How Warm is Your Parish?

By Serialong Lebasa – One Monday last winter, on July 10, some parts of Gauteng experienced a dust of snow which caused a lot of excitement among the residents of the City of Gold and surrounding areas. The temperatures dropped below freezing point.

But with the excitement came the sad reality of having to leave our warm beds and houses and drag our feet to work. One cannot help but guess that there were those who did not make it to work that day.

This reminded me of the empty seats in some parishes where Mass attendance numbers are declining. Is the temperature in these parishes also dropping below freezing point? Are we also so cold that we find it difficult to go to church?

Of course, during the rainy seasons it is also difficult to get up and go to church. Still, maybe we should ask ourselves this question: What do we, as Church leaders and parishioners, do to make our church warm? How do we counteract winter so that people don’t think twice about waking up and going to church?

Unwelcoming church

When I was in Mpumalanga in 2014, I came across two ladies at church. One had just relocated from North West to the area. She was not just new to the area but also to the Catholic Church. She was a Methodist who joined our church by virtue of marriage. After a few months I no longer saw her at church.

One day we met at a mall. I was curious to hear where she had disappeared to. The woman told me that she had found our parish cold and unwelcoming. Her answer made me feel ashamed and guilty of my failure to make her feel that our church was not that cold.

The other lady came to our church one Sunday and said that she wanted to convert to Catholicism. I informed the head catechist and asked her to meet with this visitor. The catechist advised me to tell the woman to call during the week. The following Sunday this woman was not at Mass, and she never came back.

Sometimes, without realising, we make our church too cold for people who come to seek desperately-needed warmth. People may come to church with their spirit freezing because of different challenges — financial strain, loss of their home, unemployment, family or marriage problems, sick children, missing children, substance abuse problems, and so on.

Will they leave warm?

Imagine a person who has lost their job and struggles to feed their family. Will they leave the church feeling warm after enduring the constant berating about parishioners failing to financially support the parish?

If a person whose family is dealing with conflict or has a child addicted to drugs comes to church to escape the freezing rain at home, will she feel warm after church?

If a person who has just been received into our Church hears us boasting about having been “born Catholic” and thus making that convert feel like an inferior newbie, will they feel the warmth they are seeking?

In our sodalities, we have a mission of “providing a sense of belonging, warmth, sharing, common vision and concrete expression of filial love which is largely found wanting in our parishes”, as Fr S’milo Mngadi put it in an article in The Southern Cross of October 2020. Will new members feel the warmth if they always hear the demands made by leaders who are diverting from that mission?

All of us must play our role as missionaries of hope and love, spreading the warmth of God’s love, especially to those who are suffering spiritual winter. Pope Francis shows us the way when he says: “Let the Church always be a place of mercy and hope, where everyone is welcomed, loved, and forgiven.”

Serialong Lebasa writes from Vereeniging.

Published in the June 2024 issue of The Southernh Cross magazine