Pastoral council lending buzz of excitement in Point Pleasant Beach following year-long planning process
By Lois Rogers
Features editor
POINT PLEASANT BEACH – There's an undeniable buzz around St. Peter Parish these days.
It's fueled by growing excitement about the new Pastoral Council emerging this winter from a year-long planning process at the seaside parish founded by Conventual Franciscan friars in 1882.
"Many people are interested," said Vincenzo Barba, who chairs the new council composed of 12 lay members, the pastor, associate pastor and deacon. "It has created a buzz. People are talking about it."
"...hopefully this will lead to a more vibrant parish with all the energies of people involved, the spirit can really get revitalized."
And, he said, it has generated a great deal of thought among parishioners about ways they can contribute their gifts and skills to an overall effort to establish a pastoral plan for the parish located at the corner of Forman and St. Louis avenues since 1901.
Barba, Jim Pike, the vice chair of the council, and their pastor, Conventual Franciscan Father Curt Kreml, described the high hopes they have for the new council, hopes that it will be graced with the energy, insight, wisdom and spirituality necessary to inspire fellow church members to chart a course for their spiritual home for the early 21st century.
"The key partner in this is the Holy Spirit," said Father Kreml. The important ingredients are the "presence of faith, trust, openness to a common goal to serve what's best for the parish."
The process of creating the council was fueled by those ingredients, Father Kreml said. "Everyone trusted in the Holy Spirit to guide the process."
Communication was another key and will continue to be so, he said. Over the last year, he wrote updates for the parish bulletin informing everyone of the intent to create the new body and following its evolution.
"When I came here two years ago, I found that the previous parish council had not met for years," he said.
He recognized a need for lay leadership and the role it plays in parish life.
Father Kreml held "listening sessions" to get an inkling of what parishioners were interested in. These resulted in "a mountain of ideas and issues" to consider that stressed the need for organized leadership among the parishioners.
The next step was to assemble a Leadership Advisory Group of committed parishioners to help him determine an appropriate leadership structure for the parish to adopt.
The result was the Parish Pastoral Council that parishioners began hearing about in the spring and continued to learn of through the summer and fall thanks to Father Kreml's updates.
As he, Pike and Barba explained it, unlike the older model of a parish council, a parish pastoral council has no fixed agenda but rather surveys the needs of the parish as a whole. It is a leadership body whose primary purpose is pastoral planning.
This planning is achieved through a process of discerning the many ideas and perspectives that arise and then reaching a consensus on how best to proceed for the benefit of the parish, they said.
Its focus is inspirational rather than operational, they said.
"A pastoral council is not a body of doers," Pike said.
It is a body that will strive to define what the vision of the parish is. But, as Father Kreml said, the vision "won't rest in the hands of the council. It is corporately owned."
In keeping with that sense, nothing will "come out of the blue," Pike said. "When we make recommendations, they should be doable, practical and consistent."
Father Kreml added: "hopefully this will lead to a more vibrant parish with all the energies of people involved, the spirit can really get revitalized."
Key to establishing the pastoral council was the process of creating it, they said.
The advisory committee spent several months studying the concept and went to diocesan workshops given on the subject by John Boucher, director of the Office of Parish Life, and Terry Ginther, director of Pastoral Planning.
"We met folks from other parishes and went through the process of determining how many people were interested," Father Kreml said.
It was decided to use the discernment model to select the council members rather than the election model, he noted.
"You had to nominate yourself," he said. "The process involved prayer. You had to ask yourself seriously whether your gifts would serve the parish. About 18 folks came to an afternoon session. They talked and interacted with each other and then returned home to pray and ask for discernment on whether their gifts would serve the parish."
This event was followed by a "discernment night" and about 14 people returned for that.
Since it had been determined that the council would follow an apostolic model of 12 members, it was clear at the final meeting there wasn't a place for everyone.
"One suggestion was drawing lots," Barba said. "But it was never necessary to do that. What emerged from our meetings was a visionary body and after the introspective process, some people simply withdrew, saying they would use their gifts in other areas of the parish."
"The process was a good one," Pike said. "It was good training."
In November, parishioners received a letter from the new officers explaining the overall process that went into creating the council and outlining its aims.
A poster displaying photos of the new council went up so that their faces would become familiar to fellow church goers and the members were installed at Masses over a recent weekend.
Now, they are getting to work, focusing on creating a new mission statement that will reflect the new challenges and expectations of the early 21st century.
It's but the first thread in what they hope will be a tapestry of faith that will grow over the years.
The new council members continue to be inspired by the task they have undertaken.
The first three meetings held to date have been long, intense and prayerful they said.
"Last night, we met at 5:30 p.m. and stayed until 9:30 p.m. and wondered where the time went."
The first undertaking is described as a "grand one." They will work to: establish a pastoral plan for the parish and what it would like to be; develop a plan to fulfill that ideal; implement that plan; evaluate the progress and revise the plan as they go along.
The plan will consist of first, a mission statement defining that ideal parish; create long-term goals to be achieved that uphold the mission and objectives – specific immediate tasks – that need to be completed to achieve the goals.
"It's all about creating a welcoming community," Barba said. "And most of all, it's about living the Gospel for the new century."
