Is Synodality enough to stop the haemorrhaging from our parishes? 03
A series of newsletters on Synodality in the parish
This is the third of a series of four newsletters on synodality, as the Church lives through the Synod on Synodality this month in Rome. This series originally appeared as a single article on Church Life Journal. The first instalment can be read here and the second is here.
Key #2: The Best of Leadership Principles
Understandably, as a pastor considers synodality and what it might mean for his parish, he wonders what it means for his own leadership: am I doing this right? We hear much about how synodality is a corrective to the risk of an overly hierarchical approach to leadership.
The structure of the Second Vatican Council Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, itself reveals that the hierarchical Church (chapter 3) should be understood through the lens of the Church as People of God (chapter 2), which in turn flows from the mystery of the Church as sacrament of the life of God (chapter 1). Synodality, it is argued, is Vatican II’s ecclesiology lived out, and “offers us the most appropriate framework for understanding the hierarchical ministry itself.”1 Pope Francis spells it out:
Sometimes there can be a certain elitism in the presbyteral order that detaches it from the laity; the priest ultimately becomes more a “landlord” than a pastor of a whole community as it moves forward. This will require changing certain overly vertical, distorted and partial visions of the Church, the priestly ministry, the role of the laity, ecclesial responsibilities, roles of governance and so forth (“Address of His Holiness Pope Francis for the Opening of the Synod”).
Yet, in his concern to avoid an “overly vertical” approach to leadership, a pastor may understandably swing too far in the opposite direction and here lies peril too: the risks of directionless, passive, paralyzed, and ultimately negligent leadership. To lead a parish that will thrive in a secular milieu is entirely different from leading one where the surrounding culture is even nominally Christian. To evangelize in the post-Christian west, horizontal, consensus-based leadership is just as perilous as an authoritarian approach.
Pastors around the world recognize this. In their hunger for practical leadership coaching never received in seminary is a recognition that, if their parishes are to thrive amid aggressive secularism, they need something that parishes did not need seventy years ago: vision. To reach a vision for a parish, we invite pastors to dream: what kind of evangelistic presence do they want their parish to have in the local community? What type of impact do they dream of? Whose lives could be transformed?
The vision approach to parish leadership walks the tightrope between the overly vertical and the overly horizontal.
First, the indispensable vertical element: vision cannot be created by a committee. Committee-crafted visions are of the blandest, vanilla variety that inspire no one. In scripture and throughout the history of the Church, God plants vision in the hearts of individuals. That is why we define “vision,” adopting evangelical pastor Bill Hybels’ phrase, as “a God-given picture of the future that produces passion in you.” Through casting vision, which is by its nature particular and not general, leadership exercises its important role of defining boundaries. This is essential before any consultation within any community such as a parish: what is up for grabs, and what is off the table? Leadership’s gift to a community is to make such boundaries clear.
The ITC document supports this vertical dimension of leadership by acknowledging the important distinction within the People of God: the ecclesia docens (bishops or “teaching Church”) from the ecclesia discens (laity or “listening Church”). Furthermore, it names that there exist both “deliberative and consultative votes” (ITC §68), delineating the processes of “decision-making” (whole community) from those of “decision-taking” (bishops) (§69). An analogous distinction might be made within a parish, too, recognizing that every single individual in a parish community cannot have responsibility for “decision-taking.” The “authority of Pastors is a specific gift of the Spirit of Christ” and “not a delegated and representative function of the people” (§67).
And yet, as with all good Catholic theology and pastoral practice, there is a “both/and” to this picture: the vertical dimension must be balanced by the indispensable horizontal element. Vision ultimately remains a castle in the air unless others are engaged through a relational approach, unless they mold it, share their reactions, buy into it, and make it their own. The best visions are those that have been formed in the heart of a pastor through his humble listening to the Holy Spirit and to the people around him. The best kind of leadership, according to Catholic business leader Patrick Lencioni, consists of one-third advocacy and two-thirds inquiry. Fr. James Mallon comments, “I find that I’m at my best as a pastor and as a leader when I’m listening twice as much as I’m speaking.”
A pastor with a desire to lead well will discern and sacrifice his own pet ideas that do not resonate with those with whom he shares his vision, and likewise, he will facilitate a process where the fingerprints and inspired dreams of many may be incorporated. By these practical means, a synodal approach to leadership avoids charismatic “hero-leader” clericalism and leaves potentiality for the action of the Holy Spirit.
Practically Speaking
Here are three practical suggestions for synodal leadership in the parish:
1. Lead Out of a Team
If the goal of synodality is to make God’s communion with humanity tangible ecclesiologically, a practical expression at every level of the Church is for every pastor and bishop to lead out of a team. A leadership team “consists of a small group of [4 to 6] people who gather around the pastor to help him make tactical decisions” (Mallon, 2020: 179). Rarely would a leader in any sector other than the Church make isolated decisions as their normal modus operandi. The purpose of the leadership team—as any business leader will tell you—is not to reach consensus but to make the best possible decisions.2 This is not the abdication of leadership, but the sharing of authority. Fr. James Mallon comments,
The pastor must make the internal shift from talking about “I” to talking about “we.” . . . Priests [we coach] generally identify the Senior Leadership Team model as the single biggest game changer for them. Many of the pastors . . . report that this approach has transformed their priesthood. They no longer feel alone as leaders. There is no burden related to leadership that they cannot speak about with their teams, and they see greater fruitfulness in the growth and transformation of their parishes (2020: 179–80).
The leadership team model is a concrete, structural expression that allows “a reciprocal exchange of gifts” (ITC §9) among the Church’s members, consigning to history an ecclesiological model where clergy are active ministers and laity the passive recipients of ministry. It is a model that allows a “singularis conspiratio between the faithful and their Pastors, which is an icon of the eternal conspiratio that is lived within the Trinity” (ITC §64). This evokes an image of pastors and laity “breathing together.”3
Any pastor or bishop who starts leading out of a living, breathing leadership team soon realizes that there is no room for formalism in this approach, “satisfied with appearances alone” (“Address of His Holiness Pope Francis for the Opening of the Synod”). The leadership team—avoiding any artificial harmony—should be a place of robust disagreement, debate and even conflict, as the best decisions are reached. Such a culture of openness contributes towards building a “parish of closeness” where there is ‘no distance or separation between the community and its Pastors’ (ITC §69). In Ratzinger’s words, “Being truly ‘synodal’, therefore, means moving forward in harmony, spurred on by the Holy Spirit.”4
2. Build a Servant Leadership Model Throughout the Parish
While a leadership team at the parish (and even diocesan) level may fulfill a “decision-taking” role, one must be wary of simply creating a new clerical caste or “small elite.”5 “All the baptized, whatever their position in the Church or their level of instruction in the faith, are agents of evangelization, and it would be insufficient to envisage a plan of evangelization to be carried out by professionals while the rest of the faithful would simply be passive recipients” (EG §120). It is not enough to have a leadership team: a culture of healthy leadership can be embedded throughout the parish where every single individual has an understanding of their own leadership, of the power of the Holy Spirit that dwells within them, of their extraordinary capacity to influence and make disciples of others. Two leaders from parishes that are actively building a leadership culture commented,
All of our ministries have a leadership pipeline. So we have people that we raise up into more influential roles and more responsibility because they have the capacity and the desire for it. I just asked a young woman to come on as my apprentice. Apprenticeship is a big value of our parish culture. She’ll basically be with me whenever I’m developing anything, she’ll have input into it, ask questions, understand the ins and outs of how I do what I do.
[Our pastor] empowers us. He encourages us to step out of our little box and see the bigger picture, and gives us confidence in who we are and what we believe. He has faith and confidence in us to share things and lead groups. I think it’s important to empower people, to ask people to give a witness . . . People love to be asked, they really do.
Such a leadership model replicates Jesus’ own, where he invested much of his time into Peter, James, and John, and then into the wider Twelve, who ministered to the disciples, who were sent out to the crowds. It is a model that is not just good leadership; it also allows more effective evangelization. It is a scalable model of multiplication that enables more lives to be transformed.
3. Build a Culture of Vulnerability-Based Trust and Healthy Conflict
Here is where “synodal muscle” is strengthened. We noted that, when a pastor authentically leads out of a team, it will not be long before conflict arises. A healthy leadership team will be united unanimously around the parish’s vision, but their diverse insights, backgrounds, and strengths will mean they are likely to disagree about how to get there: in other words, there should be debate over strategy and tactics. Fr. James Mallon writes,
[Conflicts] force proponents of a particular path to consider all the angles, to defend their position, and to modify the plan based on the truth behind opposing arguments. When it comes to tactics, if you are not in conflict, you have a serious problem. Perhaps the team has succumbed to groupthink, or people are not authentically sharing their points of view (2020: 195).
Creating such a culture allows space for a priest’s own weaknesses and vulnerability, too, which can be a transformative experience for both priests and laity. One parishioner shared such an example,
I remember one particular staff meeting where [our pastor] profusely apologized. He said, “I’m so sorry I have allowed this to happen.” And he said, “I’m going to change, and I’m going to [take the necessary steps] to make the change.”
In the final instalment, we will look at how Synodality relates to the third key of parish renewal: the power of the Holy Spirit.
Pope Francis, “Ceremony Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Institution of the Synod of Bishops,” 17 October 2015.
“When you work towards consensus, you often end up ‘negotiating down’ from the best decision, settling on a suboptimal approach in order to secure the support of the entire team” (Mallon, 2020: 180).
It is an image first developed by St. John Henry Newman who spoke of the ‘conspiratio fidelium et pastorum’ in his On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine.
See J. Ratzinger, “Le funzioni sinodali della Chiesa: l’importanza della communion tra I Vescovi” in L’Osservatore Romano, 24 January 1996, 4.
Cf. Pope Francis’s comment: “It is impossible to think of a conversion of our activity as a Church that does not include the active participation of all the members of God’s People. Indeed, whenever we have tried to replace, or silence, or ignore, or reduce the People of God to small elites, we end up creating communities, projects, theological approaches, spiritualities and structures without roots, without memory, without faces, without bodies and ultimately, without lives” (Letter of His Holiness to the People of God, October 9, 2019).