I have held off of this place for a bit due to the fact that I am recovering from my vacation. Sometimes I think I need two weeks vacation, one week for vacation and one for recovery.
One of the things that I have seen in our time (now being only 40+ years old, I know I haven't seen it all, but I have seen a bit) is that we (humans) have a propensity to simply plan and plan and plan and plan. Now, there is nothing wrong with planning, but sometimes the planning and the execution of the plans becomes paramount over the end vision.
My mind keeps wandering back to the early years of the Church in Acts, and I keep wondering what type of planning sessions that St. Paul had in order to do his mission? Did he actually have a plan? Or did he simply decide, with the help of the holy Spirit, to simply make a list of places he wanted to visit and take off and trust the Lord?
How bout Sts. Cyril and Methodius? What type of Church wide meeting did they have before they set off to the Slavs?
Look, I am not saying that we don't plan, but the fact is that we can't simply plan for everything. We may want to try, but we simply can't. We humans tend to get bogged down in the planning and meetings and then we have wasted time and effort on all these plans which don't get executed simply because they have been discussed to death.
I believe that first we must get the over all vision statement for what the eparchy of Parma should look like in the future. This vision statement will be the what we believe our Church must become. Once that is done then everything that is done is done with that statement in mind.
While playing around with it in my mind, I came up with the following:
The Vision of the Eparchy of Parma is to become a fully Evangelical, Catholic, Church by embracing the Ancient Traditions of our Church totally and without hesitation. Our Mission is to bring the light of Christ to this darkened world by proclaiming the Gospel, through fully embracing authentic return to our liturgy, our clergy, monastism and our traditions. We will do this by sending out evangelists and preachers to new areas and establishing new missions. We will do this by working with existing parishes and helping them to implement full returns to our traditional liturgy and prayer life. We will fully embrace all modern tools in order to fulfill this mission that has been given to us by Christ or Lord.
So what does this actually say:
1) Instead of hanging around and waiting for people to come in, we will go out to meet them and invite them
2) We are a universal Church
3) We will remove those things that are not of out tradition
4) We are going to spread the Gospel
5) Our Divine Liturgy will be implemented correctly
6) We will embrace Monasticism, celibate and married clergy, and other traditions that are in danger of being lost. Likewise we will reject those things that do not have a root in our authentic tradition.
7) We will send out men and women to new areas and establish missions and churches.
8) We will help existing parishes to fully implement the liturgical and traditional byzantine life
9) We will use all forms of media to spread the word. We will not use the excuse that we can't do something in a new way.
Now all of this requires planning, But I guess that I am saying that we shouldn't be so concerned as to try to plan for every little contingency that might come up.
