“My leadership team and I have grown exponentially through our training with Catholic Missionary Disciples. The tools, advice, and training have equipped us to better live our parish mission of growing disciples, seeking the lost, and advancing the kingdom of God. I have personally grown in my faith that we can never outdo God in generosity. When we put more trust in God and in His love and vision for our lives and our parish rather than in our weaknesses and all the obstacles that hinder us from achieving that vision with the help of His grace, tremendous things are possible. I would encourage everyone who is struggling to implement the Church's call to evangelization to join up with Catholic Missionary Disciples.”
-Fr. Corey Litzner

Catholic leaders are working harder than ever, and the fruit is not what it should be. Pastors and lay leaders pour themselves into programs, events, and classes, and still watch their parishes / dioceses / organizations plateau or decline. The instinct is to try harder, plan better, launch more. But what most parishes need is not another initiative. It is a different starting point.

We exist to give leadership teams that starting point — and to walk with them through the slow, real work that follows.

The conviction underneath our methodology
A parish is not transformed by programs. It is transformed by disciples who make other disciples. That is how the Church grew in the beginning, and it is the only way she has ever grown since. The institutional shortcut — better programs, fuller calendars, more committees — cannot produce what only Christian discipleship can produce: people whose lives have been changed by Jesus Christ and who now walk with others toward that same encounter.

This means renewal cannot start at the parish level. It has to start with leaders. You cannot give what you do not have. A team cannot pray and discern together if its members are not praying alone. A parish cannot be formed for mission by a team that is not on mission itself. The order matters, and skipping it is why so much earnest parish effort never lands.

How we walk with you
We begin with the leaders. Most clergy and lay leaders were never actually trained to make disciples. They were trained for sacramental ministry, catechesis, administration — vital work, but not the same as evangelization and personal accompaniment. Our first work is to form leaders in the pastoral and evangelization skills they were never given, while inviting them to deepen the personal life of prayer that any apostolic life requires.

We form the team. A staff is not yet a team. A team is a group that trusts each other enough to tell the truth, prays together honestly, and discerns God's will as a body rather than managing preferences as individuals. We coach teams into real trust and into the practice of communal discernment, so that what they lead flows from what they have heard the Lord ask of them together.

We help the team lead the parish. Out of a discerned vision, a team can finally do what programs alone could never do: form parishioners relationally, one person at a time, and equip those parishioners to form others. We help teams build a strategy that meets people where they actually are — from initial curiosity about God to mature missionary discipleship — and we help them re-architect parish life around that journey, so every offering is doing real work.

The renewal we hope for with you
When this work bears fruit, a parish begins to sound and look different. People speak openly about what God is doing in their lives. Mission is lived outside the walls of the church, in homes and workplaces and neighborhoods. Prayer becomes the bedrock of everything, not an afterthought before the agenda. Disciples seek out other disciples to walk through life together. These are the marks of the Church described in the Acts of the Apostles, and they are still the marks of a parish that has been genuinely renewed.

We are not offering a program. We are offering to walk with you — pastor, staff, lay leadership — through the slow, ordered, deeply hopeful work of becoming the kind of leaders who can become the kind of team who can lead the kind of parish the Lord is calling yours to be.

The harvest is abundant. The Lord is still calling laborers. We would be honored to walk with you.

CMD Cohorts offer a year-long journey for your leadership team - meet with your parish / diocesan / schools / apostolate leadership team for 1 hour a week to learn, pray, be formed, and coached to grow in pastoral skills as missionary disciples. We start with weekly meetings for 12 weeks and then monthly meetings for 9 more months.
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1-on-1 ministry coaching - weekly individual ministry coaching for 30 minutes per week. Implement what you are learning into your context + grow personally as you set with your coach.
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Change your culture for about the price of going to a conference! - More than any conference can provide - we train, coach, and build leaders into missionary disciples who can change the culture of their institutions!