About

 St. Francis de Sales parish has four purposes which Christ gave all Catholic churches.

Our first purpose is: We are called to Love the Lord with all our hearts. This purpose describes for us the heart of Catholic Liturgy. Our worship is to give expression to our love of God. These two, love of God and worship, go hand in hand. It is in this way that worship becomes for us something we want to do.

We recognize that we must be a place where everyone is welcomed and we reach out to one another. This means that everyone is free to express themselves without judgment or criticism. We are to maintain a good relationship with one another in an open and sharing environment.

This enables us to be a place where our relationship with God is strengthened and encouraged through meaningful and spiritual worship. We can be theological sound but we also need to be spiritually significant. In short, we see that the need to have our spiritual development is facilitated as we grow in our love of God and love our neighbor. As someone expressed it in the survey, we are called to be a beacon for our neighborhood.

Our second purpose as a parish is to Love our neighbor. This purpose shapes our ministry. Our ministry demonstrates God’s love to others as we become the hearts and hands of Jesus. Our ministries are to meet the spiritual; emotional, relational and physical needs.

We do some of these ministries, but there is room for more and more involvement by many more people than those who are currently involved. There was the expressed concern that time, family commitments and the such can and do interfere with our ability to be more actively involved. We recognize that we need to do more prioritizing of our time so that we can better share our talents with the community and neighborhood.

Our third purpose as a parish is to go make disciples. To go make disciples, we like Jesus’ first disciples, need to know, understand and love Jesus, our light. It is in this way, that we will become the light, the salt and the city on a hill top. The quality of our faith is what makes us willing to reach out to others, that is to evangelize. Jesus calls us first to be disciples, that is students, and then to be apostles, evangelizers. Thus, the church exists to communicate God’s Word. It is every Christians’ responsibility to share the Good News wherever we go.

Evangelizing is not only our responsibility; it is our great privilege. We recognized the need to grow in our faith through educational opportunities. We had such opportunities as we reflected on the book, Rediscovering Jesus and currently we are exploring The Gospel of Mark. There was also the recognized need to grow in a deeper understanding of prayer and devotions.

We need to be service orientated (number 2) as we reach out and bring the “lost sheep” back home. We also recognize that this is an area that we as a parish need to work on. The future holds a lot for us if we continue to grow in our understanding of Jesus and share those insights by the way we act in our daily lives.

Our fourth purpose is baptizing. This is the result of making disciples, baptism. This symbolizes one of the purposes of church fellowship, that is identification with the body of Christ. As Christians, we are called to belong, not just to believe. We are not meant to live as lone-rangers but to belong to Christ’s family and be members of his Body.

We recognized that one of our greatest needs to continue to grow and thus to increase enrollment. One of the ways that we achieve this is by “bringing people” into our church. The door way is the Sacrament of Baptism. It is exciting for us here to have our baptisms celebrated during liturgy. It is a reminder that our willingness to reach out, to be welcoming and to invite is indeed working. We also recognize that more and more of us need to be willing to do this. Our future is in our hands. We grow because we reflect the enthusiasm that comes with being a disciple of Jesus Christ. Indeed, we are on the right road.

We recognize this great need to grow in our faith daily. We see the need to touch our congregation with a deeper sense of community, to grow by engaging people, especially the young and new members as well as inactive Catholics by being more and more the expressed words, thought and actions of Jesus.

We recognize that we are on a journey and this journey involves all of us working with discipleship in our mind and in our hearts. Our 100 years plus are a testament to our commitment to be church and to continue to evolve in our faith-live- journey.