By: Claire Gallagher
This summer, Executive Director Billy O’Regan and TEC New Orleans leader Claire Gallagher attended the third annual Gathering of Catholic Ecclesial Movements and New Communities, representing TEC. We are so grateful to Claire for her participation and her summary of the workshop!
On July 8-10, 2019, the third annual Gathering of Catholic Ecclesial Movements and New Communities took place at the Lumen Christi Retreat Center in Schriever, LA. This gathering occurs every other year and is hosted by Bishop Sam Jacobs (Bishop Emeritus of the Diocese of Houma-Thibodaux). The gathering was originally born in 2013 as a way to bring together leaders of various church movements for collaboration, communication, and support in the New Evangelization.
This year, the focus of the gathering was Christus Vivit, the post-synodal apostolic exhortation of Pope Francis, written in response to the Fifteenth Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops on young people, faith, and vocational discernment. All attendees read this document prior to the gathering and spent the majority of their time together discussing Pope Francis’ message in this exhortation, including how it applies to each movement or community within the Church in the U.S. Pope Francis acknowledges that young people today are very different from young people 20, 15, 10, or even 5 years ago. With the quickly evolving and changing culture, advances in social media, technology, education, and structure of the family, our young people today need a much different approach when it comes to ministry. Paired with the recognition that the youth play a vital role in the present and future endeavors of our Church, Pope Francis sets a lofty goal of finding new ways to engage and challenge the young people to and with whom we minister.
At the Gathering, the two most heavily discussed elements of Christus Vivit were of accompaniment and leadership. Accompaniment can have the sense of meeting young people where they are, but also includes walking with them on their journey. Pope Francis points to the Gospel story of Jesus meeting the disciples on the road to Emmaus and walking with them while asking them questions about what they have experienced. This is exactly what our approach should be with the youth we encounter in our ministries—not to just meet them where they are and send them in the “right” direction, but to walk with them, love them, and pray that in this encounter, they will recognize the face of Jesus, as the disciples eventually did. An essential part of this accompaniment is to give our youth opportunities for responsibility and leadership.
For TEC, this may be the most challenging aspect. TEC, though typically geared towards youth and young adults, remains uniquely intergenerational, but the ministerial approach that the Holy Father calls for in Christus Vivit asks us to allow the younger generation to have more responsibility and more leadership. What does this mean for us as an ecclesial community? How do we uphold and recognize the value of our more experienced community members, yet still be open to the gifts that our young people have to offer? Perhaps it means accompaniment in leadership—giving our younger members an opportunity to lead, but allowing our older and more experienced members to walk with them. What exactly this looks like will vary from community to community, but essentially, Pope Francis is calling us to welcome and accept our younger members with charity and mercy, and a willingness to not walk ahead of them, nor to let them run ahead of us, but to walk beside them in their journey, as brothers and sisters in Christ.
