We thank you for your continued prayers for the mission of our Bishop and our diocese as we completed the first set of this year’s “three-days-in-a-row” workshop blitzes. These were for our principals, pastors, and teachers last Thursday, Friday and Saturday. The Holy Spirit was moving!

Thursday was a deep dive with the principals and their selected leadership teams really defining what it means to be a leadership team. Hosted in the Resurrection gym, this was piggy backing on what has been presented to them over the past few years, but most especially what we discussed last March. Each principal had anywhere from 2 to 8 people on their teams. One of the best conversations I had was with a principal realizing that she was approaching everything we’d asked from the wrong perspective. She said she needed to block out time on her calendar and budget more intentionally to meet with her team more. I told her our team meets and prays together weekly, and you’d have thought I grew a second head. She couldn’t even picture meeting monthly with her team. She left that day making the decision to carve out space in her calendar and budget to make sure they could meet off site and plan strategically together as a team. That’s just one story of many.

Friday was all our school staff together in the St. Patrick’s gym. Nearly 500 people coming together to hear what the mission of Catholic schools’ priority should be focused toward… making disciples. While it was a powerful day, with so many people at different places in their own faith journeys, we had people fully engaged and wanting more to people telling us it was a waste of their time. Yes… to our faces. Being authentically human means, we meet people where they are and part of that means we meet people who maybe aren’t quite where we hoped. We continue to walk and pray with them. The biggest challenge is how we continue to form, inform, and provide encounters with a mixed crowd of folks, some of which would rather be somewhere else. It was a paid, scheduled, contracted workday for all our faculty, to pray for themselves, their families, their students, and their school. We can’t focus too heavily on the negatives of the day as graces flowed abundantly from the Holy Spirit and there were plenty of grace-filled moments. We thankfully had people to help us pack up everything as we moved to our next venue to set up and decorate for Saturday.

Saturday was a breath of fresh air with pastors and their leadership teams coming together to discuss what leading as a team looks like. Hosted at St. Joseph’s Gulfport, the emphasis was that full authority still lies with the pastor. Just as with our leadership team, the full authority is with our Bishop. We had a representation of about 8 parishes with 10 invited. We have another 10 parishes ready to go when schedules align properly. We emphasized regular meetings and prayer with one another. We also shared how even our own ideas sometimes get rejected, but that isn’t what our meetings are about. It’s prayerfully agreeing on a way forward and being united as a team. We take every agenda to prayer as a team and watch the Holy Spirit humble us. Being a part of a leadership team isn’t a perk; it’s hard work and the mission of the leadership team takes priority over everything else we do.

We scheduled full days, but I’m sure you all know it’s never that cut and dry. I think I can speak for all the senior leadership team when I say that seven years ago, it was hard to imagine a day when principals and pastors would be eager to learn how to share their burden(s) with a team of people to praying together, visioning together, and strategizing together on how to make disciples. Praise God.

Please continue to keep our Bishop, pastors, principals, and their teams in your prayers as they navigate what God has planned for their parishes, schools, and ministries.