(The Furrow, February 2013, pp. 92-96)
In 1973, the bishops of six East African countries came together in Nairobi, Kenya, and drew up a pastoral plan for their region. They based it on Small Christian Communities (SCC’s), which would be self-ministering, self-supporting and self-propagating. The idea was that church life needs to be based on the communities in which everyday life and work takes place, those social groupings whose members experience real inter-personal relations and have a sense of belonging, in living and in working.
The Christian life is a call to community, of which the Trinity is the working model: persons distinct but equal, bound together in love. The church, at its best, is a communion of communities. A parish is often too large in area or numbers to be a community in anything more than a nominal sense. SCC’s were seen as the most appropriate way to embody the idea that the church is a communion of faith, hope and charity, reaching out to the world in mission.
Very likely, two other considerations were not far from the bishops’ minds. One was that the number of priests was declining, as vocations from the Western world dried up, while those from within Africa were as yet coming forward only in small numbers. (For example, in Zambia, between 1973 and 1983, there was no increase in the number of local clergy; deaths and departures equalled ordinations.) A second was that, for various reasons, Catholic schools, which had been seen as the primary instruments of evangelization, were passing from church to state control, and religious education in state schools fell short of what was necessary.
What an SCC is like
An SCC is a group of about twelve people, who live or work near each other, and can come to know each other on a personal basis. As a rule, they meet once a week, and the heart of the meeting is a period of shared prayer and bible reflection, the leadership of which is taken in rotation. There are many forms or methods which this can take, such as, the Seven Steps, the Group Response, Look-Listen-Love, the Amos Programme, the Sunday Gospel Enquiry, Sacred Space, Awareness of the Presence of God, a Stillness Exercise, a Breathing Exercise, a Listening Exercise, Review of Consciousness, Scripture as a Searchlight, Conversing with Jesus, the Slow Work of God, John Main’s way of prayer, praying the psalms, and Lectio Divina. In addition, part of the SCC’s mission is to cater for local human and material needs.
At their best, SCC’s are ecumenical: Catholics and Protestants have much to learn from each other about Bible-sharing, faith-sharing, spontaneous prayer, and lay evangelism.
Leadership
Probably the biggest single human factor in the “success” or “failure” of the SCC is the quality of its leadership. As is normal in human affairs, this will go through periods of strength and weakness, and there’s no reason to worry about that; dying and rising are inseparable from the Christian story. But regular training and peer review are necessary.
Community presupposes communication, and dialogue is the key. Full, conscious and active participation is needed at all levels. Leaders need to learn to work with people more than for them, in structures that are participatory, transparent and accountable. Leadership needs to move:
- from patronage to partnership,
- from dictation to dialogue,
- from control to trust,
- from playing it safe to a willingness to take risks,
- from the institution to the community,
- from law to love,
- from being self-centred and worrying about survival, to being outward-looking and concerned with humanity.
A useful approach is to start simple and build up. When leaders make mistakes, let them learn from them and keep going; the person who never made a mistake never made anything.
How well did the SCC idea work in Africa?
In some places, it didn’t work because it wasn’t tried. In others, people applied the new terminology of the SCC to old structures such as the “outstation” and expected something new to happen; it didn’t. In others again, leaders recognized that the SCC was not a magic wand; so they put work into it, especially in training local leaders, and good results followed. In time, trainees became trainers. It is not too difficult to assess the value of an SCC (or a parish either) if we apply the www test: worship, works and witness. Out of the SCC’s have come two generations of people trained for leadership in church councils, and also vocations to ordained ministry and religious life. They form the small, solid core of people who more than pull their weight in a parish.
Ireland?
Missionaries in many parts of Africa commonly found that, where people had Mass often, as, for example, in the central mission station, few people came to it, while, in distant ‘outstations,’ which might have Mass only a few times a year, people were enthusiastic and the Mass was truly a celebration. At the moment, in Ireland, we have all our pastoral eggs in one basket – the Mass. Facing into a future with few ordained priests, SCC’s offer hope.
There is a convergence of factors at work which call for change, among them:
- sociological: the shortage and ageing of priests;
- political: people look for decision-making that is transparent and accountable;
- psychological: the human need for community;
- theological: church documents call for full, conscious and active participation.
SCC’s call for a change of mentality on the part of clergy, such as overcoming the fear of losing control. We are obsessed by it; it is childish and we need to grow out of it. John Paul II, speaking in 2002 to US bishops, said, ‘Within a sound ecclesiology of communion, a commitment to creating better structures of participation, consultation and shared responsibility [is]… an intrinsic requirement of the exercise of episcopal authority and a necessary means of strengthening that authority.’ (Quote from John L. Allen, The Future Church: How Ten Trends are revolutionizing the Catholic Church, Image Books, New York, 2007, p.199.) Change is also needed among lay-people. While there is great good will in Ireland towards the church, and a longing for leadership that engages with reality, there is hesitation and fear in taking responsibility; there is passivity and sometimes infantilism. Dialogue is the key to breaking through that logjam.
I am not suggesting that an idea born in Africa may be transplanted without modification to Irish soil and expected to grow. (Though Irish missionaries applied the converse: we transplanted the Irish church to Africa – and it grew!) Most Irish Catholics are very resistant to using the bible, or to sharing prayer, as distinct from saying set prayers like the rosary. There is also resistance to the discipline of an organized meeting: even the elderly can be embarrassingly teenage-like in the desire to ‘do their own thing’ regardless.
SCC’s challenge a situation in which people see little evidence of shared leadership in their lives. And in a depersonalized and secularized Ireland, where the individual risks becoming a number, where ‘Friends’ may be no more than the name of a TV programme, where ‘community’ is often merely notional, and where hostility to the faith is on the increase, the need for mutual support is great. The faith is dying in Ireland. Are we going to let it die? If we keep doing what we’ve been doing, we’ll keep getting what we’ve been getting.
What potential have SCC’s?
They have as much potential as the power of the Holy Spirit. They are at their best when they combine elements of prayer, Gospel-sharing, exchange of spiritual experience and mutual support. They can provide an opening for grass-roots ecumenism, for the development of lay spirituality and leadership, and for reaching out to the stranger, the alienated and the disillusioned (any of whom may be in the next room). At a practical level, they can motivate mutual help by neighbour to neighbour. They can, simply by their presence, help children internalize the faith, in a manner more lasting than school lessons. Children assimilate the faith they see at home, whatever that may be – nothing, a little, folk religion barely distinguishable from superstition, or a vibrant, articulate faith. SCC’s, despite their adult focus, can be a means of evangelizing children as well as adults. Getting men involved is a difficult nut to crack. Few things will deter men more quickly than a holy huddle of the mutually approving, but, where they see something real, challenging, and reaching out to the world, they are more likely to respond. Being in groups on their own may help, perhaps along the lines of the Australian Shed model. (www.mensshed.org)
SCC’s are not another rung on the hierarchical ladder, or even a new organizational structure or movement, or a new pastoral strategy or technique. They are the church renewing itself and fulfilling its mission; they are a new way of being church.
If the above sounds like too ambitious an agenda, it must be said that there are places in the world where it is happening – Ab esse ad posse, as the Scholastics used to say. SCC’s require only the barest minimum of structure, organization, and money. They are best when kept simple: – no cups of tea or wine-and-cheese; those restrict the number of homes where a meeting may be held, and keeping up with the Joneses enters in and may undermine a community.
Learning from the past
It is worth looking at examples from various periods in the life of the church to see what has happened when lay-people were given breathing space:
- In the earliest centuries, missionaries of the Gospel in the Mediterranean basin were mostly lay men, drawn from the unlikely (in present-day terms) ranks of sailors, merchants, and soldiers of the Roman army.
- In more recent times, the Catholic faith was first brought to Korea by diplomats at the Chinese imperial court, where they had been converted by followers of the early Jesuit missionary, Matteo Ricci.
- Japanese Catholics converted by Saint Francis Xavier, persecuted and left without priests for some three hundred years, kept the faith alive.
- In Madagascar in the nineteenth century, a married woman, Victoire Rasoamanarivo, held the Catholic people of the capital, Antananarivo, together when missionaries were expelled during persecution under Queen Ranaválona I.
- The martyrs of Uganda were lay-people, some of whom, when they died, had not even been baptized.
- In much of Africa, a great deal of the work of building up the church from the beginning was done by lay catechists.
- The south Pacific island nation of Kiribati was evangelized by Polynesian sailors from Hawaii who spread the Gospel and baptized before missionaries came.
- In China, since the coming to power of the communists in 1949, it is lay men and women who have kept the church alive in many places. In 1949, Catholics outnumbered Protestants three to one; now it’s the other way round. The Protestant tradition of lay leadership flourished in the absence of clergy.
- In Zambia, it was Bemba policemen who were instrumental in bringing the faith to Barotseland in the west of the country.
- In many countries today, leaders of SCC’s lead their local church in a variety of ways – conducting Sunday services, teaching Christian doctrine, helping the poor and needy, conducting funeral services and building churches.
When people see that the responsibility for something they cherish rests with them, and that they are trusted, there is a very good chance, especially if trained and encouraged, that they will shoulder that responsibility. Once people link faith to life, they will see the church as “their” church and get involved. Others have done it; it can be done – but not in a day.