Religious education teachers for children and adults gathered at Catholic High School in Little Rock for Catechetical Study Day March 10 to learn how to maximize their ministry.
In his keynote address, “Making Lifelong Faith Formation the Norm for Your Parish,” nationally known speaker Rich Curran stressed the need for religious educators to be professional and lead the charge in helping others deepen their faith — even in the changing family dynamic when they don’t know they need it or have time for it.
Curran drew parallels with sales techniques that convince consumers that a certain mobile phone is what they need, no matter the cost, and encouraged catechists to use the best selling tool of all — the Gospel.
“Think like the people you’re trying to serve. You already know the Gospel. You know what they need. We all know they need the Gospel. The question is how are you going to get them to know they need it?” Curran said. “The Gospel can work the same way. They don’t know what they need. And your job as an evangelizer is to do it.”
When trying to create a successful program that draws people in, Curran recommended an apprenticeship approach — speaking to a person’s heart and not just the head.
This apprenticeship model is the same one used in RCIA, and that helped the early Church grow.
“How did the earliest Church grow the Church when they had no idea that (Jesus was) ’consubstantial with the Father’? There was no Roman Missal. How did they do it? That’s where we take our lessons from,” Curran said. “They were convicted. They started it. They believed in the Gospel. And they allowed the Gospel to penetrate their hearts.”
Curran uses his 15 years of experience with youth and families, last serving as director of youth ministry at the Diocese of Green Bay in Wisconsin in 2008, to help ministers engage the groups that they serve. He has a master’s degree in education and one in pastoral ministry, both from St. Mary University in Winona, Minn.
Sister Laura Cathcart, OSB, director of religious education at St. Paul Church in Pocahontas, drew inspiration from Curran’s advice on strategic planning, It goes in concert, she said, with the five-year pastoral plan that Bishop Anthony B. Taylor asked parishes in the Diocese of Little Rock to craft.
“What the speaker has asked so far of the catechists is to make a detailed plan. While we are evangelizing, to take on the aspects of a business mindset and look at it to find what are the best strategies that we can use,” she said. “To have strategies and have a plan, and not do the same activities each time. To truly have an identified plan and work at that plan reaching everybody. That was a neat concept that I heard just now. It’s about what can I do as a leader to best meet their needs — needs that they might not be aware of — how can I lead them to God.”
The need for religious educators to know why they do what they do and why they believe what they believe was also something Curran said makes strong evangelizers.
Josh Hart, director of religious education at Holy Redeemer Church in El Dorado, said that struck a chord with him.
“He encouraged spiritual growth for us as well. He invites us to look interiorly and exteriorly as to how we can help grow faith,” Hart said.
