Living community needs commitment
About 40 women and men from the parish council and church administration of the parish community "am weinstock jesu with the communities of zeil, sand, krum and ziegelanger met for a retreat in the zeil parish hall. The volunteers thought about what pastoral care could look like in the future and what contribution they could make to it. The council was supported by the full-time pastoral care team with pastor michael erhart, pastor i.R. Reiner fries, pastoral advisor norbert zettelmeier, deacon bernhard trunk, deacon franz schick and diaconate candidate andreas hofer. The leadership of the retreat was in the hands of the social pedagogue ilka seichter from bad neustadt.
In the course of the afternoon, it became clear that everyone feels part of a larger community and is willing to help ensure that faith remains alive and can be passed on in the future. While the focus at the moment is still on the further growing together of the four communities, everyone was aware that the pastoral care of the future will encompass much larger spaces. This is how the committee members filled the keywords "challenge", "fear", "opportunities" and "next steps" with their reflections, plans for the future and their visions. When pastoral care units come into being, which in many cases will be coarser than current parish communities, pastoral care can only succeed if many join in, he said. Again and again, they weighed up what was desirable and what was feasible.
Example zeiler kappele
Certainly, many services can no longer be offered in every parish. The fact that people are already taking on further journeys became apparent in the example of the pier kappele. Believers from a distance of 20 to 30 kilometers regularly come to devotions here, because there is no longer such an offer in their communities. The motorcycle service, the bicycle service and the blessing service at the kappele pier also show this trend: people come from far away when a special form of service is obviously important to them.
In many cases, committed lay people are already at work today, keeping faith alive locally by leading word of god celebrations. Such services will become even more important in the future if believers want to gather for prayer in their parish churches.
It was rated as important that the believers also feel part of a rough community and accept appropriate offers. The concern about passing on the faith to the next generation took up a large part of the discussion. Here, too, it became clear that faith can only be felt, experienced and brought to life where people are willing to get involved. Where people only want to be provided with offers from full-time pastors, church life will soon be at the bottom, it was stressed.
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