January 2012

A New Year

Hope, Anticipation and the Promise of the Future

Dear Friends,

A new year has begun bringing with it hope, anticipation and the promise of the future. Here in the Catholic Community of Wilmington and South Tewksbury, we are already well into the year’s work, focusing on pastoral planning.

As you know, in December we conducted a survey asking you for your thoughts on such topics as faith formation, spirituality and worship, and outreach. We are in the process of reviewing the results and will have more information for you on that soon. Our objective is to develop a pastoral plan that will strengthen our ability to fulfill the mission of the Church, which is to spread the Good News of Christ.

The next step will be to hold focus groups with parishioners, digging more deeply into the topics the survey covered. After that, we will have a listening day, a daylong event open to all, during which we will review the history of the parishes and the results of the focus groups. Later in the day we will hold discussions.

Finally, we will have a dialog day. The purpose of this event will be to determine how to use the information we have gathered, what steps and initiatives we will take going forward, and what we want our parish life to look like in the future.

We appreciate the response we have received from parishioners. I hope you will continue to be an active participant in the focus groups, listening day and dialog day. Your parish—our parish—is a vibrant faith community because of the care and attention our parishioners give to the important work we all do every day.

May God Bless,