Plan Approved and Moving Forward!

 
I am happy to announce that the Local Pastoral Plan for our Plainville-Wrentham Collaborative Parishes, which our Plan Writing Team and the Collaborative Pastoral Council have been working on for the past year, has been formally approved by Cardinal Seán! We are so grateful to the members of both parishes who attended workshops, read books and survey results, and attended many long working meetings to prayerfully ponder what purpose, values and vision will help our Catholic communities grow in faith and discipleship in Jesus Christ. This plan spells out the priorities that we will make our focus for at least three years:

(1) “Strengthening and Growing the Sunday Experience,”
(2) “Vocations and Discernment, Especially Diocesan Priesthood,” and
(3) “Faith Formation of Adults and Families.”

The full five-page text of our Pastoral Plan is being posted on our website (pwc.church), and we will be providing print versions and summaries in the bulletin and pamphlets as the fall approaches. While the plan provides specific goals for our parishes to achieve, the cardinal’s letter approving it encourages us to “implement [it] with flexibility, in order that it be a source of focus and motivation for your pastoral mission but not a constraint or hindrance.” The experience of preparing the plan has already been an opportunity of focus and motivation for us on the PWT and CPC teams, and we pray that the Holy Spirit will make it so for our whole collaborative!

With that enthusiasm in mind, we will begin to form new “teams” (commissions or committees) to help us focus on these priorities and goals.

The “Sunday Experience Team” will spend a good amount of time studying the liturgy of the Church before considering appropriate and effective ways to enhance our experience at Sunday Mass. There will be less intensive ways for others to be involved in things that lead up to or follow the Mass.

For our “Collaborative Vocations Team” we need people who are interested in coordinating established programs and sharing creative ideas for promoting church vocations such as religious life, the diaconate, matrimony, and especially future priests to staff our parishes so they can thrive into the future.

We are currently looking at programs for adult small groups that would be meaningful for those already active in their faith as well as those still searching, and we will need several people to help in various ways with these groups. In promoting spiritual retreats for adults like Cursillo and Emmaus, we realize some parents find it hard to get away alone on weekends, so one of our goals is to provide a family retreat day that will allow parents to bring their children with them for an intergenerational experience of the Church as the family of God. Both Parish Finance Councils have committed to supporting this plan as an important use of our resources to strengthen our parishes. Many aspects of our plan will only become reality if we have people willing to get involved - not just staff and the most active parishioners, but new parishioners and those who haven't been involved yet in parish activities outside of Mass. We all want our parishes not only to be here in the future but to thrive.

Please prayerfully consider our Pastoral Plan and how you might be part of it in the coming months. After reading the plan on our website, www.pwc.church, feedback can be sent to The Plan Writing Team at [email protected].