In many places I go, I see parishes incredibly busy trying to help people grow in the Faith. I see priests stretched to the end of their limits and their staff putting in way more hours than we might think. To what end? Are they achieving what they had hoped for? If not, why?

In my training of parish staff and volunteers, I am constantly reminding them that the Catholic Church is not in the “Information” dissemination business. We are in the “FAITH” dissemination business. Of course, we must educate people on God, Who should the object of that faith. However, if we stop only with knowledge about God, we have done a great injustice to them.

It is easy to pass on information. It is incredibly more difficult to help those same individuals increase their trust (faith) in God to sustain their lives. Why?

1. Growing in faith requires walking the journey of life with those students, encouraging them to position themselves in a place where faith is required.
2. You can spend ninety minutes defining what faith in Jesus Christ looks like, but helping them attain the faith to live it out is different for each person.
3. Like individual people, their own growth in faith is different. It is not as cleanly defined as a program curriculum. I liken it to teaching someone how to swim. People have difficulty with different elements of the swimming process. Each element requires the time to master it before they will move on to the next element.

Growing in faith is not a one size fits all process!

“So what do we do, Dcn. Ralph? We can’t just sit back and do nothing.”

I believe that there are some things that we can begin to do today to move down the road of properly growing faith in our parishes. Here are a few ideas just to get the ball rolling.

• Change the attitude or focus of our goals to growing in faith.
  • If this is done, we will no longer stop with giving people knowledge and move on to the next content of information.
  • We never trust people we don’t know – this will require us to do the real work of evangelization, which leads people to encounter the Lord.
  • This will put those of us in leadership of our parishes in a position of dependence on the Holy Spirit to touch the hearts of our people.
  • If this is done, the prayer life of those responsible for growing faith in their believers will become much more consistent and intentional.
• Ask the Holy Spirit to guide you on how to best move forward with the resources you have.
• Place the vision constantly before the eyes of the people, that faith is an essential element for discipleship.
  • If people don’t know that they need it, they won’t pursue it.

Always remember that you have an enemy, entrenched at your parish, and it has no intention of allowing you to grow faith in the hearts of your faithful without a struggle. When you see the enemy increasing its efforts to get you to give up, increase your prayer!!