Stewardship Team

Purpose: To personally invite parishioners to engage in stewardship activities at Sacred Heart. Sacred Heart's mission is 'We, God's people embrace in Christ's Spirit, Catholic Education, Christian Commitment for life, Sacrament, and Community Service, by the mercy of God" and we define stewardship as the development of meaningful involvement.

Responsibilities: To implement the Stewardship Strategic Plan. To coordinate and execute the invitation to total stewardship: prayer, service and offering. To communicate stewardship activities. To continue stewardship development and education. To oversee stewardship implementation teams.

Time Commitment: 2-5 hours/month.

Meeting Frequency and Time: Meetings are approximately 1 hour long, starting at 7:15pm. Meeting dates are chosen well in advance.

Additional Time Requirements: As needed to complete specific tasks.

Commitment Needed: 15-18 months.

Additional Requirements: Team members need to be positive, vision-driven and committed to the process.

Stewardship Core Team

The mission of the Stewardship Core Team is to guide Sacred Heart parishioners in their journey to live more fully as disciples of Jesus Christ.  We do this by the practice of stewardship; receiving God's gifts gratefully, cultivating them responsibly, sharing them lovingly in justice with others, and returning them with increase to the Lord.

Our charter is focused around the following responsibilities:

• Education and communication of Total Stewardship to Sacred Heart parish
• Identify ways to more fully engage parishioners in the stewardship process
• Assist and enable the implementation teams (i-Teams)
• Communicate to the parish the projects and successes of the i-Teams and the core Team

Sacred Heart currently has 2 implementation teams (i-Teams)

• i-Welcome focuses on creating a welcoming environment for new and existing parishioners
• i-Ministry focuses on engaging parishioners in sharing their gifts with Sacred Heart through participation in service.

Our current core team consists of the following members;

Fr. Gregory Leif, Kevin Riha, Jim Foley, Pat Foley, Deb Wobschall, Kathleen Miller, Diane Wollenburg, Brian DeVos, Dorothy DeVos, Helen Valencia.

We are currently looking for new members. If you are intersted in attending and learning more about what our team does, please contact Fr. Greg Leif.

Current Stewardship Core Team Members

Overview

Vatican II closed in 1965 with the introduction of some major changes in the practice of our Catholic faith. The most obvious change was toward the use of local language instead of Latin in the liturgy. This step began a subtle shift from a Clergy centered, sometimes mysterious, Church toward the inclusion of laity in liturgy. Some felt the shift as foreign, while others saw it as an opportunity to become more involved. Prayer became more meaningful and participation in the liturgy just seemed to make more sense. Change comes slowly to large institutions! The shift to English was relatively easy, but the involvement of the laity took time. The role of the parish priest has always had many facets with the most important being the spiritual health and growth of all members. Responsibilities of managing the operations of the parish, although ultimately that of the pastor, has generally moved to local leadership over the past 40 years. To aide in this transition the Universal Church has established approved guidelines for roles and responsibilities, common practices for operations and governance for shared financial support to keep a level of uniformity across the worldwide church. Pastors have migrated from "owning" all the duties, toward collaborating closely with the laity to coordinate church activities, while spending more of their time in the spiritual role and somewhat less in the operations role. Here at Sacred Heart that transition has been moving along quite well. The establishment of the parish counsel, Board of Education, Finance Council and now the Stewardship Council has moved us from a pastor centric focus to a healthy cooperation between religious and laity in the life of the parish. People in a variety of ministries have always been working in the background at Sacred Heart, but we are moving quickly toward greater numbers of engaged members to grow the lay involvement and total parish stewardship of our membership. In late 2008 several members of Sacred Heart and Father Marty attended a seminar in the Cities to learn about a successful organization working in the ministry of helping parishes grow Total Parish Stewardship and Development. A vision of a "warm and inclusive" parish was presented, where many more members are working together each adding their strengths to the life of the parish. Growth in community and spirituality make it easier for all who choose to participate. Parish life just makes sense for more. Just over a year of prayer, research and planning led to our working with Institute for School and Parish Development (ISPD). Their initial activities began on January 17, 2010 when Stephanie Greenwood visited Sacred Heart to begin a ten month effort to help us create a structure for identifying needs and establishing plans to make greater strides in Total Parish Stewardship and Catholic Development. A core team had been working in the background to get this process rolling and are incorporated into the process used by ISPD to help facilitate the activities here at Sacred Heart. This will not be a one time year long process and should not be seen as a "flavor of the month" project. It must be a continuous improvement set of tasks that renew annually becoming a fabric of our spiritual and social life. The outcome of the first year will be the establishment of the process to identify needs and the method to prioritize and act to improve those identified areas. The work to develop an infrastructure necessary to continuously communicate with and invite input from all members with meaningful action plans along with a strategy and a base of parishioners to keep the process alive has begun. This is indeed OUR process with Sacred Heart personality and member driven goals, not of a few, but of ALL. With the help of the Holy Spirit and the cooperation of Sacred Heart members we will be rewarded with a more vibrant, inclusive and warm parish life.