Serving the Parishes of
St. Martha and St. Mary
Plainville & Wrentham MA
St. Martha and St. Mary
Plainville & Wrentham MA
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“If you want to converse with me, first define your terms”
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“If you want to converse with me, first define your terms”
This quote, attributed to the author and playwright Voltaire, was often recited to me by my father. Dad was an electrical engineer and also a master of words, and these two worlds intersected in his use of logic. He must have picked this quote up in a philosophy class along the way, but he used it in situations we all encounter frequently. When we have a communication gap, often it results from having a different understanding of the same word or phrase. Many a disagreement (or apparent disagreement) could be resolved or even avoided if we would clarify what we mean by the key words we are using. Dad was trying to teach me not to assume the other person knew what I was thinking, but to express myself as clearly as possible.
This experience from my youth comes to mind as we participate in a new survey in our collaborative parishes starting this week. We are participating in a study of collaborative parishes across the archdiocese of Boston, but the very simple questions will be hard to answer without a quick refresher to “define [their] terms.” Our parishes have been talking mostly about crafting and implementing our own “Local Pastoral Plan” for our Plainville-Wrentham Catholic Collaborative. The survey, on the other hand, asks about the Disciples in Mission plan, which is the pastoral plan for the whole Archdiocese of Boston. It was Disciples in Mission that started the process of grouping one, two or three parishes into “collaboratives” which (working together) could have enough parishioners, staff, and resources to become “centers of evangelization” to reverse the trend of shrinking parishes. Instead of simply reorganizing and downsizing, Disciples in Mission gave us a two-part approach: strengthening parishes for our mission, and strengthening evangelization in our parishes - the more we do one part, the more capable we are to do the other. The idea is for our parishes to grow in strength as we grow in our ability to more actively live the mission Christ gave us to “go and make disciples of all nations.” If successful, the plan would have all parishes continue to grow in faith and as Disciples of Christ, allowing us to better help others understand how important it is to belong to a Church community - thus growing our parishes.
I hope this “definition”/refresher about Disciples in Mission helps you to be able to answer the first two questions on the paper survey. The more helpful feedback for our own collaborative will be the four online questions (see separate article about the survey). As always, thank you for your time and efforts to help strengthen and grow our parishes!