By sharing resources, Detroit hopes its ‘families of parishes’ plan allows communities to focus on mission

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MICHIGAN FAMILY PARISHES
People pray at Our Lady of Good Counsel Parish in Plymouth, Mich., Nov. 24, 2020. Under the new "family of parishes" structure, each individual parish in the Archdiocese of Detroit would retain its identity, but would work more closely with neighboring parishes. (CNS photo/Valaurian Waller, Detroit Catholic)

The first 27 “families” of parishes will come together next summer in the Archdiocese of Detroit, which is in the midst of a yearslong revitalization and reorganization process known as “Unleash the Gospel.”

Earlier this week, the archdiocese announced the first of two “waves” of parish families that will begin operating together by July 2021. The other 24 parishes in the Archdiocese of Detroit will form the second wave of parish families in July 2022.

“The world needs us to come forward and proclaim the Good News, and we’re hoping that by structuring in such a way that it frees our people up to do more of that,” said Deacon Michael Houghton, the missionary strategic planning director for the Archdiocese of Detroit.

Deacon Houghton, who is also the archdiocesan Families of Parishes project manager, told Our Sunday Visitor that pastors and their staff members decided how to form the families, which are groups of three to six parishes that share resources and leadership teams, and collaborate on ministries.

“We only gave them two criteria: that the group should be somewhere between three and eight parishes,” Deacon Houghton said. “And second, that we would like the families to be contiguous, meaning each parish would share a border with at least one other parish in the family.”

In the “Families” model, parishes maintain their own distinct identities but share personnel and are led by one priest or a team of pastors, who in turn are overseen by a priest serving as a “moderator.”

“In a family, you and your team are responsible for all the parishes. It’s no longer one pastor for one parish,” Deacon Houhgton said. “Perhaps it’s three priests responsible to be pastors for four parishes. How are you going to do that? What do you do for your Mass schedules and your sacramental schedules?”

Pastors and parochial vicars in the families will be assisted by lay support staff who will take up more of the administrative duties. Each family will have a “director of mission support” to oversee non-ministry positions. Lay ministers in some families may handle mission-oriented assignments such as worship, family ministry, youth and adult faith formation.

Each family will also have a pastoral council that will consist of clergy and two parishioners from each parish, as well as a Family Leadership Team that will be appointed by the pastor or moderator. Unlike in a parish cluster — an organizational model that some other dioceses have adopted — a pastor in Detroit will not be shuttling back and forth between meetings with two or more parish councils.

“What we’re saying is … a number of those different teams and committees need to be combined so that the pastor or the moderator of the family can have one group to talk to and not three, four or five,” Deacon Houghton said.

On Dec. 8, Archbishop Allen H. Vigneron of Detroit said on the archdiocesan podcast “Eyes on Jesus” that pastors and their teams considered several factors when deciding which parishes to partner with. In addition to contiguous territories, they also also took ethnic and socio-economic characteristics into account.

“In some cases, a family thought it was better to stretch themselves and be a mix of working-class and middle-class parishes,” Archbishop Vigneron said, adding that the smallest family has three parishes while the largest has eight.

“There’s no one model for every family,” said the archbishop, who added that the guiding criterion for organizing a family of parishes is discerning “what is going to allow us to be a Church on mission.”

The Families of Parish model is the latest development to emerge from Unleash the Gospel, which is described as a path of prayer and discernment that featured a special year of prayer for a new Pentecost in Detroit and an archdiocesan-wide synod in 2016.

“We need to be more missionary. That’s the bottom line of what we’re after,” Deacon Houghton said.

Rooted in the New Evangelization, Unleash the Gospel is in part a response to demographic trends that have impacted the Church in the Northeast and Midwest. Both regions have a decreasing and aging Catholic population that have prompted bishops over the last 20 years to merge or shutter parishes and close Catholic schools.

The regions are also losing priests to retirements, and are not ordaining enough young clergy to make up for those losses. Deacon Houghton said archdiocesan planners have spoken with their counterparts in Chicago, Boston and London, Ontario, in Canada, to share ideas.

“We have to rethink things given the priest shortage and the shortage of resources that we have,” Deacon Houghton said. “It challenges us to think, ‘How can we do this better? How can we organize differently and still allow ourselves to go out and fulfill the mission that we’re on?'”

On top of those structural challenges, archdiocesan planners and parish personnel have also had to work around the restrictions forced on them this year by the novel coronavirus pandemic.

“The biggest complication we have is that we can’t get together face to face. Almost all the work has been done virtually,” said Deacon Houghton, who added that that task is “difficult but not impossible.”

“The pandemic was certainly a problem. It is an issue and it has been very difficult for us,” Deacon Hougton said. “But we look at it kind of like the story of St. Paul, who was on a shipwreck three times. Every time he was ship-wrecked, he used it as an opportunity to go out and be a missionary wherever he was.”

Brian Fraga is a contributing editor for Our Sunday Visitor.

Brian Fraga

Brian Fraga writes from Massachusetts.