When Trenny Greuel walked into her first Synod Small Group session at her parish, St. Michael in Farmington, she was prepared to discuss and give feedback on topics affecting the local Church. What she didn’t expect, she said, was to leave each session feeling spiritually renewed, with ideas for evangelization and excitement about her role in building up the Church.
“We’re all on a journey, and we’re all trying to work on our faith, work on our prayer life and deepen our relationship with God,” said Greuel, 47, an attorney, wife and mother. “I was just blown away at how much the Synod Small Groups helped me do that as an individual, and how I was able to carry that into my family.”
Nearly all parishes in the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis participated in the Synod’s Parish Consultation with Small Groups, six small-group sessions held between mid-September and mid-November, drawing an estimated 8,000 to 10,000 people to at least one session, said Father Joseph Bambenek, the Synod’s co-director.
The feedback he’s received — both in the feedback forms and participant testimonies — has “been overwhelmingly positive,” he said. While the conversations yielded valuable data for the Synod process, “it seems like (Archbishop Bernard Hebda’s) objective of growing into unity was met, and we’re well on our way towards more vigorously proclaiming the good news of Jesus Christ,” he said.
At each 2-hour session, a video produced by archdiocesan staff guided participants through prayer, talks on Church teaching and personal testimonials that presented the session’s theme. At each session, participants spent two 30-minute periods discussing questions related to that theme at table-based small groups, and completed feedback forms that indicated their own experience with the topic, expressed where they wanted to see the archdiocese put resources related to the topic, and included a short answer with “my best idea” — a chance to share something specific that they wanted Synod leaders to know about the topic.
The topics were based on three focus areas Archbishop Hebda identified for the Archdiocesan Synod: 1. Forming parishes that are in the service of evangelization, 2. Forming missionary disciples who know Jesus’s love and respond to his call, and 3. Forming youth and young adults in and for a Church that is always young. The archbishop discerned those topics following the 30 Prayer and Listening Events he held throughout the archdiocese in 2019-2020, which drew more than 8,000 participants and 35,000 comments.
Feedback, faith sharing
From their inception, the Synod Small Groups’ organizers envisioned the events as an opportunity to receive feedback on the focus areas and foster small-group faith sharing.
With an estimated 320 participants — including 40 confirmation students — the parish with the largest turnout for the first session was Assumption in Richfield, which also drew from nearby St. Richard and St. Peter. Other parishes with more than 150 attendees that first session were St. Stephen in Minneapolis, St. Odilia in Shoreview, Holy Name of Jesus in Medina and St. Paul in Ham Lake.
At St. Odilia, each Synod Small Group session was offered twice, once in English and once in Spanish. Gizella Miko, St. Odilia’s director of discipleship and formation, said the parish’s Spanish-speaking community participated in similar numbers to its Anglo community, but Latino participants’ average age skewed younger, with more people in their 30s and 40s.
“After the first (session), people were really excited to hear each other’s stories. People were really touched by being able to hear about parishioners that they hadn’t really known before and … how God has worked in their life,” Miko said. As a 30-year-old, she appreciated her table conversation with older Catholics, including an 80-year-old who described her experience of forming a Christian group as a public high school student decades ago.
The experience has been so positive at St. Odilia that Miko is launching three new small groups, including ones on prayer and the Creed. “I feel like it kickstarted the rest of the initiatives that we want to do in the parish for adult formation,” she said. “It’s like, here’s this great space that we had for people to come together and talk about faith, and now we can continue the conversation in areas that people want to explore.”
At St. Joseph in West St. Paul, Douglas Bushman, director of parish formation and mission, said the small groups met their mark. Bushman, 67, recently returned to his native Minnesota after a career teaching pastoral theology, most recently as the Pope St. John Paul II Chair of Theology for the New Evangelization at the Augustine Institute in Denver. He said he was impressed by Synod Small Group’s materials and process, and, like Miko, he’s leveraging their momentum. After the Small Groups ended, he began a lectio divina series, and about three-fourths of the Synod Small Group participants returned.
The Synod Small Group conversations were “energetic, vibrant,” he said. “I thought the archdiocese did an excellent job of preparation and anticipating the small group dynamics. And the impression I had was that everyone was respectful. There was a lot of listening to one another.”
ARCHBISHOP’S IMPRESSION
Archbishop Bernard Hebda personally visited at least 10 Small Group sessions, and his experiences “were consistently positive and confirmed my intuition that the Holy Spirit is working among the faithful of this archdiocese,” he said.
“I found that the participants had a seriousness of purpose and a healthy desire to rebuild the Church. They were quick to develop a ‘listening ear’ and were respectful of their fellow participants, even when their views were quite divergent,” he told The Catholic Spirit. “The questions and comments that I received all point to the fact that an amazing number of our parishioners having been thinking and praying about our future and are looking for opportunities to contribute their insights and experiences as we set a course for our Church. Wherever I went, I found folks expressing gratitude for the team that put together the excellent videos for the Small Group process.”
In 2019, Archbishop Hebda launched the Archdiocesan Synod process to help him discern the direction he should lead the archdiocese over the next five to 10 years. From the beginning, he emphasized the Synod as an opportunity for Catholics to journey together and be “a listening Church” that comes to understand people’s experiences and perspectives.
The Synod Small Groups provided the widest opportunity for consultation as the Archdiocesan Synod process continues. The information gathered will inform the next step, Synod deanery meetings in January and February, which will include up to 10 representatives from each parish. Those discussions will then shape the June 3-5 Synod Assembly in St. Paul, which will include about 500 people, who will make recommendations on the focus areas to Archbishop Hebda. Those recommendations will shape a pastoral plan he expects to release in November 2022, followed by a pastoral plan in early 2023.
Broad benefits
The Synod Small Groups inspired two dozen Catholics to call or email the Archdiocesan Catholic Center in St. Paul to share their appreciation for the experience, with many of them praising the quality of the video materials and conversation they facilitated, as well as the overall organization. In the months leading up to the Small Groups, more than 2,000 parish volunteers were trained to assist in a small group role at their parish.
Participants who spoke to The Catholic Spirit said they benefitted from the intergenerational conversation and the opportunity to meet new people, receive faith formation, reunite parishioners separated by the COVID-19 pandemic and learn how to function as a small group. Several said it motivated them to be stronger evangelizers or witnesses to the faith, and it helped them feel a greater connection to the Church outside their own parishes. Several mentioned that in their groups, and people expressed appreciation for being asked to share their experiences and ideas and be heard.
Louise Gerken, 79, said the small group experience was better than she had hoped. She admitted she was a little skeptical about participating because the process seemed “rigid and formal,” and it was a considerable time commitment. But, she had a very positive experience. “It fired up my desire for evangelization,” she said.
The Small Group conversations also led to some immediate changes at her parish, St. Paul in Zumbrota: a program for welcoming new parishioners, resuming fellowship following Sunday Mass and improving the process for sharing prayer requests — things Gerken described as “baby steps,” but necessary.
Estela Villagrán Manancero, the archdiocese’s director of Latino ministry, said that in the 10 parishes with the highest participation, five of them were parishes with large Latino populations. That was pleasantly surprising, she said. She said that like all Catholics, Latinos are glad to be asked about their needs, and many asked for more Spanish-speaking priests and retreats, and support for raising families and getting through family crises.
At St. Edward in Bloomington, Janet Gorshe, parish life director, said that the Small Groups were ultimately “very fruitful,” although some of the parishioners arrived to the first sessions with a “working group” outlook and, at first, seemed not to understand the role of the event’s prayer and teaching, or the importance of sharing their “best idea” on the feedback form. But participants were engaged in the discussions and provided ideas, she said.
Because St. Edward’s parish population is aging, the final sessions on youth and young adults were especially important, Gorshe said. “We’re really talking about how to get the young people back involved, get them back in the pews, and what do we need to do as a Church,” she said.
Overall, she said, “I think people really enjoyed it.”
Recent Comments