By Gretchen Keiser

The intensive training program in Scripture, theology and church teaching that has been available in the past only to men studying for the permanent diaconate will now also be open to lay men and women involved in parish work in the Atlanta archdiocese.

This “Two-Year Lay Ministry Training Program” means that pastors can offer to parish leaders and minister – and those who might be future leaders – a new opportunity to deepen their knowledge of Scripture and teaching and develop their ability to pastor people, said Father William Hoffman.

It is also a revamping of the archdiocesan three-year permanent diaconate program, which formerly offered this preparation only to male diaconate candidates culminating in their ordination as permanent deacons assigned to serve the church in parishes or special ministries.

Right now a class of 54-men has completed a second year of study and is moving toward the final year of study this fall and ordination next spring.

The new program, beginning this September, will be open both to new deacon candidates and to others both men and women who are or will be serving parishes in other ways. After two years of study alongside the lay ministers, men who want to become permanent deacons will apply and be considered for a third year of study, leading to ordination.

The lay ministry training is “a part of the renewal of the church,” said Father Hoffman, “people taking their rightful place in church ministry and calling it by its right name” rather than saying they are “just doing church work.”

Some people pastors might consider for the program are religious educators, youth ministers, those responsible for parish liturgies and leaders of parish organizations. Hopefully the lay ministers will gain “a better idea of what they are doing and why they are doing it, with a background from a church perspective,” Father Hoffman said.

Director of the permanent diaconate program for the last two years during which time this most recent large class of candidates began training, Father Hoffman said the new program will also provide a time period for those desiring ordination as permanent deacons to weigh their decision and for the program coordinators to become more familiar with the interested men before accepting them formally as diaconate candidates.

While there are a variety of leadership training programs in progress in the archdiocese, including the Cursillo movement’s Leaders School and a formal lay ministry videotape program from Loyola University in New Orleans leading to a graduate degree, this is the first lay training program of its kind in the archdiocese.

It is structured like a formal degree program, because it is used to prepared men for ordination and a lifetime commitment to church service, but it does not require the academic degrees to enter that a graduate program in lay ministry would demand, Father Hoffman pointed out. In seeking ways to better prepare lay people for parish work, archdiocesan officials were looking for a program that would not exclude people without academic degrees, but still provide substantial training in key areas, he said.

For parishes, he said, this might be an opportunity, suggested by religious education coordinator Tom Brassington to ask “what they would like to see five years from now (in their parishes) and how they can get there.”

A vision of what the parish could be like, and how it wants to better live out the Gospel could lead to a search for those people in the community “who could do it” with some study and training. Father Hoffman said. Rather than thinking that trained people “will ship in from someplace else, we have to train our own,” he said. He said the program is definitely intended to respond to the need for more lay people to assume parish work that had been done exclusively by priests and Religious.

Rather than being aimed at all interested people as an academic program might be, it is aimed specifically at those a parish knows are or will be involved in parish work. Pastors are asked to select the candidates and it is recommended that the parishes pay the $100 annual fee for study and materials so that both the parish and the minister see the training as related to the parish and its needs.

“We want them linked to the parish in some sort of ministry way,” Father Hoffman said. “We want the pastors to select these people from among those who are currently involved or potentially involved.” Otherwise, he said, the program becomes strictly “academic.”

The plan is for the new program to begin in September, and those who join will be studying two Saturdays a month throughout the school year, as do those in the current diaconate class. The course will include Scripture, basic systematic and moral theology, spirituality, canon or church law, church history, social teachings of the church and pastoral skills.

Two identical informational talks are being held Monday, June 2, and Monday, June 9 at the Catholic Center, 680 West Peachtree St., N.W., Atlanta, from 7:30 to 9 p.m. Parishes have been asked to invite people to one of the two meetings, both those who are interested in becoming permanent deacons and those who are lay ministers. Application forms for the program will be given out at the meetings.

Those interested in the diaconate must be men at lease 32 years old at the time of entering the program, since 35 is the minimum age for ordination. Although married men are eligible for the diaconate, single men cannot marry once ordained and those who are married cannot remarry. Another guideline is that those ordained to the diaconate are ordained to serve the archdiocese not their individual parishes.

More information on the program and the new structure can be obtained from Deacon Ray Shaw at St. John Neumann parish in Lilburn.