It all begins with acknowledging that we have some very profound challenges, and that we don't have easy answers at hand, things that we know will solve the problems. If people embrace those two facts, then the next steps are a little easier to fall into place.
In the corporate world you get a report card every quarter and have to talk about it, whereas the church can drip, drip through bad trends for decades and decades.
We need to become a more welcoming church, one that reaches out more to those who have walked away or who aren't very interested to begin with.
It's not always going to cost money to turn a parish into a more welcoming parish. But it does take a willingness to change a lot of assumptions.
Denial of numerous problems can happen in any organization, and I don't mean this as flip or negative as it's going to sound, but you see it a lot in corporate cultures right before they hit a wall. People tell themselves a story that it can turn around, it's going to turn around, we're doing all the right things, and then that story lasts until it's literally no longer sustainable or believable.
The church is like any large corporation in one respect. In its early days, either the early church or the early years of Microsoft, you see all kinds of creativity, innovation, invention, people have nothing to lose, they're trying to find what works. Then you wake up and you're a vast enterprise, and it's very hard, when you have all kinds of buildings and structures and hierarchy and so on, to hang on to these very creative impulses that helped you get your great success in the first place. As a church we're going to have to figure a way out from under this.
One question I often ask is why the church doesn't set aside funds specifically to seed new ideas. A lot of our money tends to go into existing, literally physical buildings, or existing parishes, programs, and schools, and we have nothing that is very explicitly dedicated toward new ventures of all kinds that would help parishes, help education, help catechesis.
To me the church's problem would be a hundred times worse if you felt everyone has written the church off, they don't want to know, there just aren't people to turn to. But it's exactly the opposite: there are such people. We have to find a way in our organizational life to get out of their way, clear the path to find more of these people, and empower them.
