Greetings and blessings to you and to all the members of Little Flower Parish!
As you may already be aware, our parish is now entering an exciting new phase of its history, the implementation stage of a parish pastoral plan that we have been calling Embracing the Future.
Back in the fall of 2008, soon after beginning my second term as pastor of Little Flower, I assembled a team of nine parishioners to serve on a steering committee to help me formulate a five-year pastoral plan for the future of our parish. Under the guidance of James W. Brown, an organizational consultant with an expertise in Catholic parish life, the Embracing the Future committee coordinated interview sessions with some 120 parishioners in May 2009 to gather information about your vision for the future of the parish. After processing this data, they extracted a list of six pastoral priorities to form the backbone of the plan, then organized a special brainstorming session involving 45 parishioners to generate ideas for action steps to address the needs raised by these priorities. Since then, the committee has been meeting regularly to develop a complete pastoral plan involving dozens of individual action items.
This booklet will provide you with the key elements of this plan. Consider it as an “executive summary”; if you wish, you may consult the more detailed version of the plan at the parish web site (littleflower-church.org). The six priorities are outlined here in a convenient order, but this is not meant to suggest a particular order of importance. Some of the most important elements of the plan are highlighted as Key Action Steps in the following pages. I am sharing this plan with you so that you may prayerfully consider how you might help your fellow parishioners and me realize its underlying vision during the coming days, months and years. The last page of this booklet gives suggestions for getting involved with whatever part of the plan interests you. I invite you to reflect on the example of the early Church, that small and vulnerable group of believers of Christ who, moved by their faith in Him, “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship” (Acts 2:42). It is this fellowship which is the model of parish life to which we aspire, and which I invite you to share in a deeper way as we move forward to “embrace our future” as a parish.
Yours in Christ,
Rev. Robert W. Goebel, Pastor
View the Embracing the Future Booklet.
View the Embracing the Future Pastoral Plan.
