My name is Fr. Charlie Garza and I grew up with Amazing Parish as a pastor. I was made a pastor in April of 2014 at St. Martin de Porres in Dripping Springs, TX. I quickly realized I did not know what I was doing and cried out to God asking for help in a vulnerable prayer time with God. The next day I received an email inviting me to one of the first Amazing Parish Conferences in Denver. While God does not usually answer our prayers with emails, God answered me with an email at that time. The Denver Conference was exactly what I needed. I learned how to begin forming a parish leadership team, what it meant to be a leader/manager and began to read every Patrick Lencioni book I could get my hands on. What I had no clue about, I began to learn.
While the conference helped me in my journey of being a leader, I needed coaching as well. Coaching helped me with those concepts I struggled to understand and helped me to apply them to my parish. Thanks to what I learned from Amazing Parish, my first parish doubled in size from 450 families to 1,000 families within 5 years. We also had vibrant small groups, strong leaders, a greatly increased offertory, all debt paid off, and the funding for a $5 million building. My Bishop noted this and moved me to a larger parish in 2019.
When I arrived at St. Albert the Great in 2019, I immediately began forming a parish leadership team and launching a renewal process. While my new parish was more than double the size, it was struggling mightily and had decreased in size over the years. Add to these challenges the arrival of Covid-19 shutdowns – my parish was in a bad position to meet the challenges of the pandemic. We did not have enough money, did not have enough technology, did not have the right staff and the list could go on. However, in the midst of numerous challenges, something amazing started to happen – the one Advantage that my parish had shone bright. St. Albert the Great was the only nearby with a pastor who had completely bought into the Amazing Parish principles and begun to lead with a cohesive leadership team. Quickly, we went from being the dysfunctional parish that no one paid attention to, to being the parish that everyone started to copy. While all the parishes around us were paralyzed, my team and I adapted quickly and came up with ways to effectively evangelize in all areas during a global shutdown. We made the local news for our drive thru confessionals and won a national Catholic award. We were the first parish in our Diocese to recover to pre-pandemic attendance levels when almost everyone else was half their pre-pandemic size.
Today, my parish has doubled our collections and Mass attendance to around 4,200 a weekend. We have servant leaders who clean bathrooms as volunteers and run leadership trainings using Amazing Parish concepts.
The renewal process was MUCH more painful than at my previous parish, and I would not have made it without the help of my parish leadership team and those from Amazing Parish encouraging me. Put simply, Amazing Parish has helped me become the pastor I am today. Thank you for the impact you will be making to pastors like myself.
Fr. Charlie Garza, Pastor
St. Albert the Great I Austin, TX
0 Comments