Commission Participation

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BellaChiara

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Hello Forum,
I am new to the forum format and hope someone here can offer some useful advise. I am a member of our parish council. We are struggling with increasing participation in our parish commissions. Participation in our monthly meetings has decreased to an alarming level. Does anyone have suggestions on how to invigorate a parish to get more people involved? There seems to be so much apathy and no one wants to take time away from their schedules to attend commission meetings. Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
BellaChiara
 
BellaChiara said:
Hello Forum,
I am new to the forum format and hope someone here can offer some useful advise. I am a member of our parish council. We are struggling with increasing participation in our parish commissions. Participation in our monthly meetings has decreased to an alarming level. Does anyone have suggestions on how to invigorate a parish to get more people involved? There seems to be so much apathy and no one wants to take time away from their schedules to attend commission meetings. Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
BellaChiara
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I think the key is to have the commission members meet once a month face to face to do nothing but report to the commission on the progress of their projects. In other words the expectation is for the majority 98% of the work, discussion, decisions are made away from the Commission meetings. If the pastor or Commission chair is the kind of person who needs “control” rather than just providing guidance and support. Then final “approval” for doing or not doing something can be received at the Commission meeting. However the Chairperson should have already reviewed the material the members have worked on so very little time is taken up with the “approval process”. It gets people Emailing, calling , meeting outside of the 1 and 1/2 hour meeting once a month. Think of the business model. If a business only required it’s employees to actually work 1.5 hours a month? So see the Commission meeting as a staff meeting all the real work gets done outside of it.
 
Wow, that IS a problem.

I am serving on a Commission for the first time this year (for a 3 year term), and one of the things they told us as we were discerning this call was the committment; if we are on a Commission, we are obligated to be at EVERY MEETING. Period. That’s not to say there aren’t good reasons for missing a meeting, or a reason to step down so that the position can be filled in the next year, etc. (Common sense applies here- one of our members had a baby and missed the December meeting…etc.)

So considering this is mid-year, maybe it’s time to consider the REASONS people are considering this low priority? Look at that first because when you understand the root of the problem you can address the solution.

In our parish, the Council is made up of Commission Chairs, and usuall, I need to leave after my meeting. Since I’m not a Chair, I usually leave because the Council meeting ends at 10 and I have other responsibilities.

LOL, one of the things I’ve discerned from my experience thus far is that I’m not a “committee person”. Sometimes we learn through experience, though, but I will serve out my term…is maybe a little reminder of work-ethic needed in your parish?

How are you set up? Maybe if we understand the format your parish has for leadership, we can better address your concerns and provide more solid suggestions.
 
I’ve been on the Faith formation commission for a year now. And, it’s been so discouraging. Nothing we’ve tried to implement has gotten past the talking stage. The Pastor gave us a directive, then flip flopped on it. We talked about evalutating and reforming the sacramental prep programs (esp. confirmation), but the youth director had a hissy fit and we had to drop it. Then, we wrote a booklet to explain the theology and guidelines of our sacramental programs. Then, the rest of the commission who had approved the project dropped it.

How ridiculous. What a waste of my time.

Committees like this are useless.

I wonder if the other commission members see the futility of their investment of their time and energy.
 
Thanks to everyone who responded to my questions. Our parish has about 1,500 active families. We have grade school with K through 8 grades. We have 8 Pastoral Council Members and 8 Commissions. Each Pastoral Council Member is a liason to a commission. We meet once a month, on a Monday evening, and the attendance has been dropping at each meeting. We had only 3-4 members of each commission at our last meeting and a couple of the commissions had no members attending. The complaints we hear range from people not having time to attend on a week night to people just don’t like to attend meetings. It is very frustrating to see the apathy and lack of committment to the efforts being made by the parish. One of our Pastoral Council goals is to increase participation in all the commissions, but we are struggling with how to accomplish this. Thanks again for the responses.
 
I am a life long Catholic and never heard of commissions. Is this something new? Or is it a new name for “ministries” or “apostolates”? Or is it a regional thing? I see several of the responses are from people in the midwest.
 
It’s hard to know how to address the issues you bring up, BellaChiara.

Personally, I find that “disinterest” in attending meetins is not acceptable for someone who has committed to serve the Church. I have learned that I’m not real interested, either, but I gave my word, and someone in the past instilled in me that this is important.

ReginaNova ~ I can’t speak for Bella, but my parish is a full stewardship parish; we are completely self-supporting. A few years ago they restructured the leadership in preparation for this, and here we are. We have several Commissions; Liturgy, Education, Operations, Finance, and a few others. Under those are other Committees such as Enviroment (decorating, practical space-use issues, etc), Maintenace, and the like. I am on the Liturgy commmission, and our job is “visionary”, although this year we’ve been very hands-on in that we put on a workshop for all those people involved directly in the Liturgy.

We don’t determine what goes on at the liturgy for that is already decided, so for our Commission, it has more to do with taking in info and right now, as a fairly new thing, we are discerning our purpose. How’s that for a waste of time?

As a new structure, though, our parish needs time to set it up… I’m not certain this is a “midwest” thing though. Our Pastor is definitely in charge of things, and our other priests (very large parish) are definitely involved. It is just the job of the laity to help to run the day-to-day needs of the parish, freeing the priests to do what they need to do; operate as conduits of grace, chosen sons of God.

As far as I know, Bella, our parish doesn’t have the problems yours does in leadership, so I pray that this is somehow resolved. I wish I could give some advice here, but from what you’ve said, I’d guess you have a problem with “work ethic” and the fact that your "leadership’ doesn’t know what that is.

Is there anything more you can tell us?
 
Thanks, JCPhoenix, that was an excellent discription of commission. Your parish structure sounds very similar to ours.
I agree that the lack of participation may be work ethics. We had a commissions meeting last night and attendance was a little better. We issued a questionaire to try to help determine where and how we can improve participation. It will be interesting to see the responses.
Thanks,
Bella
 
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