GROWING PAINS.

How a rural parish survived suburban sprawl

This is the tale of a little parish that grew and grew. It was a little parish for the first 130 of its 150 years. I was the pastor during the growing years, so I was able to see the effects of sudden and sustained growth on a small community and on those who ministered to it.

In 1978 St. Patrick's in Wadsworth, Illinois was one of two rural parishes left in the Archdiocese of Chicago. Wadsworth itself was a tiny town five miles west of Lake Michigan and three miles south of the Wisconsin state line.

One wintry day I turned east off Highway 41 onto Wadsworth Road. I crossed over the Des Haines River bridge, bounced over the railway tracks, then drove past the feed store, post office, the Duck Inn, and Gracie's Grocery. Two hundred yards up the hill I found St. Pat's nestled in the snow: a little frame church, a red-brick rectory, and school.

As I walked up the sidewalk to the rectory, I had a panic attack. I had never been a parish priest; now I had a whole parish to care for. It really was not all that big: 350 families and a school with 135 kids.

I rang the bell and waited. A lady with shoulder-length gray hair and very large eyes opened it.

"I'm Father Dyer, the new pastor," I said.

She stared at me for what seemed minutes, then announced: "I'm Alice, the housekeeper. I'm brain damaged."

My life at St. Patrick's had begun.

Where everybody knows your name

Shortly after I arrived in Wadsworth, I climbed a nearby hill. A geographical quirk gave me a commanding view of the countryside, and, as far as I could see, I couldn't see a living soul. St. Pat's 350 families were scattered over 65 square miles of northeast Lake County, most of it woods, fields, and horses. Total population density was about 70 people per square mile.

Even in 1978, however, there were intimations of future growth. A huge amusement park had been built in the southwest quadrant of the parish. The interstate that served the park ran north and south just a mile west of our church. Growth was inevitable, but for the next 10 years it was almost glacierlike; then it became an avalanche and forever changed the face of northeast Lake County. During that decade, St. Pat's grew from 350 families to 2,400.

When I arrived, the pastor emeritus, Father William Slattery, was still resident. An intelligent, energetic man, he had built the church and rectory and quickly introduced the reforms called for by Vatican II. "Wild Bill," as the parishioners called him, was a banty rooster with a volcanic temper. Until his death in 1985, Bill kept the parish books, said Mass, heard Confessions, visited the sick, and loved talking to little kids.

Bill taught me a lot about the parish. "You're a `newcomer' here if you moved in within the past 25 years," he said. "Another thing: Everybody is related to everybody else." He exaggerated only slightly. Many of our parishioners had been there for generations and had intermarried. What he really meant, however, was that Wadsworth and St. Pat's formed a tightly knit community.

I got firsthand evidence of this within the next two months when I ran into my first crisis. The winter of `77-78 had made up its mind to go into the record books. One winter storm followed another. Our school had a flat roof, and an engineer told me, "Get the snow off the roof now or you'll lose it." I called a couple of parishioners asking for help, and within two hours 40 men from the town and parish were up there with shovels, many of them our non-Catholic neighbors.

Bursting at the seams

In the fall of 1987 St. Pat's began to create a five-year plan. I asked five parishioners to look at different dimensions of parish life. After months of work, they presented their reports at a parish town-hall meeting.

One of their findings was quite startling: Between 1978 and 1987 our numbers had doubled to 750 families, and they predicted that within another five years our numbers would more than double again. They recommended we build a new church and multipurpose facility that would include classrooms, a kitchen, and a gym. After a lot of discussion, the people at the town-hall meeting overwhelmingly accepted the recommendation.

We had just broken ground on the two new buildings and signed contracts for almost $3 million when the school principal came to see me. She had 35 children on the waiting list for kindergarten. "We have to open a second kindergarten," she said. I listened with mixed emotions. I was committed to the school but worried about further burdening our parishioners.

Certainly we had to enlarge the school, I said, but later, when we have a better handle on our finances. "We cannot turn those children away," she replied, reminding me that with the new parish center we would have five extra rooms.

I somewhat skeptically agreed to bring the proposal to a joint meeting of the school board, parish council, and finance committee. Once again the people of St. Pat's surprised me. "Of course we have to begin a second stream!" they insisted.

I rarely mentioned money at the weekend liturgies. Like most priests, I disliked talking about it, and besides, we had enough to pay our bills. As the parish began to grow more rapidly, however, I had to ask the parishioners to help. In 1994 we had to enlarge the school again to accommodate the second stream, and I reminded them of the commitment they had made five years earlier. We could do it without a fund-drive, I said, if everyone increased their weekly donations to the best of their ability. When I finished, they stunned me with a round of applause--and a 35 percent leap in Sunday donations, We built the school addition.

As new parishioners poured into St. Pat's, my assistant organized a small army of volunteers who filled the rectory from morning to night, keeping administrative expenses surprisingly low. The rectory became both administrative center and meeting place. Alcoholics Anonymous met in the basement; Incest Survivors Anonymous in my study; and the building committee, the liturgy commission, and the CCD board in the dining rooms. Foot by relentless foot, the rectory became offices and meeting rooms. It got to the point where I couldn't step out of the shower without bumping into an encounter group. I finally rented a house five minutes from the rectory.

Three tips for pastors

When I began working at St. Pat's, my life had been devoted to theological education. I had nine years of administrative experience as dean of the faculty at St. Mary of the Lake Seminary in nearby Mundelein, Illinois. I knew something about budgets as editor of Chicago Studies, a theological journal with some 10,000 subscribers at the time. My dad had been a general contractor, so I had absorbed a general knowledge of architectural plans and the ways of contractors. In hindsight, that little grab bag of experience proved useful. In 1978, however, I was bleakly aware that I knew almost nothing about being pastor of a parish.

I made three decisions I do not regret.

First, I decided to learn the first names of our 350 families. I memorized their photos in the parish directory and in a few months could greet most of them by name at the weekend Masses. When I registered new parishioners, I took two pictures of them with a Polaroid camera, gave them one and lined the others up on a shelf in my study so that I saw them daily.

The parish population doubled over the first 10 years, but with the photos as a reference, I was still able to recall their names readily. Native Americans believe that there is something sacred about a person's name. They are onto something.

My second decision was to visit parishioners whenever they were sick, hospitalized, or in nursing homes. There were two hospitals and four nursing homes within 15 miles of the rectory, so this was relatively easy. It became more time-consuming when they were hospitalized in Milwaukee or Chicago. But time was something I had in my first 10 years at St. Pat's, and the patients' pleased reaction to a visit was worth far more than the effort I invested.

Third, I decided to write a weekly column for the Sunday bulletin. I had spent my adult life studying theology; now I had the opportunity to see what it had to say to parish life. Some years into writing it, I discovered that neighboring parishes were interested, and I decided to publish it. In its first year more than a thousand parishes subscribed. Four years into retirement, I am still writing the column. I believe our faith is simply too rich to encompass in a 10-minute homily.

Get out of the Spirit's way

It's relatively easy to speak of the external history of St. Pat's, things like building programs and snow emergencies. It is more difficult to describe the internal life of the community--the interaction of people and the Spirit of God. This was an awareness into which I grew gradually in my years at St. Pat's, and I found it indispensable in dealing with our growing numbers.

Bishops establish parishes, and priests found or care for them. It is God's Spirit, however, that brings the people together around the risen Christ, teaches them to pray and worship, to serve one another and the community around them.

The Spirit prompts and helps them to pass their faith on to the next generation. If God's Spirit was present and active in the people, my role was to help them discern the Spirit's prompting, encourage them to follow--and then get out of the way. The more effectively I did this, the more astonishing the results. This was brought vividly to life for me the day we dedicated our new church, as 60 men and women of the parish marched up the aisle with banners representing each ministry of the parish.

In my later years at St. Pat's there were 10 parish staff members, including five deacons. At one time or another, each of the deacons asked me what I wanted him to do. I invariably responded by asking what dreams, hunches, or intuitions they had about their ministry. When they told me, I encouraged them to go for it. Each of them enriched parish life immeasurably as they followed their dreams. I tried to encourage others, on and off the staff, to do the same.

Paved paradise

When I left St. Pat's, I took a six-month sabbatical. My 150-pound Newfoundland and I traveled some 7,000 miles down the back roads of six Midwestern states, stopping at small parishes and attempting to learn how they functioned.

These parishes were exactly what St. Pat's had once been, small rural communities surrounded by farms. Back in northeast Lake County we were rapidly paving over some of the richest farmland in Illinois.

Several years of attending the National Catholic Rural Life Conference had taught me some unforgettable lessons. The first was the tragedy of the disappearing family farm. Mergers and acquisitions are a fact of American corporate life, and America's 1.6 million family farms are under increasing pressure. A great many are now owned by corporate America.

The second lesson I learned from the NCRLC was our national indifference to our greatest natural resource--our rich soil. One statistic sticks with me: In 1900 there were 2 feet of topsoil in Iowa; there are now about 6 inches.

Land is not a renewable resource. I thought of this when I drove past a new development in St. Pat's Parish the other day and saw a mountain of topsoil for sale: "Semitrailer loads only." I wonder what the loss of this irretrievable resource will mean to feeding our nation in the next millennium.

Plans and precincts

The single most important administrative decision I made in my 20 years at St. Pat's proved to be the creation of that five-year plan back in 1988. It took months of work, but it allowed us to foresee and prepare for the tremendous changes coming our way.

We found it imperative to involve the entire parish in evaluating our findings and planning a parishwide response. That said, the parish then faced the task of welcoming a flood of new parishioners.

"I miss the old days," said one of the older parishioners. "I miss the little church and seeing the same familiar faces Sunday after Sunday."

I missed them, too. The challenge was to maintain the sense of a closely knit community when the numbers are seven times what they once were. We had greeters at every Mass, of course, and a welcoming committee that arranged coffee and doughnuts after Sunday Mass so new parishioners could get acquainted. But the generation-sold tradition of a close-knit, welcoming community was our greatest asset; it created an ethos of its own.

Still, the older parishioners lament remained valid. A community of 2,400 families cannot be as close as one of 350. Here, I have one large regret.

In my first year at St. Pat's I worried about pastoring 350 families scattered over 65 square miles. How would I know when one of them was hurting or in trouble?

I borrowed an idea from Chicago's famous Democratic machine. With the help of a group of parishioners I divided the parish into 16 "precincts," each with its own "captain" who would be responsible for staying in close touch with the parishioners in their district. I would go from district to district and meet with as many as they could gather, so that they would have a sense of being part of a larger community.

The project failed at St. Pat's; all but one of the groups, the largest, ceased to meet. The reason, I believe, is that we were so few and so far apart.

But as the parish grew, I should have reconstituted the "Big Green Machine" as we laughingly called it. Each of our five deacons could have taken charge of an area of the parish and created a local community where the members would look out for one another and develop a program of outreach to their non-Catholic neighbors.

This strategy of establishing small communities within a larger one has a distinguished history in Hispanic America and has been effectively adapted in many U.S. parishes. I regret that I did not have the wits or the time to try it again. It may be particularly useful in attracting young Catholics who see the institutional church as large and impersonal.

Maintaining contact

A second regret I have is closely tied to the first. My personal contact with the parishioners diminished as the parish grew. Volunteers now handled registrations on weekends in the narthex of the new church--sometimes a dozen new parishioners each weekend. The volunteers took pictures of each of the parishioners. I found it more difficult to memorize their names and faces, especially because I had not taken the photographs or had a chance to meet them in person when they registered.

The upside of this quandary was that I came to rely ever more heavily on the staff and parish council. I made their formational development a priority. Both had a tendency to become absorbed in organizational detail. I suggested that they focus more on the pastoral tasks facing us, more on vision and policy than "picnics and Porta-Potties."

For example, we were trying to teach the 600 children in the school and 550 in our religious education program the centrality of the Eucharist to their lives, but only a quarter of their parents were attending Mass on a weekly basis.

What did we know about the lives of these children and their parents? Most of them came from families where both parents worked or there was only one parent and he or she worked. What sort of support could we offer them? How could we help them to make the Eucharist an important part of family life?

I could see no effective way of being pastor to 8,000 people. Engaging the staff and council, however, brought their energies and talents to bear on our common concerns. We arrived at no magical solutions, but at least were all thinking about the same problems.

One thing my sabbatical taught me was to be careful about first impressions. After the first month on the road, I had concluded that rural parishes were quite conservative, theologically and liturgically. As I traveled farther, I discovered an equal number of parishes that were quite the opposite, and I began to wonder what made the difference.

The conclusion I came to was more anecdotal than scientific, and it is this: Given enough time, the people and parish priest tend to resemble one another. I believe that happened to me in my years at St. Pat's.

Eighteen years after arriving, I drove down the long hill past Gracie's Grocery and the feed store, over the railroad tracks and out of town. I had found a small rural community where people over seven generations had learned to care for one another. Even as the parish grew, it retained much of this character. I could only hope they learned as much from me as I did from them.

RELATED ARTICLE: WHAT'S WRONG WITH SPRAWL?

Suburban sprawl begets developments with bucolic names like "Timber Ridge." It also begets challenges for the entire metropolitan area, such as:

* TRAFFIC CONGESTION, with accompanying pollution and increased time commuting. "In a year, people spend the equivalent of two weeks' vacation time stuck in traffic," says Jackie Grimshaw of Chicago's Center for Neighborhood Technology. "Kids are spending an inordinate amount of time on the school bus just getting to the closest school. No wonder we have increasing obesity."

* GOBBLING UP LAND: Compare the amount of land used by one city family (often in an apartment)with the huge single-family lots in far-flung areas.

* BUCKS FOR INFRASTRUCTURE: "Cornfields don't pay for the sewers and roads needed by the people moving out there," says Grimshaw. So who pays? Taxpayers in the whole area, including city dwellers who thus foot the bill for those who flee the city.

* LACK OF AFFORDABLE HOUSING: Bob Jones of Business and Professional People for the Public Interest points to the crisis in affordable housing in the Chicago metro area, saying that most towns refuse to take any responsibility for housing the poor or low-income workers who staff local stores and restaurants. Even multifamily housing is firmly opposed by many residents.

* SEGREGATION BY RACE AND INCOME: When the (mostly white) wealthy leave, the city is left with a concentration of poor and minority people with greater social needs and a weaker tax base to pay for needed services. Many of them have no way to get to jobs in the suburbs, which usually can be reached only by car.

--COC

RELATED ARTICLE: WHAT'S YOUR NAME AGAIN?

Suburban sprawl can put a lot of pressure on things like sewers and roads--and parishes. Stress shows up in different ways.

At Guardian Angels Parish in Oakdale, Minnesota, the parish population shifts rapidly as families move in to pursue jobs with nearby corporations, only to move out a few years later. The staff is constantly starting over with a now group of parishioners.

"We've had a sister parish in Nicaragua for 13 years, but people are always asking me, `Where is that again?'" says Judy Scheider, director of pastoral care. "We become a service provider. We believe that you have to have a covenant relationship with your church, but people who are very mobile, with small children and two incomes, have a hard time finding time to participate. We try to be there for them, but we need their energy and support, too."

Father Bill O'Mara founded St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Parish in Orland Hills, Illinois 13 years ago. Part of the Archdiocese of Chicago, the parish now numbers a whopping 4,600 families, with 2,400 children in CCD. While St. Elizabeth Ann Seton has a much more stable membership than Guardian Angels, O'Mara describes a similar challenge of "making sure we're a welcoming, warm parish--not a big parish who just wants to get `em in and get `em out"

St. Elizabeth Ann Seton puts much of its energy into Sunday Mass, planning good music and homilies, rather than spreading itself thin on many activities.

"We're not looking to have a lot of organizations to get people out of their houses. They're already out of their houses for civic events and sports. We start something only in response to a need," says O'Mara.

One need arose when Catholic schools in neighboring parishes became overcrowded as the area boomed. Seton and three other parishes chipped in to build the Cardinal Joseph Bernardin Catholic School, a regional school due to open in the fall of 2000. It's the first new Catholic school built in the archdiocese in more than 30 years.

--COC

FATHER GEORGE DYER is founding editor of Chicago Studies and writer and editor of Androgogy, The Three-Minute Theologian, and Catholic Educator.