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June 2, 2021
Over the past two weeks, we’ve reviewed some of the information that was part of our Parish Assembly presentations in May. We summarized your responses to our Spring Newsletter & Survey (you recommended that we move forward with fewer buildings, perhaps one building in Penn Hills and one in Monroeville). We also reviewed parish membership and activity from 2011 through 2019 (over the past decade, our Mass attendance has decreased by half, and our membership is in significant decline). If you’d like to watch the Parish Assembly presentation in its entirety, it’s available for viewing at our website (www.cdsmph.org/assembly). You also have the opportunity to participate in the Q&A session by clicking the blue Q&A button on the Parish Assembly page.
Given all this information, and in order to understand what our capabilities are and what challenges face us, we formed a “Task Force” last October. The Task Force was comprised of five current, active members of CDS – one from each of our legacy parishes. Each of the members of this team brought not only their love of our faith and of our parish, but also their professional skills and experiences as well (construction, finance, real estate, non-profit work & volunteering). We asked them to rate each of the twenty buildings that our parish owns.
They evaluated all of our buildings by reviewing 32 distinct considerations for each site; this evaluation approach was recommended by the Diocese of Pittsburgh as the standard means to review diocesan properties. The 32 items were grouped into four categories: ‘worship’ (the facilities that the church has at its disposal in order to support liturgy), ‘impact on ministry’ (whether the site can support offices for staff, residential space for priests, facilities for meetings and gatherings, etc), ‘finances’ (not only the costs of operating the site but also all anticipated major repairs/maintenance over the upcoming five years), and ‘location’ (ADA compliance, parking, etc). Each of these 32 line items was rated for each of our six sites, using a zero-to-five scale (with ‘five’ being the highest possible rating). After summing up the ratings by category, the sums were then weighted: ‘worship’ was the most important consideration (35% of the total score), followed by ‘impact on ministry’ (30%), ‘finances’ (20%), and ‘location’ (15%).
This approach enabled our Task Force to rate each of our six sites overall. We found that three sites scored the highest – St Bernadette, followed closely by NAM and St Susanna. Falling a full point behind them were the St Bartholomew and St Gerard Majella sites. The St Michael site scored less than 2 (out of 5), and was the lowest-rated site in our review.
We’d like to offer a word of thanks to our Task Force members: their efforts were honest, unbiased, and characterized by integrity and Christian charity. The results weren’t the only data point that Fr Thom and Fr Larry utilized to reach a proposal, but they were critical in aiding the discernment of our clergy leadership team.
Another vitally important part of the discernment process was the input and recommendations of our parish finance council and interim pastoral council. In the weeks leading up to the Parish Assemblies, they reviewed the parish survey results and the Task Force’s conclusions. Fr Thom and Fr Larry coalesced the data they had received into three talking points: financial and ministerial realities (one site seems insufficient for our needs, while three or more sites are more than we can afford, given our declining resources); geographic considerations (although we continue to develop a unified parish identity, our parish still seems to have a two-community feel to it); and demographics (there are greater numbers of participating parishioners in Monroeville/Pitcairn than Penn Hills).
Our councils were asked whether they thought that our parish could financially support two church sites, and they responded that they thought we could. We then asked them for their recommendation of sites to retain. By a two-to-one margin, they recommended that St Bernadette be retained as the Monroeville site and St Susanna as the Penn Hills site. Fr Thom and Fr Larry accepted and adopted this recommendation, noting that this configuration would mean that, at the most, it could add up to no more than 2-3 miles (and 5-7 minutes) travel time to the existing commute of our parishioners to church.
We presented all this information to you in our Parish Assemblies in May. Next week, we’ll review the questions you asked us regarding those presentations!
Please continue to keep Christ the Divine Shepherd Parish and our parish family in your prayers!
