Parish Renewal Seminar in Geelong
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November 21, 2023On the evening of November 21st, St Mary's Geelong hosted a Regional Gathering focused on parish renewal. Fr Rene and Anthony Holligan attended the event. The keynote speaker was Ron Huntley, who spoke about the importance of developing Vibrant, Viable, and Vital parishes that are focused on growth and mission.
Ron’s presentation, in very practical terms, provided a hope-filled vision, firming grounded in faith, enabling parishes to develop and grow, not with the goal to have people to go to church, rather to bring people to experience and to fall in love with Christ so that they want to go to church for the love of Christ.
To enable such a vision to come to fruition, Ron presented a model of parish leadership that is founded in five qualities: Trust - in that people can have trust that they are cared fore and valued; genuine motive - people can trust the motivations of those leading are purer and for the best of those they minister to; Ability - those tasked with responsibility have the skills to carry out the mission assigned to them; Character, - people can trust in the character of those leading to follow through with the tasks and commitment, and finally; track record - people can be confident in leaders based on their history.
While Ron spoke of many things related to these five aspects essential for the development of Vibrant, Vital and Viable parishes, anybody who listened to what he was presenting could not help but to feel hopeful and walk away with some confidence in the future of our parish and its mission, focused on making Christ known to others, bringing people into the love of Christ, and developing disciples of the next generation and generations to come. Such an approach enables the continuation of that mission Christ set for the original disciples of making the kingdom of God known upon earth.
