By Michael Motes

Nearing the halfway mark in a 12-week program for members of his parish council, Father Matt Kemp, pastor of Our Lady of Lourdes, is seeing “a spark of hope and excitement” in what began as “a very painful process.”

Aimed at instructing parish council members that the laity should take on more responsibility for the overall activities and governing of their parish, the series of Sunday evening workshops is being led by the Reverend Calvin E. Houston, pastor of Rice Memorial Presbyterian Church and co-director of the Urban Training Organization of Atlanta, which is partially funded by the Archdiocese of Atlanta.

Several months ago Father Kemp attended a seminar at Catholic University in Washington on the topic “Parish Council in Service to the Community in Faith.”

When he returned to his downtown Atlanta parish, he decided to present his parish council with some course of training which would allow them to better benefit the entire parish.

“So many councils are bogged down in parliamentary procedures and Roberts’ Rules of Order that they achieve very little,” Father Kemp said.

He wanted to present ideas using manager trainee techniques and contacted Rev. Houston, who suggested that members of the Lourdes council devote a weekend to discussing their inner-parish problems and chart a course of action toward taking on a bigger share of the responsibility of the parish.

During the weekend at Camp Calvin, a Presbyterian center, Lourdes parishioners underwent what Father Kemp calls a “process to identify.” Three basic questions were discussed: 1) What is the parish? 2) What does it mean to be a Christian? 3) Are we willing to “put ourselves on the line” at being called a Christian?

The result of the weekend was the 12-week discussion seminar. Father Kemp explains the overall aim of the program is to survey how the parish presently functions; to dream of how the council would like for it to function; to explore tools for goal-setting, accountability and evaluations, and ultimately to get the entire parish involved in some aspect of total parish life.

Now nearing the halfway point, Father Kemp reports that “a spark of hope and excitement is evident about the future thrust of shared responsibility for the community that is Our Lady of Lourdes.”

He says, “The entire parish must take on shared responsibility for educational life, worship life, financial life, social outreach and internal family life and the quality of family life.”

At the end of the workshop sessions, Father Kemp will offer the BULLETIN a report on how the 12 weeks of study and discussion has affected his parish.