Working on parish renewal is a very good thing. It comes from an attitude of “ok isn’t ok” or “we can be better” or “God wants more”. These are gifts. We got here because the Lord stirred hearts to reach more souls. So, the conferences have been attended. The vision has been written down. Staff has been reorganized, sometimes more than once. There is real fruit in places - more reverent Masses, a handful of people whose faith has come alive, a few small groups that have actually become small communities. Let’s thank God for these gifts. Yet, in the quiet of our hearts, anyone honest knows that what we have is not yet been parish renewal. Not in the deep sense. Not in the sense the word was meant to carry. Little has been “made new”.

You can feel it in the silences after a good meeting. You can sense it back in the rectory after Mass. We have been at this for years. The parish, in its bones, has not been transformed.

This is not a complaint about the renewal movements. The hard work of the last two decades, which was laid by the saints among us, has given the Church an extraordinary gift. They have shown us that parishes can be reorganized around mission, that systems can serve souls, that strategy is not the enemy of grace. We owe them gratitude for their courage. Without this hard work of the movement of renewal, most would still be running parishes on status quo and inertia.

But there is a step that almost all of these movements assume rather than perform. It is in the assumption that once the right systems are in place — once there is a clear vision, a discipleship pathway, an Alpha, a welcome ministry, a healthy staff culture — the leader who runs the system will know how to do the actual pastoral work the system exists for: to meet a person where they are, to listen pastorally, to speak of Jesus in a way that impacts to the heart.

That assumption deserves more scrutiny than it has received — because it may be one of the reasons the deeper renewal we have been laboring for has not yet come.

LOOKING DEEPER

A discipleship pathway is only as evangelistic as the people walking it with someone. 

An Alpha table is only as fruitful as the host's ability to draw out a real conversation. 

A welcome ministry is only as warm as the person standing at the door. 

The system creates the occasion. 

The person makes the encounter.

And here is where most renewal stops short. Even where we have managed to build the strategy or tactic, we have rarely formed the person who must show up inside it. And without that person, the occasion does not bear the fruit it was designed to bear.

The pastor who can lead a visioning day sometimes freezes when a young man asks him, after the 5 p.m. Mass, whether God is real. The staff member who can run a small group has never been coached, in any practical way, on how to listen to someone in spiritual distress. The committed volunteer who has been on every retreat the parish offers has rarely, if ever, had another Catholic watch her try to share her faith with a friend and tell her honestly what worked and what did not.

These are not small gaps. They are THE gaps. Pastoral and evangelistic skills are the actual point of renewal — the reason for the strategy, the goal of the structures, the fruit the system was supposed to bear. And they are precisely what the system, by itself, cannot give.

WHY WE SKIP THIS STEP

It is not hard to see why the missing step keeps getting missed. Programs are easier to design than people. A weekend conference can transmit a strategy. It cannot transmit a skill. Skills require time, repetition, observation, and feedback - and feedback in the area of pastoral and evangelistic competence is among the most vulnerable things a leader can submit to. A priest who humbles himself to say, “I have never been coached on proclaiming the Gospel” or a DRE who says, “I don’t know how to assess where someone is spiritually” is saying they lack a skill they “should have had” and that is scary and humbling.

There is no shortcut here. There is no video series that closes the gap. There is no program to fix it all.

There is also a quieter resistance, especially among those that have been in the field for a while. For priests - the implicit message of seminary, for many men, was that pastoral and evangelistic competence are conferred at ordination - or, at the very least, that they are not the kinds of things one continues to be formed in once the formation years are over. To suggest that a pastor might still need to grow in how he speaks of Jesus to a doubting parishioner can feel, to him, like a question about whether he has what it takes. It is, of course, no such thing. But it is felt that way, and so the conversation does not happen.

WHAT TO DO

If we are going to take the missing step, it will look less like a program and more like an apprenticeship. Less like a curriculum and more like a relationship. It will involve someone - a coach, a mentor, a peer who is a step ahead - who is close enough to a leader's actual ministry to see it, name it, and walk with it over time. It will involve feedback on real conversations, not abstract instruction. It will involve leaders being willing to be open and humble.

It will also involve admitting that those of us who have already been in it for decades are not exempt from the same kind of framework of pastoral formation but at the front of the line for it.

There is something deeply Christlike in this missing step. Jesus did not hand the apostles a strategic plan. He walked with them, sent them out, watched what happened, debriefed when they returned. He named what was working and what was not. He let them fail in front of him. He let them try again. The whole shape of his formation of the Twelve was the very thing we have left out of our renewal work: the patient, person-to-person coaching of those who would actually do the work of evangelization.

The renewal movement has given us the architecture. But it has not produced the encounter. It was never going to. That part was always going to require the slower, more vulnerable work of forming the persons who must meet souls. 

Their skill. 

Not their hearts, which many have already given. 

Their hands.

That is the missing step. It is the one between the work we have already done and the renewal we still hope for. And it is waiting.

If you want to start working on this missing step. That is what we do at Catholic Missionary Disciples. Reach out and start a conversation.