Your Parish Is the Curriculum: Rcia in the Midst of Community

We all agree that the community needs to be involved in the RCIA. So we make bulletin and Mass announcements explaining the rites and the RCIA process, hoping the parishioners will "get" their responsibility to initiate these seekers. Then, although catechumens, candidates, sponsors, and team members form a tight-knit community, parishioners still wonder who these people are with their rituals that make the Mass long and most of the newly initiated still disappear from the parish after Easter.

Taking to heart what the United States bishops said in their document on adult faith formation--"While the parish may have an adult faith formation program, it is no less true that the parish is an adult faith formation program" --Diana Macalintal argues that we have to stop trying to get the parish involved in the RCIA and start getting the catechumens and candidates involved in the parish.

In this book, readers will discover:1. why doing the RCIA in the midst of the community not only forms seekers into disciples but renews the conversion of the entire parish; 2. what parishioners can do to take responsibility for the initiation of adults, without adding another meeting to their lives; 3. how to use the four key areas of parish life and the liturgical year to introduce seekers to Christ and train them in the Christian way of life; 4. the three levels of catechesis and how to use mystagogical reflection on parish life to provide a systematic and complete catechesis appropriate for each level.

When you make your parish the RCIA curriculum, you will be shaping not just a group of people but an entire community into lifelong disciples.

Diana Macalintal has served as a liturgist, musician, author, speaker, and composer for the last twenty-five years, and her work can be found in Give Us This Day and many other publications. She is the author of The Work of Your Hands: Prayers for Ordinary and Extraordinary Moments of Grace, Joined by the Church, Sealed by a Blessing: Couples and Communities Called to Conversion Together, and Your Parish Is the Curriculum: RCIA in the Midst of the Community (Liturgical Press). Macalintal is a cofounder of TeamRCIA.com with her husband, Nick Wagner.