One of the things I am realising as I see parishes around the country begin to creak into missionary gear, is that parishes change only when people change. If you set out to renew your parish, sooner or later you will discover that the first person who needs to change is… you’ve guessed it… you.
Why is this? Here are a couple of reasons I’d suggest…
- Shifting into a missionary gear is messy, intense, uphill, and requires focussed team work. If we promote healthy culture in our teams, we soon find they are places where we find love, trust, vulnerability but also challenge. We are stretched in ways we didn’t know possible. Before long you learn things about yourself you’d never known, and you see yourself living beyond yourself in ways only the Lord can invite us to.
- When we move into this new way of working, there are certain behaviours and mindsets we begin to shed. The subtle ways I’ve been conditioned, the mindset I’ve become accustomed to, the behaviour that’s engrained. So much of this is cultural – decades of a maintenance or ‘cultural Catholicism’ mindset – and shifting it is probably a lifetime’s work.
Forming teams that can work like this, and helping people better know themselves in the process, is messy and tough. Not only does it mean getting to know your strengths and learning how to play to them, it means getting to know your weaknesses and how you best work with others; how you approach tasks and leadership, and what your blind spots most likely are.
In the last year, I’ve used two tools that have helped me immensely.
- StrengthsFinders: Knowing my top five strengths has been an eye-opener. Achiever is up there, which explains my crazy lifelong insatiable capacity for getting stuff done. Input, Intellection and Learner are apparently the ‘classic PhD combo’ which also explains a lot. But what’s not there is also telling. I always thought I was pretty strong relationally until I discovered that all my top five strengths fall under ‘strategic’ and ‘executing’ categories. The other two – ‘relationship-building’ and ‘influencing’ – are in fact not there at all! This just tells me that any time I am part of a team, it should also include folks who are strong under these two headings too. After all, There’s no such thing as a well-balanced person, but there is such a thing as a well-balanced team.
- MBTI: A sceptical friend told me that Myers Briggs was “middle-class astrology”, but I took this test recently and was amazed at how much clarity it gave me. My intense J-ness told me why I’ve always struggled working with Ps. My N-preference told me why I struggle with spreadsheets and detail, and love big picture thinking. And my T over F preference corroborated my top five Strengths that lean towards thinking and strategy over feeling and relationships. Of course, your type preferences are not determinative of your behaviour. Knowing that I lean towards T prompts me to think more consciously about the F in my interactions, and that helps me develop and become good at it.
Of course, these are nothing more than tools, and even the most penetrating knowledge of ourselves does not guarantee effective team work or openness to the Holy Spirit. These are just two tools in the big toolkit that is available to us in parish renewal. They can help you maximise the impact of your strengths and limit the damage your blind spots may cause. They will also help you accept and love those in your team who don’t see things or behave in the same way you do.
These tools look at your personality and gifts on the natural level. We can also discern how God uses us on a supernatural level. A couple of years ago, I loved going through the Called and Gifted programme and discerning my spiritual charisms. It is amazing to realise in concrete ways how the Holy Spirit acts in power to bless others through you. I wrote about discerning charisms here; it is truly life-changing, and as a disciple, gives you a language to understand how God uses you. I would recommend it to any disciple who’s been walking the walk for a few years.
