FAITH DEVELOPMENT
“Proclaim ’15. Building a Missionary Parish”, a national conference held on 11th July 2015 at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre to share “practical ideas offered for planning and carrying out fruitful evangelisation.” One of the speakers was Cardinal Vincent Nichols. Our Bishop Mark was the Bishop’s Conference Chair of the Department for Evangelisation and Catechesis. Find out more on
The Parish of Our Lady’s and St Benedict’s got together as a consequence of Pope Benedict's 'Year of Faith', meeting after Saturday Mass to view DVDs which inspired the group to encourage each other, each in their own small way, in order to grow. When the Year of Faith ended, the group wanted to continue meeting, to find new ways to share the Word of God.
We would like to encourage all parishioners to take part, and we take direction from Pope Francis’ “Evangelii Gaudium" (The Joy of the Gospel), which is a 2013 apostolic exhortation by Pope Francis on "the church's primary mission of evangelisation in the modern world".
To many minds this 'reaching out' or evangelising can be an alarming concept, but we are all called to our strengths and standing on a soap box or knocking on strangers’ front doors is thankfully not asked of many of us. Instead, the meetings start with a simple prayer and friendly conversation on invigorating our parish.This has led to the realisation that there are many activities that the parish simply do not know about. There is a compilation of these activities on the Parish Activities page. You can find the pdf document here.
Bishop Barron talks about the Mass
We were encouraged by the term 'New Evangelisation'. Indeed, the Day of Faith each term in our school is exactly evangelisation. Thanks to everyone involved for organising and leading this vital input to our children's development, in a Catholic school where such a small proportion of students are Catholics. Equal proportions apply to the teaching staff. But faith there appears to grow out of proportion!
In it’s own way the parish group has put together some thoughts and proposals which could bring us all together in the joy of our Christian faith and create some opportunities to interest others. Everyone is welcome to attend the meetings, to join in or just to mingle. There is no pressure to contribute. Meetings are advertised on the Newsletters.
You can find details of the parish meetings on the Parishioners Meetings pages, and the various courses undertaken on Groups and Courses: