Kent Schaffer, on the Church Relevance blog, has posted the top 13 reasons seekers choose a church. The top three are: preaching teaching hospitality This would be a great discussion to have with your team. As you are making plans to start or improve your catechumenate process, how can you make the seekers’ top three
Several people have reported trouble playing back the video. We have a few ideas that might help, but we are not too sharp about computer stuff ourselves. So if you have a techie friend, he or she can probably solve your problem more easily than we can. That said, here are a couple of things
Troubleshooting video playback
Pope Benedict XVI has just written a letter to all of us about the current economic crisis and the solutions required to fix it. Download your free preview to the Reader’s Guide of this ground-breaking letter. Free preview of introduction section as PowerPoint (2.1 MB) (When prompted, click Open to view the file, or Save
Free preview of reader's guide to Caritas in Veritate
In preparation for the upcoming meeting between President Barack Obama and Pope Benedict XVI on July 10 at the Vatican, the USCCB media office has put together a nice summary of the 26 previous meetings between a pope and a sitting U.S. president. What struck me most was the length of John Paul II’s pontificate,
In this surprising discussion on the science of happiness, Nancy Etcoff says that even though we are wired from birth to be happy, we are not very good at increasing our happiness. Her 20-minute presentation covers a lot of data, but she never talks about the link (or absence of one) between faith and happiness.
What's the secret to happiness?
I’m editing the October 2009 issue of Religion Teacher’s Journal, and I’ve just run across the second author who casually refers to choosing a new name for confirmation as though that’s the ordinary practice of the church. I chose a confirmation name as a child as I’m sure most of you did. But our experience
Imagine a catechumen named Penelope who is in the care of a dedicated group of RCIA team members at St. Peregrinus Parish in Pittston, PA. Penelope became a catechumen, along with two other inquirers, in October. It is now February, and the St. Peregrinus team is starting to think about the Rite of Election and
I just returned from an RCIA institute sponsored by the North American Forum on the Catechumenate. It was an engaging, intense, fulfilling couple of days. The participants were revved up from the beginning all the way through to the end. I love being with people who are so dedicated to catechumenate ministry. One question that
Who should lead your RCIA process?
The Concord Pastor wondered aloud the the other day about what requirements for membership we might list in our parish bulletins. He had run across a Unitarian Web site that got him wondering: I Googled the church and in perusing their website I came across the following with regards to membership in their parish: Becoming
To see how you might use one of these points in your catechesis, read “How to lead a 90-minute catechetical session.” The Way of Faith Explain that poverty is a moral scandal that we cannot tolerate. In the news ROME ” The global financial meltdown has pushed the ranks of the
Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time—B
