Thanks to all of you who have participated in the All Things New surveys and provided data and feedback over the past few months. The information has been enlightening, educational and fruitful as we continue to ask ourselves what our parishes, ministries and institutions need to look like in order to effectively share our Catholic faith in a way that is suitable and sustainable for our children and generations to come.
The next step in this multi-year process is to hear more robustly from you, our parishioners, about our parish. The Archdiocese of St. Louis will host over 350 listening sessions throughout our 178 parishes. Our Parish Listening Sessions will be Monday, October 17, and Wednesday, October 19. You are invited to register for our listening sessions at https://allthingsnew.archstl.org/.
Parishioners must register in order to attend a Listening Session. Registration will close once the designated room's seating capacity is reached. There will not be additional opportunities for Listening Sessions other than the ones scheduled for each parish.
Each listening session, including ours, will be facilitated by volunteer parishioners from a different parish. These trained facilitators will share pre-recorded messages from Archbishop Rozanski and Fr. Chris Martin, Vicar for Strategic Planning, with an overview of All Things New, a planning area overview and multiple DRAFT model options to consider for our respective planning area. A brief time will be allowed for small group discussion and facilitated large group feedback.
The goals of the listening sessions are to engage as many of you as possible in understanding the current state of our parish and diocese and to solicit feedback from as many of you as possible about the DRAFT models options for their planning area.
After the final listening session in each planning area, the Archdiocese of St. Louis will make public the content presented at all the parish’s Listening Sessions in that planning area and will offer an additional opportunity for parishioners to provide open-ended feedback through an online survey. The survey will remain open until December 31, 2022. Parishioner feedback to the models is critical, as it will be used to help shape the future of the Archdiocese of St. Louis.
In order for you to be fully prepared with accurate information before our parish listening sessions, you will receive access to our Parish Workbook.
The Archdiocese of St. Louis has created Parish Workbooks as a supplementary resource to help us prepare for the listening sessions. The workbooks are meant to equip us with data about the Archdiocese of St. Louis, our local planning area, and our specific parish. Our Parish Workbook is posted on allthingsnew.archstl.org for anyone to view.
Please continue to pray for the gift of true discernment so that we may continue to do the Will of God in all things.