People working in the Church today often do not have an overall pastoral approach. Most have either an activities-oriented approach or a problem-oriented approach. I have found myself in the last few years in a number of working groups in the Church. In literally hundreds of meetings, trying to do anything in the modern world gives a person a great deal of experience with meetings. These groups have almost always dealt with activities or problems. Rarely have they reached the level of an overall approach or strategy for building-up the Church. Perhaps the most common approach in the Church today is activities-oriented. For instance, a parish staff meeting will regularly concern itself with getting teachers for the CCD program, scheduling Masses, repairing buildings, getting commentators and lectors, registering children for school. It will consider these important because it is assumed that every parish must have certain activities. Therefore, the function of those in charge of the parish is to see that these activities happen. They must be scheduled and given a place, and people must be found for them. It is sometimes assumed, in fact, that the more activities a parish has, the better that parish is. Another example which illustrates the activities-oriented approach concerns the training a priest gets. Most of a priest's education is academic. But when he is given practical training, he is taught how to speak (give sermons), how to perform the liturgy, how to teach catechism, perhaps how to counsel. In other words, his practical training consists in being given skills to perform certain activities well. His practical training is activities-oriented. The second most common approach is the problem-oriented approach (not to be confused with what some sociologists term the "problem-solving approach," which is, in fact, close to what will later be described as the holistic approach). The parish staff meeting can also illustrate the problem-oriented approach. The parish staff meeting will often take up a number of problems: how to accommodate the people for the Mass with the overflow crowds; how to handle the situation now that there is one less priest; how to get more children to attend CCD; what to do now that not enough volunteer teachers showed up, or how to respond to the boycott. Much of what happens in a parish staff meeting is reaction - responding to a particular problem which has to be solved. The training which priests receive can also illustrate the problem-oriented approach. Because of the many new problems facing the Church today, many efforts are being made to improve the formation of priests. The inner-city problem, the education problem, the problems of authority and structure, all need attention. The response on the part of many priests and seminarians and on the part of those forming priests often is to want to add to priestly training the study of social work, counselling, or sometimes politics (some priests, for instance, are "going to school" to Saul Alinsky and others to learn how to help their people or even to learn how to deal with their bishops). There is a natural desire for priests and those forming them to want to add particular skills to help them deal with particular problems. A third approach is the holistic approach. This approach has to be concerned with activities and problems. But it does not put the focus there. The focus in the holistic approach is on the goal orideal and on the whole. In other words, the holistic approach is primarily interested in building something, in forming the Church as a whole or some unit of the Church into what it should become. Someone who is working with the holistic approach would keep his interest mainly focused on the goal or ideal of what the Church should be and on the Church (or part of it) as a whole. He would work toward having a process under way which would move it toward becoming what it should be. The three different approaches can be illustrated in house construction. In building a house, there are a number of activities needed. There are the carpentry work, the electrical work, the painting. One man runs a bulldozer leveling the ground, another makes concrete for the foundations, still another raises the beams. These are all activities which are essential for building the house, and the people who perform them usually take an activities-oriented approach. They have "a job to do." Also, in the construction of a house, problems need to be dealt with. Steel beams are too long. A sudden rain floods the basement. These are specific problems that can develop, and they can be taken care of by a problem-oriented approach. The foreman calls in special help or equipment to take care of the specific problem. In addition to all the activities and the efforts that deal with problems, there is also the work of the architect. He has what might be called the holistic approach in the construction of houses. He is concerned that all the activities and efforts go together in such a way that something is being built. He is concerned with the goal, with the whole. Both the activities-oriented approach and the problem-oriented approach embody the danger of just considering an activity in itself. In the holistic approach, on the other hand, it is clear that the activity has to be considered and evaluated primarily in its place, in the whole, and in its relationship to the purpose of the whole. An activities-oriented approach or a problem-oriented approach is adequate in situations where there is little overall change because in those situations the specifications of the job are obvious. They can be learned as a set of activities. For example, a number of years back, a person could be taught how to function as a priest with an activities-oriented approach. What had to happen at a Mass, for instance, seemed relatively obvious. All the person had to do was to learn a set of skills. The specifications were visible and could be handled with a little experience. When a process of development is needed, however, the use of an activities-oriented approach or a problem-oriented approach can only lead to a variety of difficulties. Sometimes the efforts made turned out to be aimless or blocked the development which should have taken place. A progressive priest, for example, will decide that changes have to be made for the renewal of a parish. He will then go about introducing all the good things he has seen. He will establish CFM groups, send people to Cursillos, begin folk liturgies, have dialogue groups, start a parish council, co-sponsor a sensitivity-type weekend and "open-up" the rectory. Within a couple of years, he and his people will begin to develop battle fatigue, because they are involved in a number of activities without those activities adding up to anything or without the parish being formed into some kind of whole. Moreover, the existence of different groups and programs that people are committed to will block the development of the right kind of efforts, because the people who should be responsible for a better parish life have their time taken up in activities which are good, but which do not add up to a better parish. The holistic approach is needed also when the situation as a whole is inadequate and needs a total redesigning. Often, in dealing with problems, it can be a mistake to focus only on the problems themselves, the way a problem-oriented approach does. Focusing on the problems can lead to solutions which meet the problem but are destructive to the whole effort. For instance, one criticism leveled against housing projects in cities is that, in destroying old neighborhoods, they cause worse social problems than the one they relieve (inadequate housing) because they uproot people and destroy the help people get from natural community patterns. If this is true, building housing projects is an example of solving a problem and making the situation in the city as a whole, worse. Sometimes, focusing on problems can lead to working on particular solutions, when what is needed is an overall strategy which, while not dealing with each problem in itself, eliminates the need to deal with them because it eliminates the cause. Take, for instance, some approaches for dealing with the problems patients have in a mental hospital. Institutional settings cause certain problems as well as relieve others (as we discovered after hospitals were built). One approach to handling these problems is to add new types of counseling and other new services (both costly procedures). An alternate approach, for at least a variety of patients, is to develop treatments which involve the patient's living outside an institution and needing less care. In other words, the new approaches which are being worked out are not just a matter of patching up the old system (solving its individual problems), but taking a look at the whole and trying to redesign it (a new strategy). What we have called the holistic approach becomes more and more important in times of rapid social change. Today, one of the most significant developments in business is the so-called "managerial revolution." A hundred years ago, business was conceived of as the operation of a certain number of activities. The job of the owner or top man was mainly that of making sure everything got done. But in today's rapidly changing economy, the key person in the business is the manager, the person who can grasp the goals of the operation and who can mold the entire business or part of it into a whole, a unit, which can pursue its goals and adapt to the changes of society without disintegrating or becoming less and less effective (less and less profitable). Today's manager has to have a holistic approach. The Church today is being forced to go through the same process which business is going through. It needs a pastoral revolution similar to the managerial revolution in business. One hundred years ago, what needed doing was obvious in the Church There was a system that worked tolerably well. As long as the priest learned some skills so he could perform certain activities, the Church would go on. It was enough for the priest, say, to learn how to teach catechism better. He would never have to face the situation in which people would be asking why have catechism at all. The activities of a parish could be listed and a man could be trained for any or all of them. I do not mean to say that the holistic approach was not needed a hundred years ago in the Church, any more than that businesses did not need managers then. The holistic approach was needed to set up the system in the first place and to deal with any problems that came up which were of such magnitude that some major adjustment was needed to deal with them. Moreover, if a priest back then had a holistic approach, he could do a great deal more for a parish. But the holistic approach was not needed then nearly as much as it is now. A man without a holistic approach could get by if he could do the activities well enough and was a likeable enough person. Now, that is less and less true. Every unit of the Church needs people with a holistic approach. It is no accident that people now are anxious about the role of the priest and the purpose of the parish. The old system cannot be simply assumed. It is changing. People are needed who can be the managers of a process of Church renewal. People are needed who can grasp the purpose of the Church, who can care for the whole Church, who can build something. The holistic approach gives us the vantage point from which to ask what are the most important tasks facing the Church today. It is not enough to deal with the problems (clerical celibacy, papal authority, birth control). Nor is it enough to develop new activities (parish councils, ecumenical dialogues, parent-educator programs). These may be important, but they can be handled only in the context of an overall strategy or blueprint for building the Church. What is needed is a clear grasp of the goal (What it is that we are trying to do in the Church today, what ideal the Church should be heading for) and a way of bringing the Church, as a whole (the whole Church), to it. What is needed is a plan of development that will deal with the needs of the Church in the 20th-century world. |
