PAT'S POINT OF VIEW
Taking a Team Approach to Christmas

As you prepare for Christmas liturgies at your parsh, it might be a good time to put your commitment to teamwork to the test. What I mean is that during particularly busy times, and Christmas is certainly one of them for people who lead a parish, it is easy to slip back into habits that have been developed over many years. “Let’s just do the Christmas Eve Masses and the Midnight Mass and the morning Mass the way we always have, and we can regroup in the new year to get back to being a team and a healthy parish.”

This is understandable. When we are stressed, we often just put our heads down and try to get through a challenging time. But this is often a waste of an opportunity to solidify our commitment to teamwork. This Christmas, I invite you to consider taking a different approach as a team.

Think about planning your liturgies, your homilies, your hospitality ministry and your music as a team. Sit down together and challenge one another to come up with the very best ways to connect with your parishioners, especially the ones who might only come to Mass on Christmas. How can you reach them during those precious sixty minutes at Mass by presenting the joy of Christ in a way that cuts through the noise and the stress that they bring with them? What could you do, working together, to help them see and hear and experience the only peace that endures? Be creative. Push one another. Pray about it together.

Whatever you do, don’t allow yourself to be sitting there on the 24^th or 25^th and thinking, “next year we should…” Do it now. And remember that in addition to the homilies, music, hospitality and liturgy, the people that come to your parish are going to notice – yes, they will – that you are working together as a team. That matters, because teams are always more joyful than people working alone.