ATLANTA--At a leadership training institute held Aug. 2-6 at St. George Church in Newnan, directors and coordinators of religious education gathered to share ideas and receive new insights into their ministry.

The training was a collaborative effort by the staff at the archdiocesan Office of Religious Education and Faith Formation for those who hold leadership roles in Catholic schools and parishes. Diane Dougherty, archdiocesan director of family and children’s ministry, coordinated the event, but said that every person in the religious education office had a part in the training.

The first two days of training were spent discussing the diverse needs of religious education in parishes and schools. Using the defining study and works of Francois Darcy-Berube, “Religious Education at the Crossroads,” participants explored the importance of their own attitudes toward religious education and how effective structures in families, parishes and schools support the process of catechesis. The DREs and CREs pondered the call of the Second Vatican Council that directs Catholics to become lifelong learners from baptism through adulthood.

“We all had the opportunity to talk about religious education from our own framework,” Dougherty said. “We concentrated on looking at where we’ve been in the past and where God is calling us in the future.”

Dougherty said that the central place where catechesis begins is in the liturgy and in worship and that to go to Mass without attending a religious education program, or vice versa, offers a person only “half the power of the true message.”

Participants spent days three through five of the training clarifying diocesan guidelines and policies concerning the sacraments, developing informative workshops in liturgical catechesis and outlining the existing basic certification program for catechists with an overview of developing intermediate and advanced components.

One participant said that the institute was a “new awakening for me--the spark I needed to begin the school year with food that will last for a long time.”

Dougherty hoped that the experience would be one participants could draw from in their different roles within the church.

“My prayer is that everyone left the training with a sense of excitement for the work that we do in the church,” she said. “I hope everyone reinvested themselves in the work of religious education.”