Dear Friends,

For the past five weeks, our liturgy focused on the Bread of Life Discourse from St. John’s Gospel, Chapter 6. However, beginning this Sunday till the end of the month, our Sunday liturgy will shift focus on Stewardship. You may recall that for several months in the past, I spoke about and wrote articles on stewardship. I am convinced therefore, that stewardship is by now not a new concept to our parish.

Moreover, in trying to understand better our parish’s past, I found out that our parish was so heavily involved with stewardship that it was, at one time, considered a model stewardship parish, especially under Fr. John Bonavitacola. This is what I hope our parish will become under my leadership because I personally also believe in stewardship. However, I also believe that to achieve this objective, we must have a correct understanding of what stewardship is and the spirituality it is built on.

In a past article, I pointed out that, understood correctly, stewardship is our recognition that whatever we have is a gift from God meant to be received gratefully, developed diligently with increase, and shared generously with our neighbors. We do this practically by, intentionally and consistently, offering of our time, talent, and treasure to God through our parish community. Our personal involvement in our parish’s life through sharing generously our time, talent and treasure will define what our parish will be like. To deepen our understanding further on what stewardship is, however, the following will be the focus of our homilies:

• This weekend, Sep 1 will introduce us to what stewardship is.
• Sep 8 will focus on stewardship of Time.
• Sep 15 will be on the stewardship of Talent
• Sep 22 will focus on Treasure

Sep 29 will be our commitment weekend where I will ask you to commit your time, talent and treasure to the service of our parish. I now invite you to join me in praying our parish’s stewardship prayer which contains, according to me, all the ingredients of what a faithful stewardship parish should embrace:

My parish is composed of people like me
I help make it what it is
It will be friendly if I am
It will be holy if I am
Its pews will be filled if I help fill them
It will do great work if I work
It will be prayerful if I pray
It will make generous gifts to many causes if I am a generous giver

It will bring others into worship if I invite and bring them in
It will be a place of loyalty and love, of fearlessness and faith, of compassion, charity, and mercy, if I, who make it what it is, am filled with these same things

Therefore, with the help of God, I will dedicate myself to the task of being All the things that I want my parish to be. AMEN.

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