We are very pleased to announce that Fr. Manuel Williams has confirmed as closing plenary speaker at SASI!

He will provide a rousing, inspiring sendoff after four days of training on the theological foundations of the dignity of work, the history of Catholic thought on work & analyzing social change, case studies & a working session on supporting workers today, reflections by the Zeitouns, self-care for social ministers, promoting life & dignity, racial harmony, environmental stewardship, sustaining social ministry in the midst of disaster, doing more with less, and much, much more!

If you or leaders from your diocese are in need of financial assistance please apply for a scholarship. There is still a bit of funds available (even after the May 15 deadline). Please spread the word!

Look forward to seeing you there!

In June, the Roundtable spoke with Dan Ebener, former Social Action Director (and Roundtable member) in the Diocese of Davenport, about his work and his latest book on Servant Leadership. Read their conversation here:

Roundtable Report:  You’ve had a long history working in ministry and education. You were a diocesan social action director for twenty years, you’ve taught in universities and workshops on leadership, non-profit management, and conflict resolution, among other topics, throughout the years. Now you are director for Stewardship and Planning for the Diocese of Davenport and have recently written a book on servant leadership. How did you find yourself where you are today?

Dan Ebener: One part of my story may be of particular interest to Roundtable members. Very early in my social action ministry, at one of my very first Roundtable meetings in the 1980s, [first Roundtable secretariat] Harry Fagan got up and said, “If you’re not developing leaders, you might as well get out of this business.” That particular statement changed my whole approach to ministry.

At that time I was guilty of trying to do too much myself. I was not delegating and creating structures for others to get involved in my ministry. But from Harry Fagan I learned that we shouldn’t be doing it ourselves, we should develop the people so that the people will do it. Lao Tzu once said, “of the best leader, the people will say when the job is finished, we did it ourselves.”

This experience first changed my ideas about leadership. And now, as you can probably tell, I am very passionate about servant leadership. I feel like it’s my next calling in life.

RR: What is servant leadership? And where in Scripture do you find the foundations for servant leadership?

DE: Servant leadership is teaching and leading the way that Jesus taught and led. It’s about welcoming people and their ideas, encouraging the initiative of all, and building greater trust, commitment and cohesion among people. It about building a greater sense of mission.

I’ve been rereading the Sermon on the Mount during the past few months. Jesus says, “Where your treasure is there also your heart will be.” And I think what I’ve come to realize about the Sermon on the Mount is that it’s all about the heart.

Where the heart is, that’s a question central to servant leadership. Is my heart with the people, the mission of the organization, with God? Or is it with selfish interests and selfish motives? Is it willing to step on anybody until I get what I want? These are the questions of servant leadership that can transform ourselves, our churches, as well as corporations and society at large.

RR: In March 2010, you published a new book entitled Servant Leadership Models for Your Parish. Tell me more about that. What models do you offer for parishes in the book?

DE: My book is about how servant leadership changes how we do church. The thing that’s great about teaching leadership is that it applies to all walks of life. I teach at the graduate level and I see nurses, teachers, social workers, pastors, business leaders, coaches in my classes. All these people create an incredible learning environment to talk about and apply to leadership, because it applies to all those fields. However, we often overlook the way that leadership applies to the way that we do church.

One of the primary ways servant leadership works in a parish is that this model brings out the best in people, it welcomes their physical presence, their ideas, initiative, participation and leadership. To be truly welcoming is to open oneself up to the full personhood of those entering the parish, not just their physical presence. If people feel like they should be “seen, not heard,” that’s not welcoming.

What my research showed too is that servant leadership increased participation in parish life. When that leadership structure is in place, people are going to take their role as follower of Christ more seriously and sharpen the saw, train themselves, and develop themselves as leaders for social action. Servant leaders guide and nurture parishioners in that process.

The beginning of the book defines servant leadership. The middle is lots of stories of what it looks like in a parish. The last section puts servant leadership into various different models that could work for  parishes.  One of the great strengths of the book is the stories about how and why servant leadership works.

Roundtable Report: Can you share an example of one of the stories in your book?

DE: One story from the smallest parish in the Davenport Diocese involves a guy who showed up for Mass 15 minutes early, and he noticed that the front door wasn’t swinging properly. So he went to his truck, pulled out a toolbox and fixed the door. He went to Mass and that was the end of it. But what’s significant about the story is that first, in a small parish, you can get things done smoothly and easily. Also, if the pastor of the church had seen him doing this, and asked him to stop and go through the building committee, see if it was in the budget, and fill out the paperwork, the guy would lose his initiative. A servant leadership model gives people a sense of ownership of their parish. That guy treated his church like his home. Of course, in a larger parish there are more rules. But the culture of a parish is contingent on the leadership of the pastor. It can either encourage or extinguish initiative. That story was just one simple story, but there are lots more in the book.

Roundtable Report: What are the trends you are seeing in the field of leadership, in our church and in our society?

DE: We’re in a kairos moment right now around servant leadership.  There is interest mounting from lots of directions.

Take, for example, one organization called “Lead Like Jesus,” which was formed out of the evangelical churches. There are lots of evangelical Christians who are CEOs of corporations who are now looking at how they can lead their companies like Jesus would. This group has spurred a lot of interest around servant leadership in the for-profit world. The CEOs of these companies are realizing that they can’t lead like Jesus without changing the workplace. And, of course, changing the workplace in a significant way like this creates an opportunity to make major transformations in our society toward social justice and human dignity, particularly around the dignity of the worker, one of the principles of Catholic social teaching.

One of the first things I say in my book is, “Every leadership situation offers an opportunity to put our faith into practice.” In every leadership situation, a CEO of an organization has an opportunity to say, “Am I going to put my corporate hat on and think only of the financial bottom line? Or am I going to go with my gut and lead like Jesus would?” They are asking themselves how they can be disciples in the workplace.

And it’s had a great impact so far on a growing number of CEOs and top organizational leaders in very large corporations. Some 40% of Fortune 500 companies have adopted servant leadership as their philosophy. Walmart has adopted servant leadership as a corporate philosophy. We have strong Christian leaders in that company, southern evangelicals who want to practice their faith at work.

People want to practice their faith while at work. If we spend the greatest number of our waking hours at work, then we should be practicing our religion there. If corporate leaders want to practice the Sermon on the Mount at work, this could be a major breakthrough for us who believe in Catholic social action.

RR: How do the ideas of servant leadership and stewardship speak to the work of diocesan social action directors? How can promoting models of servant leadership support their work?

DE: In social ministry, we’re not looking for charismatic leaders.  We are looking for transformational leaders who will create structures where people will do things themselves. We’re looking for leaders who will develop the people. As a diocesan staffperson, you can’t do it all yourself. If you try, you won’t be able to get as much done, and eventually you will burn out, but you’re also taking away the opportunity from others to get involved.

Leadership is about giving people an opportunity to practice discipleship. It’s not about work that needs to get done, it’s not about checking tasks off a “To Do” list, it’s a life that needs to be lived. The sooner we can all realize that social action ministry is a part of Christian discipleship, the sooner we will transform society.

As diocesan staffpeople, our role is to empower, enhance, and enable. Sometimes we think, “If I can just have this meeting, conference, dinner, then our social action ministry is going to excel.”  But it’s not about that. It’s about the people. It’s about creating an environment where everyone practices social action ministry because it’s a part of discipleship.

When you go to community organizing school, we talk about the iron rule, which says, “don’t do unto others what they can do unto themselves.” Our role as social action ministers is empowerment. Our role is organizing, it’s not to be the leader ourselves. The best measure of leadership is not how many followers you lead but how many leaders you develop. Social action ministry just flows throughout my latest book. Everything I learned as a diocesan social action director just flows through the book.

RR: Anything else you’d like to share with Roundtable members?

DE: My bishop sent a copy of Servant Leadership Models for Your Parish to every bishop in the country. To get a copy to every pastor in the country will take diocesan work. Every diocesan social action director should know that his or her bishop has a copy of my book.

RR: Thank you, Dan, for your time and for sharing your insights!

Purchase a copy of Dan’s book from Paulist Press.

The following is the text from Jack Jezreel’s keynote presentation at the Roundtable’s 25t^h Anniversary Luncheon.

Thank you all for the privilege to share some thoughts with you today. Since I have about twenty minutes and I usually talk in three-hour chunks, let me get started. I have opted to follow an inclination toward provocation in this presentation, not provocation for its own sake, but provocation to stretch us to consider a possibility perhaps just beyond our current aspirations. I have presumed that you would rather be provoked than anesthetized.

These comments come by way of observation from my travels across the country. I work in a shop that builds tools that aim to inspire people to work with you. My comments are offered in that same spirit of wanting to support and grow a church that is a powerful expression of God’s restoring, healing presence in the world.

I come before you with a blend of, first, hope and enthusiasm about the prospects and role of the U.S. Catholic Church as a tool of God’s healing and transformation in the world mixed with a certain degree of frustration and impatience about the current reality. So, I want to say some challenging things with love. I love our faith tradition, I have high regard for the work we all do together. I care deeply for our sisters and brothers who know daily despair and suffering. And, to repeat, I am very hopeful.

My thesis has three parts. First, it is my observation that parish social ministry, while growing and maturing and even thriving in some places, is still mostly undeveloped, inadequately supported and not an integral part of parish life in most places. (Keep remembering: I am very hopeful).

Second, it is my conviction that this is not due to a lack of theological investment on the part of our tradition or leadership or a lack of good will in the pews or fall-out from the pedophilia scandal or even the particular political drift of the current corps of bishops. Rather, the impediment is a structural one, found in the “home” of most Catholics—that is, how the parish defines itself.

Third, that for the American Catholic parish to thrive in the future will require nothing less than a full and courageous embrace of the church’s best examples throughout history, requiring both a new vocabulary and a new paradigm for parish membership, which bears immediately on the role of parish social ministry.

So, back to my first point. The role of social ministry within the life of a parish can be evaluated in a number of ways, I suppose, but ultimately depends on our assumptions and expectations. If, on one hand, we think of parish social ministry as little more than one of the extras that pastors, staff and parishes in general can choose from as an optional side dish to the real meal of parish life, then we might be tempted to admire parish social ministry where it happens and shrug our shoulders where it doesn’t. If, on the other hand, the assumption is that a commitment to the poor and vulnerable is a “constitutive” part of Biblical/Christian/Catholic faith, then it should be assumed that parish life in every parish ought to reflect this. And, it might be deduced, that the way this commitment to social ministry would be reflected would include measurable evidence like: staffing priorities, particular kinds of parish projects, the language of its prayers, homily attention, bulletin space, the pastor’s calendar, and budgeting, at least.

Having visited perhaps more U.S. Catholic parishes in these last ten years than any other human being I know, I can only say that I have met a lot of very fine and committed people who pray, worship and work in parish environments that are, more often than not, disinterested in their work. What I mean—and I AM using broad brushstrokes here based upon my travels and conversations with you—is that most pastors, a significant majority, are apparently largely disinterested; deacons as a group are, it seems to me, a little more interested—a very hopeful sign—but only a little more interested; religious educators and liturgists are disturbingly and routinely disinterested, and then budgets, bulletins, staffing and mission statements resoundingly demonstrate disinterest or at least a lack of enthusiasm. Mary Wright on our staff has co-written a book on the federal budget as a moral document. A book similarly focused should be written about parish budgets.

In summary, it is my experience that many Catholics who come to a passion for justice and social ministry often do so not because of the parish but in spite of the parish. Others, who are introduced to social mission at their parish quickly find themselves birthed to a conviction that the parish then does not adequately support. There is a lot of unrest among the Catholics who are our colleagues in the pews. And, so, I am interested and even determined to see how things might be changed.

And, I repeat, I am hopeful. I am hopeful because my dissatisfaction is shared by many, I would guess many of you. We have moved, I think, from a place of thinking about social ministry as an exciting thing for some churches to do to a conviction that it is a necessary thing for all of the Church to do. Our dissatisfaction is not a sign that things have gotten worse; rather, it is a sign we are ready to mature, to move to a new set of expectations and a new level of implementation.

My second point, which is really the heart of my presentation today is to suggest that the solution to the reality of the disconnect between parish and Catholic social teaching does not lie in more documents, more encyclicals, more campaigns, or even that any of you do your work better. Of course, all of us can do our work better and we should, but my argument today is that doing our work better, at least as it commonly imagined, is not going to be the solution to a Catholic community disinterested in its social teaching.

The obstacle, to put it succinctly, is that the assumptions of the place where most Catholics gather to celebrate and express formally their Catholicism—that is the parish—is currently organized in a way that is inimical to a robust engagement in the Church’s social mission. It is my conviction that the current set of assumptions about what constitutes membership at the local parish will forever work against any sincere effort to engage a majority of Catholics in their Church’s mission. What that means is: I think we should, for example, stop blaming our pastor or bishop. It is my opinion that they are as handicapped by this as the rest of us. The problem is much more fundamental, in my mind.

As I read the Gospels there is an alternating pattern in Jesus’ ministry that I think should be the template for our lives, for our work, for our parishes. The narrative of the Gospels follows a pattern that gets repeated over and over. We take it for granted because it is so repetitious – it’s the drama of gathering and sending. Gathering and sending. Jesus gathers the disciples, then he sends them. Jesus gathers listeners and then he sends them. Jesus’ disciples, then, also gather and send. And, so, at its very best, the Church has mimicked this alternation of gathering and sending.

Let me quickly define the terms: Gathering is the work of evangelization, calling people to faith. It is the work of education, catechesis, formation. Gathering is the work of liturgy, gathering the people of faith to prayer. It is the stuff of retreats and convenings, like this one. Gathering is the nurture, the preparation, the celebration, the education, the discernment. It speaks to “Getting ready,” perhaps getting ready for some event but, more generally, getting ready for the larger event called the work of our lives. Gathering is the Sunday liturgy, the education classes, sacramental celebrations like marriages, ordinations, and confirmations. Gathering is the many social occasions to be together – fish fries and potluck meals. Gathering is the Lenten retreat, the Advent mission. It’s the RCIA. It’s RENEW. It’s marriage prep. It’s JustFaith. It’s about nourishing faith, nourishing the community, about remembering our story and being prepared for . . . the second part of the drama called SENDING.

Sending is what you do. Sending is Jesuit Volunteer Corps, St. Vincent de Paul home visits, helping resettle refugees in our hometowns, serving meals at a soup kitchen. It is advocating for immigrants, the poor and the vulnerable. It is providing a safe place for battered women, it is providing care of battered soldiers, it is to prevent battered unborn. It is caring for battered in Haiti. It is the work outlined and given a vocabulary by Catholic social teaching. The proclamation of the Reign of God is to invite a mission statement for our lives. And the touchstones are the common good, the dignity of every human life and the dignity of creation, it speaks to strong and loving families, good jobs, healthy food, attention especially to the poor and vulnerable and a bias against violence of all kinds. The proclamation of the Reign of God is to embrace the gift of life and the gift of creation that God has given and to relish it, to share it, protect it. And the critical religious insight is that this sending is a necessary part, a constitutive part of what it means to be in relationship to God. To know compassion is to know God. No compassion, fake God, fake faith.

You see, the Gospel is gathering and sending. Gathering AND sending. It cannot be one or the other. It is necessarily and unavoidably both.

Here is my observation. Parishes, as they are currently and routinely configured, are primarily or sometimes exclusively places of gathering. Period. If you look at the parish bulletin, the parish budget, the parish staff, the pastor’s time, it’s all about gathering. It is ALL about Gathering. It’s about gathering for Eucharist, gathering for prayer, gathering for education, gathering for fun, gathering for sacramental preparation (which amounts to gathering in preparation for more gathering). The telltale indicator of this is the most repeated Catholic question, “what time is Mass”?

Let me be clear. Gathering is absolutely critical. Gathering as the nurture of faith is essential. The human hunger for meaning and understanding, the appetite for vision and spirituality, encounter with the sacred and holy are all real and precious. We need community, so we gather. We need to learn, so we gather. We need to be mentored to holiness, so we gather. We need to pray, so we gather.

BUT, gathering disconnected from sending ultimately mutates into something less than the Gospel and something less than what is so very compelling about Jesus and the church he inspired. That parishes are guilty, as I am contending, of being structured for gathering and not structured for sending has two serious consequences.

First, parishes that emphasize gathering and not sending become static because they have lost their mission. Gathering is for the Church, but the Church is for the world. Parishes that do not structure themselves for mission, outreach, justice, compassion, charity, advocacy, solidarity, and peacemaking are parishes that have been reduced to puny expressions of the Gospel. For what authentic or potent religious tradition is primarily concerned with itself? The critical question for parishes to answer is not just, “What time is Mass?” Rather, the question for parishes to answer is “What heroic, healing things does this parish do for the world and how can I be involved?”

Second, parishes that emphasize gathering and not sending, no longer even do gathering well, for we lose a sense of what we are preparing for, praying for, learning for, being formed for. Spiritual formation loses its sizzle and urgency. Eucharistic celebration gets turned in on itself. It’s time that the religious educators and liturgists understand that they can’t do their job without Catholic social teaching, without an eye toward mission. Parishes lose members, not because they are wrong, but because they are boring. They don’t ask very much of their members. Nobody ever says that about Jesuit Volunteer Corps, for example.

Of course, the Catholic tradition has this robust expression of sending expressed in dozens of organizations like CRS, CCHD, JVC, Maryknoll, Catholic Charities, Jesuits, Franciscans, Daughters of Wisdom, Benedictines. But what I find so interesting is that almost all of these are lodged OUTSIDE of the parish. Indeed, the challenge that many agencies like CRS, CCUSA and CCHD have tried to address over the last decade is how to GET INTO the parish. A prior question is how did it happen that social mission ever got OUTSIDE of the parish.

And, so, the final point I would like to address is where we go from here. Happily, we don’t have to invent this. All we have to do is to look at our own home tradition and perhaps a few relatives.

The testimony of the document, “The Communities of Salt and Light, is that the parish is or ought to be THE Catholic social mission structure. And the document makes a series of helpful, hopeful recommendations that moved the conversation significantly. I would like to recommend a next step.

I suggest that we look to our own tradition and see what structures, over time, most readily enabled the Church’s commitment to the poor and vulnerable. Let’s see where the soil has been made fertile for charity and justice. We don’t have to look far. The answer—my answer anyway—is religious communities.

I think we all would agree that for decades and centuries, some of them of the most remarkable witnesses to the work of peacemaking and justice have been women and men of religious communities. And this really no surprise. The logic of most religious communities is that they had work to do, that they were called to serve. There were schools to build for poor immigrant children; there were hospitals to build to serve the poor; there were people on the streets of Calcutta who needed love. Nobody joined the Franciscans because the mass times at the abbey or motherhouse were convenient. People joined the Franciscans to serve. In other words, the terms of membership were service.

The extrapolation I would like to make is suggested by the example of a church not too far from where we are seated today. Down the road there is a church called Church of the Savior, a non-denominational church pastored by Gordon and Mary Crosby. I have never been to the church but I have read a lot about it and here’s what I know: if you go to the Sunday worship of that church, you will be struck by the beauty of the music, the creativity of the liturgy, the enthusiasm of the congregation. And, if you go again and again and then decide you would like to join the church, you will be given a registration form that asks for your address, family information, AND what mission team you would like to join. A mission team is a subgroup of church members who work on a particular project related to outreach and justice. If you were to respond with a note that said, “You know, I really love this Church. The liturgy is beautiful, the preaching is sublime, the people are friendly but, frankly, I am really not interested in a mission team,” you would be told kindly that, if that’s the case, you can’t join our church. Gathering AND sending. Neither is optional.

There is an evangelical church in Denver and the pastor is on fire about caring for the poor and vulnerable. So, this is what his 3000 member church does. On the first and third Sundays of the month, they gather for worship. On the second and fourth Sundays of the month they gather—all 3000—at a poor neighborhood park and rebuild the playground; two weeks later they rehab a block of houses owned by retired and low-income elderly; two weeks later they serve a dinner for an entire neighborhood in distress. Gathering and sending on the calendar.

My purpose here is not to propose these as viable options for the Catholic parish, but they are suggestive that it is possible to define membership by gathering and sending. And, so my first closing question is why not us?

Why not parishes that ask everyone to commit to a social ministry, like Maryknoll of the Missionaries of Charity? Why not divide every parish into teams of 12 and ask them to commit themselves to one refugee family, OR one neglected patient at a nursing home, OR one at-risk child who needs tutoring and a friend. Why not create a list of advocacy options and invite teams of 12 to make a commitment to CRS or CCHD or Catholic Charities or St. Vincent de Paul and become the conduit of parish activity for that particular organization. Why not teams of 12 that pray together, study together, and reach out together? Why not organize 12 doctors in the parish into a local version of doctors without borders? Why not a team of 12 sent by the parish to Haiti? Why not a team of 12 to start a community garden? Why not a team of 12 groomed for community organizing? Why not a team of 12 to work with at-risk mothers-to-be? Why not a team of 12 to rehab houses? Why not half the parish budget for gathering and half the parish budget for sending? Why not half the parish staff for gathering and half the staff for sending? Why not half the parish bulletin for gathering and half the parish bulletin for sending? Why not holy days of obligation and the obligation is to two kinds of Holy Communion – sacramental and social? Why not? And, finally, the other, even more important question is “Why?”

Because the world is so very wounded.

Because our experience of the living God is at stake.

Because the Church is made life-giving only by a great love gathered and then sent.