The story behind the recent growth in England’s Southwark archdiocese seems to begin on July 25, 2019.
That was the sweltering day when Archbishop John Wilson was installed as the new head of a sprawling archdiocese, which serves around 400,000 Catholics in south London and surrounding areas.
“We have a hope in the Lord Jesus,” Wilson began his homily. “As your new archbishop, these are the most important first words I could ever say to you.”
Looking out at a packed congregation aflutter with improvised fans, he said: “The Church is all of you, the Church is all of us, joined with Jesus Christ, our Head, and continuing His mission. In this, every Catholic is called to be an evangelizing disciple.”
“Each one of us has an irreplaceable part to play in the flourishing of God’s kingdom. The Lord needs you. His Church needs you.”
Like most dioceses in the Western world, the Southwark archdiocese has been affected by a decline in Catholic practice since Vatican Council II, aggravated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
But this year, 450 adults completed the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults (RCIA) course in the archdiocese, a 164% increase from the year before and the highest figure since 2015.
What’s behind the rise? Catholics in the archdiocese point to a program called Some Definite Service.
What is it? How does it work? And is there a prospect for further growth?
The Pillar spoke with people involved in the program, at the archdiocesan, deanery, and parish levels, in search of the answers.
A diocesan-wide approach
On Sept. 3, 2020, the Southwark archdiocese established its Agency for Evangelisation and Catechesis, succeeding its lively Centre for Catholic Formation.
The agency’s task was to help turn Archbishop Wilson’s vision of a “missionary and evangelizing archdiocese” into reality.
The agency helped to craft the plan known as Some Definite Service — a quotation from the English theologian St. John Henry Newman’s celebrated reflection on God’s call to each person to fulfill their mission within the Church.
“We’ve tried to distill it down to one sentence,” the agency’s director Mark Nash told The Pillar.
“So, Some Definite Service is the diocesan-wide approach to parish growth in evangelization, catechesis, and formation, supported through local people, plans, and prayer,” recited Nash, smiling at his successful recall of the mission statement from memory.
It’s easy to miss how ambitious this is.
Many people’s experience of Catholicism is hyper-local: It begins and ends in the parish a few minutes’ drive away.
Parishes are often self-contained and have weak links with neighboring parishes, let alone the diocesan administration, often located in a distant, nondescript office building most Catholics never visit.
Creating a “diocesan-wide approach” to anything is therefore hard.
But a “diocesan-wide approach to parish growth in evangelization, catechesis, and formation”? In an archdiocese with 175 parishes, covering 1,775 square miles, ranging from the densely populated inner city to rural areas, and with around 80,000 practicing Catholics?
That’s extremely challenging.
In some dioceses, a plan might be launched with fanfare, but little would be done to realize it. It might be put on shelves in parish offices, in binders with charts and buzzwords — and soon enough, it would be forgotten.
But Some Definite Service seems different from your typical diocesan growth plan. There are signs it is being put into effect — and starting to bear fruit.
‘A place of invitation’
Some Definite Service aims to create what the archdiocese calls “a missionary volunteer network.”
Visualizing the network as a pyramid, at the top, you have Archbishop Wilson and the Agency for Evangelisation and Catechesis, with its “diocesan advisory team.”
On the next level, there are the “deanery mentors,” responsible for promoting evangelization, catechesis, and formation in one of the archdiocese’s 20 deaneries.
Finally, there are the “parish leads,” who are the closest to the grassroots practice of the faith and work with their pastors to help parishes embrace the “missionary and evangelizing” spirit.
Behind the various titles, there’s a common goal, according to Nash.
“I think there is a consistent message: the idea that whenever you encounter the church in Southwark, you ought to find a message of invitation to encounter Jesus,” he said.
“Whether it’s through Catholic schools, through parishes, through individual diocesan departments, or through individuals, it’s that encouragement to be consistent, that we ought to be a place of invitation, not just to join the Church but to experience Jesus through his Church.”
Some Definite Service is not only seeking to establish a new structure within the archdiocese; it also aims to inculcate a new language. Those involved in the project tend to repeat certain phrases when describing their work, but without sounding robotic.
One example is “intentional accompaniment,” which Nash defines as “an overarching way of behaving, which has at its heart the willingness to aid the growth of another and, through them, the growth of others.” Another is “active listening.”
Some might dismiss these as slogans, but Nash suggested they have a deeper purpose.
“There’s a language that’s being seeded, and we’re hearing it being repeated more and more back to us, of expectancy, of zeal for souls, a heart for the lost,” he said.
“I think that’s been a fundamental shift, actually: People are talking a lot more about the need to evangelize. More and more people who were doing it in an atomized, or limited, or local manner are being connected one with another.”
‘Bonds of connection’
In his “some definite service” meditation, Newman described each individual as “a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons,” each having a distinctive role to play in God’s “great work.”
Participants in Some Definite Service are not left to their own devices but have an extensive support system.
That’s crucial because this is where many diocesan plans fail. Organizers often assign titles and define objectives, but then step back, relying largely on individual initiative to accomplish a complex goal.
Volunteers in Southwark archdiocese stressed they felt part of a wider team and knew where to turn when they needed help.
“I am not at all on my own,” deanery mentor Maria Christopher told The Pillar via a phone interview.
“There’s a quite a bit of commitment on the part of the archdiocese and also the archbishop, because they have invested in terms of all the resources necessary. They’re a phone call away.”
Christopher is a grandmother who moved from Sri Lanka to England 35 years ago. She works as a care coordinator, helping people living with dementia.
She’s also a mentor focused on evangelization in a deanery in the London Borough of Merton. Through discernment, she discovered she had the spiritual gift of encouragement — a faculty evident even in a brief phone conversation.
One of her chief tasks is to meet with parish leads and encourage them as they take the first steps toward evangelizing in their area.
“It is very transformative,” she said. “The parishes are coming alive.”
“The day before yesterday, I had a parish lead meeting. She herself was saying that suddenly more people are coming, there is more enthusiasm, people want to know each other.”
“The Holy Spirit is working. We are bonds in a chain. This connectivity between people is creating a curiosity, which leads to having a conversation with the right people.”
Deanery mentors are recruited by the Agency for Evangelisation and Catechesis, which provides training and opportunities to connect with other mentors.
Describing Southwark as a “blessed archdiocese,” Christopher noted that in her parish, 13 people entered the Church at this year’s Easter Vigil.
“I think it is exclusively attributable to all the good people praying, and also praying together,” she said. “There is a collaboration with the Holy Spirit and each of us. So these are the effects.”
Christopher suggested that growth across the archdiocese could also be attributed to the leadership of Archbishop Wilson, a cheerful, energetic figure sporting black rectangular glasses.
“He’s very committed to Scripture and also the Catechism of the Catholic Church. These two things go hand in hand. And also he’s actually starting new things, operating on many platforms,” she said.
She cited the archdiocese’s Give Prayer a Go initiative, which featured a Lenten video prayer campaign that reached more than 1.5 million people on Facebook alone in its first week.
“He’s predominantly a very approachable, likable person, and also a very prayerful person,” Christopher said of the 56-year-old archbishop. “He has a disposition of listening and welcoming.”
“And then he really, truly believes in a gathering of missionary disciples and he set out this vision that the archdiocese should become a missionary, evangelizing archdiocese.”
“I think the archbishop clearly has something to do with it,” agreed Nash. “Things are happening in Southwark through his manner, but also his passion.”
“He has remarkable communication skills, and he speaks frequently about the importance of becoming an evangelizing and missionary archdiocese. And I think we’re hearing that echoed in different places.”
‘A greater sense of cohesion’
The team overseeing Some Definite Service seems to have given a lot of thought to what it’s seeking from parishes, mindful that many are already overburdened.
“Essentially, what we’re asking of each parish is to develop a parish plan,” Nash explained.
“And we’re asking for each parish to have three parish leads — one for evangelization, one for catechesis, one for formation — and we’re asking them to pray.”
“Those are the principal things: We want three people and a developed plan that will be ongoing and refined as time goes on.”
Southwark archdiocese is so large that a previous archbishop unsuccessfully petitioned Rome to split it. Nash describes the archdiocese as “a multicultural melting pot,” with Latin American chaplaincies, a large African diaspora, a growing Asian population, and migrant communities from Eastern Europe.
Nash, who grew up in the archdiocese’s smallest parish, in a coal mining area of the county of Kent, said: “I was utterly insistent that whatever it is I do in my work, we don’t just focus on the three or four parishes that are already doing loads of good stuff.”
“And there are many parishes in Southwark that are doing very good stuff in terms of evangelization, in terms of charitable work, in terms of adult formation. But equally, there are others that require a bit more support.”
“At the agency, we really want to ensure that as many people as possible receive that support so that everyone has the opportunity to be in a parish that’s thriving, to grow in their faith, and deepen their prayer life.”
Given the sharp contrasts between parishes, Some Definite Service is careful not to try to impose a one-size-fits-all model. It is the local pastors who select the parish leads for evangelization, catechesis, and formation, and oversee the creation of a blueprint for growth.
“We insist on a principle of subsidiarity,” said Nash. “We can recommend one or two things that we’ve heard have worked in other contexts. But we try to support them in really trying to understand the needs in their place — and then make suggestions according to what they discern they need.”
“So parish leads, priests, others, come together, try and put together a plan to articulate a vision of what they want their parish to be, or what they believe the Lord wants their parish to be.”
“Then we ask them to comment on the reality of the situation. Is it urban or rural? Is it a settled community or transient? Is there a university or a hospital?”
“And then we say, ‘Well, how do you bridge that gap between what you want to be and what you are presently? What’s the thing that you want to focus on?’ And then we help them with the thing they want to focus on.”
Andrew La Trobe, a parish lead responsible for evangelization, has helped to draft a plan with his pastor and other volunteers at his parish in Sevenoaks, Kent.
The father of five, who left South Africa for the U.K. in the late 1980s, was the parish RCIA coordinator before he took up the new role.
He told The Pillar in a phone interview that the plan has three main points. The first is welcoming: To review how the parish welcomes newcomers. The second is improving communication within the parish, including upgrading the parish website. And the third is hospitality.
“We’ve just done a refurbishment of our parish center. So we’ve got better facilities to engage with the local community,” he explained.
Latrobe, who worked in the financial sector for around 30 years before moving into more entrepreneurial work, said that Some Definite Service had given him a new experience of the Church.
“The training days that we’ve been to, and the sharing with others that are going through the same process in different parishes in other parts of the diocese, has created a really quite interesting community,” he said.
“Inevitably, our lives as Catholics are primarily lived through our parishes, which is great. But this has almost created another community of those that are pretty active in their parishes who are now able to share ideas and support and offer guidance as to what’s worked and what hasn’t in their parishes.”
La Trobe said that his parish was geographically one of the largest in the archdiocese, with three other centers in addition to the main church, with eight or nine Masses each weekend.
He sees his task as helping to give fellow parishioners “a greater sense of purpose and clarity that they are evangelizers.”
“If we do it in a coordinated way and along the lines of the archbishop’s vision, and in our particular parish priest’s application of that vision within our local context, then it just gives everyone a greater sense of cohesion,” he said.
“The exciting part is not that we expect to do a lot of very different things, but that hopefully we can just do it in a bit more of a joined-up manner and in a manner which really enhances community life.”
‘All of this is possible’
Agency director Mark Nash acknowledged that Some Definite Service is far from fully developed. Only about a third of parish leads have been recruited so far.
“The network is limited at the moment and we’re looking to grow that,” he said, noting that it was nevertheless “growing weekly.”
“We want one of the things that routinely takes place in these conversations between mentors and leads, and between the advisory team and the mentors, is essentially a space for communicating good things that have happened.”
“So whereas in many dioceses, you do hear about good news, but rarely, we’re hearing about them frequently — both personal and things to do with parishes. I think the spiritual temperature is warming up.”
Nash added: “There are good news stories that are happening and being spotted and claimed and celebrated on a more regular basis. And that in its turn inspires others to activity.”
Given the network is voluntary, and people feel they have less free time than ever, how does the agency persuade people to step forward?
“The single biggest thing is actually articulating and offering them something of a vision,” Nash said. “Something that’s expectant, something that’s inspired.”
“I think people will commit to something for a very short period of time if they feel as though they have to do it. But they are willing to commit themselves generously if they see something as being fundamentally worthwhile.”
He continued: “The archbishop has been fairly consistent in his encouragement of parishes, individuals, and departments to grasp this possibility that we can grow and that Jesus is important today. And anyone that buys into the secularizing prospectus needs to read the Gospels again. All of this is possible. “
“A lot of the narrative is doom and gloom elsewhere. We’ve got to be realistic, that clearly there are challenges, that secularism has taken hold of many young hearts in particular.”
“But seeing the relatively young profile of people coming to the Rite of Election, being received into the Church, is a sign that it’s perfectly possible to puncture that narrative.”
Fundamentally, Nash said, “we’ve got to acknowledge that the Holy Spirit is there before us, that God wants good things in his Church, it’s conceived of in his mind before I was born.”
“So, we have to be mindful that the principal agent for evangelization is the Holy Spirit.”
‘We just need to be bold enough’
Archbishop Wilson told The Pillar in an email interview that it was “a tremendous joy” to see rising numbers of adults entering the Church in the archdiocese.
“It is a wonderful testimony to the witness and commitment of our clergy, laity, and consecrated religious in our parishes, schools, and chaplaincies,” he said.
“Too often, we hear messages of doom and gloom. We are bombarded with a narrative that our society is secularized and unwilling to hear the message of the Lord, but this is not, I believe, a true narrative. Of course, there are challenges, but the real issue is whether we believe in the power of the Gospel.”
“Our approach is simple. Perhaps that is why it is proving effective. We are simply seeking to meet people and invite them to come to know the Lord Jesus through his Church. This means enabling an encounter with Christ through what we do and say, and for everyone we meet.”
“We are trying to be faithful to preaching the Living Word of the Lord Jesus in our schools, parishes, and communities. The focus has to be about calling people to friendship with Christ through the beauty of our Catholic faith.”
“Take our efforts to online evangelisation as an example. We recognize people are increasingly ‘online,’ so we are seeking to meet them there and bringing the message of the Lord Jesus to them.”
Wilson referred to the Give Prayer a Go initiative, which he said had “reached millions of people without any money spent on advertising.”
“By simply sharing the Words of the Lord Jesus, through homilies and prayers, people are responding,” he said.
“It’s the same with prayer and inviting people to take part and grow in prayer. I was privileged to lead an archdiocesan-wide rosary with our schools in May, which saw over 10,000 children and young people take part in praying the rosary with me.”
“People often say ‘young people aren’t interested in prayer,’ but how wrong they are. I saw how passionate and immersed in the rosary these children and young people were. We just need to be bold enough to meet them in the present moment and circumstances and allow the Holy Spirit to work.”
Wilson said the biggest challenge facing Some Definite Service was “just making a beginning.”
“At first, it may seem daunting, but we have set out to encourage each parish, each school, each priest, and each lay person to evangelize,” he commented.
“I want the Archdiocese of Southwark to be a missionary archdiocese, one which does not shy away from evangelizing; and the people in our archdiocese are responding wonderfully.”
“Within our schools, we have a new program where we invite non-Catholic staff to consider being received into the Church. It has started as a small pilot, with a handful of schools taking part and this year we saw four staff becoming Catholics.”
“There has been great interest in the program and we intend to roll it out more widely across the archdiocese.”
Wilson said the project’s premise was simple.
“We use the words of the Lord in the Gospel: ‘Come and see.’ It’s about just inviting people in. That’s all we have to do, each and every day, in each and every encounter, invite people to hear the call of the Lord Jesus.”
“Schools and dioceses from Australia, Canada, and across the U.K. have since been in touch to find out more about the program and we will, of course, be sharing all that we can to help people run similar initiatives in their own schools.”
Wilson stressed that the Agency for Evangelisation and Catechesis was crucial to efforts to evangelize across the archdiocese.
“By providing hands-on support to parishes, they help equip them to lead people to Christ,” he said.
“Again, it’s about meeting people exactly where they are, just as the Lord himself did. It’s about recognizing no parish is the same and that we need to utilize the unique gifts — and indeed, acknowledge the challenges — of each parish.”
“What remains consistent is our clear message on the need to be passionate about evangelization and to enable people to encounter the Word of the Lord Jesus for themselves.”
Turning to the future, Wilson said: “I look forward, over the next few years, to our plan to become a missionary and evangelizing archdiocese growing from strength to strength.”
“By trusting in the Lord Jesus to guide us in our efforts, we have great hope that so many more will encounter him and find life through his Church.”
