportive of the change required for effective initiation ministry in the parish.
2. Expertise: Today, we know that expertise means more than just familiarity with the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults. We also need people on board who are fluent in the various cultures of the parish, who can speak knowledgably about the social conditions of the neighborhood, who are skilled in organizing people, and who understand, at a deep level, the process required for spiritual conversion.
3. Credibility: Sometimes RCIA teams have everything in place and yet still seem to lack the ability to cause true change. That may be because we can sometimes operate in isolation from other parish ministries and activities. And therefore, we lack credibility with the wider parish. In an ideal world, RCIA team members would be at every parish event, developing networks throughout the parish. Just showing up goes a long way toward developing credibility.
4. Leadership: In my experience, RCIA teams usually have only one person with true leadership skills. And one person usually cannot effect wide-spread change. Teams need to reorient themselves from recruiting helpers to recruiting—and training—leaders.

The new RCIA job description

Creating a guiding coalition like this is hard and sometimes tedious work. It is outside of the job description of what most people think of as the work of the RCIA team. Even so, it is what we have to do as team members. And if you are that one true leader on the RCIA team, think of the above four tasks as your primary job description. Recruit new leaders to take over the tasks on your current job description.

Start by building parish-wide credibility

If you are wondering where to start, I’d pick number 3, credibility. Start showing up at events all over the parish. Be curious, and be interested. Listen deeply for the vision and mission of each group you visit. And as you get to know the ministries of the parish, ask yourself how these groups are already contributing to the initiation ministry of the parish.

• How are the Knights evangelizing with their pancake breakfasts?
• How is the Tuesday night rosary group contributing to the spiritual growth of the parish and your catechumens?
• How are the lectors communicating the word to the parish and to your catechumens?

Our primary work is coalition-building

I learned how to lay this out in four steps by reading John P. Kotter’s book, Leading Change. But I learned the intuitive principles that underlie these steps from the “my word is final” pastor I worked for in the 1980s. For all his talk about having the final say, he was great at creating the type of coalitions Kotter talks about. He was pastor of that parish for 30 years, and he never seemed to tire of building and strengthening guiding coalitions committed to being change agents. He didn’t have superpowers or special training beyond his pre-Vatican II seminary formation. He just rolled up his sleeves every day and got to work. He did, however, understand what his “work” was and wasn’t.

That is our challenge as RCIA leaders. We have to understand that our primary work is to develop guiding coalitions of change.

What is your next step?

What do you think? How do you see your role as a leader in the initiation process? What next steps do you think you can take to develop a guiding coalition?