Grow In Love In the Parish Leader Book

IN THE PARISH
A Bridge between Home,
School and Parish Communities

One of the pillars underpinning the Grow in Love series is the importance of providing concrete opportunities for families to engage in religious education together. By sending home a piece of work, a prayer and a topic to chat about each week, teachers provide parents/guardians and families with such support.

The Grow in Love series also seeks to reflect the fact that the children, their families and their school are part of a much larger community of faith, the parish community.

As the Grow in Love series became established in schools, and as reports of parents’/guardians’ willingness to engage in the At Home material were shared, it became apparent that a resource based on the Grow in Love programme for use in the parish context would complete the circle of home, school and parish working together to foster children’s faith and their sense of belonging to a faith community.

This resource provides that link for families during their child’s First Communion year. It has three main elements:

- A series of liturgically based initiatives
The aim of these is to help families with young children to feel a greater sense of belonging to the parish community, and to find their place in the ordinary Sunday Mass, both in the year of sacramental preparation and beyond.

- A series of newsletters: The newsletters are designed to run in parallel with the school-based Grow in Love programme, and to reinforce the concepts therein. It is envisaged that they would be distributed on a monthly basis to families. Ideally, this should be done in a parish context – for example, at a monthly family Mass.

- Speaking notes: Each month, speaking notes are offered for the priest, together with a sample Prayer of the Faithful. The speaking notes draw attention to the key features of the newsletter for that particular month, and the Prayer of the Faithful picks up on the theme for that month.

- The sacraments are events in the life of the Christian community, not just in the life of the individual. They are grace-filled moments for the community. Parish communities will therefore benefit from sharing responsibility and ownership for sacramental preparation and celebration with home and school.

We hope these newsletters will be a source of information and inspiration to parents/guardians, and will serve to strengthen the engagement of children and their families in the life of the Church.

For further information email: growinlove@veritas.ie