In a season of mergers and new beginnings, Pope Francis’ vision of flexibility and outreach offers a roadmap for what comes next.
By Brenda Kresky
In the midst of change, it helps to return to our tradition’s core principles — words that steady the heart and sharpen the imagination. For me, one of the clearest guides comes from Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation “Evangelii Gaudium,” or The Joy of the Gospel.
is the director of planning
for the Diocese of St. Cloud.
He writes about the parish not as a relic to be managed, but as a living community capable of renewal.
“The parish is not an outdated institution; precisely because it possesses great flexibility, it can assume quite different contours depending on the openness and missionary creativity of the pastor and the community.”
That single sentence lands differently when your local Church is being asked to stretch.
Right now, our diocese is living through that kind of moment. New decrees have been released and with them comes the reality many communities recognize immediately: familiar parish boundaries may shift, ministries may combine, Mass schedules may change and long-standing routines may need to be reimagined. The word that keeps surfacing — sometimes with hope, sometimes with apprehension — is “merging.”
It would be easy to treat this as a purely administrative project: fewer buildings, fewer meetings, a cleaner organizational chart. But Pope Francis’ insistence on “openness and missionary creativity” pushes against that reduction. If the parish is meant to be, as he says elsewhere, “the Church living in the midst of the homes of her sons and daughters,” then renewal can’t stop at structural decisions. It has to reach the level of daily life — how we accompany families, how we show up for the sick, how we feed the hungry, how we welcome the newcomer and how we form disciples who can articulate their faith with clarity and joy.
That is why this passage has become one of my favorite excerpts in recent Church documents: it refuses nostalgia and refuses despair at the same time. It names the parish’s flexibility as a strength, not a weakness, and it implies that the Holy Spirit is not limited to the contours we have always known.
Seen in that light, the merging decrees can be more than a conclusion to what once was. They can be the beginning of something that still needs to be built: a “new creation,” a creative way of being Church in the world today. Creativity, of course, does not mean chasing trends or discarding what is essential. It means asking different questions with the same Gospel at the center: Where are people actually thirsty? What would it look like for our parish to be a sanctuary “where the thirsty come to drink in the midst of their journey”?
A mission-oriented parish puts the mission of Jesus Christ first and foremost. It trains its members “to be evangelizers” — not by turning everyone into a program leader, but by helping ordinary people live with extraordinary clarity about why they hope, whom they trust and how they love.
In practice, that might look like a renewed commitment to hospitality, small groups that actually pray and share life, service that is coordinated rather than scattered and homilies and catechesis that speak to the real pressures families face. It also looks like a willingness to say goodbye to what no longer serves the mission, so that energy can be released for what does.
If this season feels uncertain, that may be because it is asking us to become more than caretakers of a familiar past. The invitation is to become Christ’s hands and feet in the world today — together, across communities, with courage and tenderness. The parish is not outdated. It is being called to live again as a community of communities: close enough to hear what people carry, bold enough to go out and meet them and humble enough to keep renewing itself until the Gospel is not only preached, but recognizable in the life we share.