From: conan@durban.berkeley.edu (David Cruz-Uribe)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian
Subject: Re: Cell Group Churches -- contrasted with "normal" churches
Date: 9 Oct 92 09:23:30 GMT
Organization: U.C. Berkeley Math. Department.

I have been following the recent postings about "cell-group churches"
with some interest--a year or so ago someone unsuccessfully tried to
convince me that this was the future of the Catholic Church.  
Therefore, I thought I would make some more skeptical comments 
about.  These comments are strictly from a Catholic perspective;
they may have no bearing for evangelical Protestants.

In the Catholic church they are usually referred to as "small base
communities" or some variation of that.  They seem to have their
antecedents in Latin America, though I am not too familiar with what
occured there.  To the best of my knowledge, they arose there partly
out of necessity to address the severe lack of clergy.  In the U.S.
one of their first promoters (as I understand it) was a Fr. Baranowski
from Michigan.  He wrote a book about them (the title of which I
cannot remember), has prepared copious quantities of material to aid
parishes which want to switch over to this new paradigm, and also
travels the country speaking about small groups.

Unfortunately, I have never been in a parish which has adopted 
this model, so I cannot comment on it first hand.  However, what
I have read and what I have heard (mostly while serving on a
Diocesan planning committee) has left me unimpressed.  First, I
found the exclusivity of the proponents somewhat unsettling.  Since
small groups are a new paradigm of church organization, and not
"just another program", they demand the complete attention of 
the parish to the apparent exclusion of anything else.  I really
got the sense as I read Fr. Baranowski's book that the parishes
he organized adopted the attitude that if you didn't like small
groups you could go elsewhere.  He talks at one point about 
interviewing new parishoners and I got the sense that they were 
going through an "approval process".  Since Catholic parishes
are organized geographically and, more importantly, are facets of
a universal Church, this approach strikes me as parochial in the
pejorative sense (no pun intended).

While I will be the first to admit that the current organization
of most parishes has problems, one thing in its favor is that it
is flexible enough to handle great diversity.  Further, while in
the best of all possible worlds I would like all Catholics to
be deeply commited Christians, I realize that there are always
going to be degrees of commitment, and I want a Church which is
open enough to minister to the marginal.  Speaking from my own
experience:  when I returned to the Church during college, all
I wanted to do was slip into a back pew; a heavy handed attempt
to get me "involved" would have only driven me away again.  As
time went on I became more open to the need for community and
the various parishes I belonged to readily opened up to me when
I was ready for them.  Nobody ever demanded an "all or nothing"
commitment that small groups seem to require.

I think that this problem is fairly pervasive, though I have only
seen it hinted at.  At one point in his book, Fr. Baranowski
conceded that in a parish he had been working with for _10_
years, they had gotten 25% of the parishoners to join small groups.
Turn this figure around:  after 10 years three-quarters of the
parishoners were not involved in this all encompassing paradigm.

Second, the Catholic church is a sacramental church: as _Lumen
Gentium_ said, the Eucharist is the "font and apex" of our communal
life.  Yet every description of small groups I have seen seems to
downplay their role.  The most outrageous proposal I heard (again
while on a Diocesan planning committee) was to close all the parish
churches in a certain area of Oakland, and reorganize everyone into
small groups.  While perhaps unintentional, this plan seemed to
indicate that small groups would eliminate the need to come together
for the sacraments.

To close:  please note the caveats which stud this post.  If anyone
out there has had positive experiences with small groups in a
Catholic parish, I would be interested in hearing about them.  My
mind is not completely closed--I'm merely skeptical.

Yours in Christ,

David Cruz-Uribe, SFO