Anyone else's parish not give a flaming hoot whether they live or die?

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True, somewhat. It also depends on the parish for Catholics. I attend a pretty well-endowed one. In any case, @Erikaspirit16 had some very low-cost suggestions.
 
I know this isn’t exactly the same but I had a similar experience in media work. When contacting various companies to get work or work experience during and after I studies journalism, I had some positive responses and some where they were not taking people but they still got back to me to let me know the situation. The few Catholic publications I wrote to basically ignored me [or at least, it felt that way, as they didn’t have the courtesy to reply]. Weird.
 
I second small groups, I go to one as part of my husbands non-denominational and as newcomers to the area it’s been a great way to connect with people.
 
Does your church have weekend mens retreats…womens retreats…our church has them throughout the year…someone will notify the congregation after mass that there is a retreat coming up…either for men or women and there will be someone in the vestibule after mass where you can sign up…there is no way they could ignore you then…great for newcomers to get to meet other members
 
That is actually my job. The very best way to build community is to begin meeting people where they are.

For example, fewer and fewer people read the bulletin. It is old media. Parishes need to use Social Media and use it well (bad Social Medial presence is worse than none). This means they need to pay someone who has the technical savvy and who stays abreast of the latest. A Social Media budget to boost posts for important events.

Listening to parishioners. While it is well and good to complain that parents drop their kids off for RE/CCD, that may be the only break the parents have to go to the store that week!

Offer childcare for every possible event.
 
Unfortunately what I see in my parish is a horde of tired women who’ve been giving their all to the parish for decades and now really want a younger group to take over. The problem is that there is really no younger group to take over, so these women in their 70s and even 80s are doing what they can to keep things going as best they can.

There is some hope from the immigrant population that is moving into the parish but for the most part, unless they came here with a white collar job, they are working 60-70 hours/week to put meals on the table and send money home. They come to church but rush off to work when Mass is over.
 
How willing are these women to consider changing to times that working women (or men) can do? Not that the long hours and commuting helps of course.
 
Phemie said:
Unfortunately what I see in my parish is a horde of tired women
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Term limits. If a top priority is finding people to takes their places, that’s what will happen. If they can stay forever, it won’t happen. Simple.
 
ConfusedLucy said:
How willing are these women to consider changing to times that working women (or men) can do? Not that the long hours and commuting helps of course.
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The Women’s Group, most of whom are between the ages of 55-80, usually meet in the evening when they are organizing the once a year “Fall Fair” fund raiser. That’s to allow those who work to attend but there’s no great stampeded by working people to join in to help. There are no regular activities beyond a once-a-month social after a Sunday Mass, something they also organize and clean up after.

Many of these older women were founding members of our parish. As young women just starting families they moved to this town in the middle of the wilderness, inaccessible except by air (or by boat for a few months in the summer), so their husbands could work; many are now widows. One is our sacristan.

There is a Knight of Columbus Council (two if you consider the 4th degree council) but they have no regular activities like those mentioned in other posts. Any social activity they have is limited to members and their families or invited guests. Unfortunately their newly-renovated club was destroyed by fire late last year. Now they don’t even do their First Sunday post-Mass coffee, which was also usually only attended by members and their families.
 
casslean said:
Me too. One of the things I find the church is not great at, however, given the number of volunteers they rely on, is providing adequate training to their priests and paid staff in managing vounteers and giving training to the volunteers in how to manage other people.
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Secular volunteering also has this problem, bigly.
It is a main reason I do not go rushing to give my time to secular volunteer organizations.

The preference of the ones I have seen is to have a pre-organized group, such as a high school service group, or a parish group, come in and do a very set task for X number of hours, like make lunch sandwiches, and then be herded together by the group’s own moderators and taken back from whence they came.

The volunteer organizations usually have a few full-time staff who at best do not have the bandwidth to train and manage a lot of volunteers, and at worst may be worried about volunteers taking over the jobs that they themselves are trying to keep on a paid basis. If Susie the volunteer shows that she can do Joanie the paid coordinator’s job as well as, or better than, Joanie, then Joanie may fear finding herself unemployed. I have seen paid staff basically running volunteers off for this very reason.

Even if Susie and Joanie are both volunteers, Joanie may still fear being replaced if she’s relying on that volunteer job as a big source of her self-image, self-esteem, power, or resume building.

It is not a “Catholic thing”, it is an organizational thing.
 
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If I were to go to a church where everyone rushed to see me and called me back right away, I would feel one or more of the following:
  1. That these people were very surface.
  2. They would drop me like a bad habit
    3.That I had wandered into…" the Stepford Church"
Building real friends and bonds take time. I would much much rather have a few real friends than many fake ones. In the meantime, look inward, and focus on your family. Just a suggestion. I wish you and your family the very best.

https://faithsmessenger.com/wounds_stepford_church/
 
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blackforest said:
Honestly, Catholics should look to their Protestant brethren and sisters for ideas. To their credit, they do a much better job at the whole community thing.
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We hear this all the time. Besides having married into a Protestant family, I also happen to live between two Protestant churches so I see it in action too.

A big difference between the Protestant and Catholic churches is that for many Protestants, fellowship is 80 to 90 percent of the reason they are bothering to come to the church. This is a different focus from the Catholics, many of whom are coming to worship, or for a religious practicing purpose, not to socialize in small group activities or to eat or to listen to an entertainment program (the latter two are huge with some Protestant churches).

The Protestant congregations around here also tend to be smaller and aware they are smaller. They know each other more than large Catholic parishes and they need to do a lot of outreach just to stay viable. The local Catholic parishes here, by contrast, are huge and are going to have full seats a lot of the time whether they bother to do any outreach or not.

It’s all very well to say Catholics should be like Protestants, but a whole lot of Catholics really don’t want to “be like Protestants”. It’s like telling US citizens they should be more like Europe. It’s not going to go over well.

I think littlelady’s statement about “meeting people where they are” is the best thing I’ve seen on this thread. And in order to meet people, you need to be approachable yourself. Pulling a “poor me victim” or an un-humble act like you expect people to drop everything and pay attention to you, is not going to fly. Being genuinely interested in people and willing to accept them with their faults and still be interested and get to know them and their needs, will work a lot better.
 
Tis_Bearself said:
It’s all very well to say Catholics should be like Protestants, but a whole lot of Catholics really don’t want to “be like Protestants”. It’s like telling US citizens they should be more like Europe. It’s not going to go over well.
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Tis_Bearself said:
Pulling a “poor me victim” or an un-humble act like you expect people to drop everything and pay attention to you, is not going to fly. Being genuinely interested in people and willing to accept them with their faults and still be interested and get to know them and their needs, will work a lot better.
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That’s not what I said. Not even close. At times like these, I really need a photo of the Pope giving that quizzical look after he’s misrepresented by news media. Or perhaps Jordan Peterson’s expression after Cathy Newman makes some outlandish so-what-you’re-saying comment.

Borrowing a community-building idea from a Protestant church, e.g. “Hey, let’s try a different community-building approach that I saw at a Lutheran church!,” is not tantamount to saying “Catholics should be like Protestants.”

And the OP yearning to make connections at a new parish does not make him/her a whiny, attention-seeking victim.

Yeesh!
 
blackforest said:
Borrowing a community-building idea from a Protestant church, e.g. “Hey, let’s try a different community-building approach that I saw at a Lutheran church!,” is not tantamount to saying “Catholics should be like Protestants.”
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🤣

You apparently did not sit in on either the parish council meeting for the church that I did a marketing project for. The priest wanted to add some elements he saw at other churches and when they were poo-poo’d as impossible he stated where they were done. A number of the council–and laity who heard about it later–said EXACTLY that.

And I’ve found in New England the “we’re not protestants/we don’t do that because protestants do” is a huge and prevailing attitude.

Granted, New England was anti-Catholic for the most part early on, but that’s another discussion.
 
I agree with you about parents dropping off kids. It doesn’t mean that we aren’t involved elsewhere in the parish. I’ll drop my kids off at RE but stay pretty active in our social justice and social outreach ministries — you know, “adult” stuff to give me a little break, lol! I also agree about childcare. It’s good for adults as well as kids, (the latter of whom get to make friends at church). Our parish is the first that I’ve attended that provides it, and it’s been a godsend.

Social media is a communicator but not a community-builder. In fact,it may have the opposite effect.

For communication, it’s not a bad idea to use it so long as you’re careful to study social media habits. Only 41% of millennials use Facebook daily.

You’ll be leaving out a lot of the elderly.

The latest data that I can find is that79% of Americans are on Facebook. That may sound large, but that would leave a full one in five of parishioners disconnected.

While it may be a great communication tool for people who already use it, I wouldn’t recommend jettisoning the church bulletin altogether. (I’m not on Facebook and depend on our bulletin).
 
I think the problem for a lot of Catholic churches these days is that there aren’t necessarily these Catholic populations guaranteed to turn up, even people who stay Catholic often relocate for example.

There is a touch of complacency with older parishes as it’s probably very easy to imagine that they will be around forever. Outreach is desperately needed but we don’t always know how, I mean we sometimes struggle to reach people inside the building so it’s only harder to reach those outside.
 
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