www.byzcath.org Forums Faith & Christian Life Parish Life & Evangelization Open House?

Do you do some sort of open house to get people to know about your parish? Think it is a good idea? Like have a talk and do some sort of service afterwards?

Every Sunday, starting at 9:15, moving into full gear at 10:30.

Well, for an open house, I know that one of our fellow parishes in the local area held one last weekend. I linked to the parish in another thread yesterday morning about it.

How has that worked so far?

To give us some perspective, what annual events does your parish have already (if any of course)? For example do you have a "Ukrainian Festival"? Annual picnic? Hafla (I guess you wouldn't call it that, but I don't what the appropriate Ukrainian term is)? Christmas party? Trip to ______ ? Bazaar? Parish mission?

Our parish events currently are very Ukrainian-centric and thus people who come are either Ukrainian Catholic parisioners of our parish, other parishes, or the Ukrianian Orthodox. Even I don't go to all of them.

Very well indeed! As has been stated elsewhere, Holy Transfiguration grows at a slow, but steady pace.


This is where you need to extend the invitation to the broader community. When Holy T first started its annual food festival, we were basically buying all our own food and goods! It was a terrific weekend for the parish, but we didn't really do much but provide social time for ourselves. It's time to start telling nonUkrainians about your activities. People will come for the food, for the music, out of cultural curiosity, whatever, and -- if you expose them to it through church tours and liturgies -- they will come back for the spirituality.

We do advertise and we still get only mostly Ukrainians. Not sure if it is the prevailing culture of the area here that people tend not to go to ethnic gatherings (I know I don't) or that people really just don't care.

Right, I agree with this. Both Ukrainian Cathedrals in our area (St. Vladimir Orthodox and St. Josaphat Greek-Catholic) hold full-blown festivals annually, and open their Churches for tours, and have open house-style DLs for the guests, and the parishioners alike. This was also true of a few Ruthenian Churches as well, where I went to one where they started off (now this was on a Sunday) with a DL with a choir to respond to the priest and deacon throughout, and then we had Slovak meals just afterwards being served for those that stayed after the DL. So all was good.

I guess our challenge is to first get non-Ukrainians to our public events. Like I said, most people are either parishioners of our other parishes, or the Ukrainian Orthodox folks.

Those two things don't necessarily go hand-in-hand. I've known ethnic festivals -- Ukrainian Festivals, Greek Festivals, etc -- that were attended by a wide variety of people.

Well, I know that there's been a few Slovak Festivals all over the place, too, and some of those Slovak festivals don't necessarily have to be at a Ruthenian Byzantine Church, although a couple are. There was one Lutheran Church that holds these, and there was a Latin Rite Catholic Church that holds one annually. Although I'm wondering if any Slovak festivals at a Byzantine Church would convince those from the Lutheran Church to become Catholic, or convince those from a Latin Rite Church to worship in the Eastern Rite. This is something to consider, too.