Strengthening the Foundations of Small Christian Communities [SCC] in the Archdiocese of Calcutta (PART II)

 

In the 13-19 November 2020 issue of The Herald, Part 1 of this article, I highlighted the major challenges to the SCC’s growth in the Archdiocese by way of dilution of Christian values by overly secular worldly pressures and lifestyle, resulting in low family participation in the SCC units and so diminished urge for evangelisation. However, the silver lining in the last two years of the SCC revitalization efforts is that many potential leaders from among priests, religious and lay faithful have emerged who can be trained to provide strong inspiring leadership at all levels. The main thrust of the SCC Commission for the next two years is to work systematically towards building a strong, motivated and capacitated group of animators and leaders to address these challenges and concerns to strengthen the foundation for an SCC growth movement.The strategy itself is quite simple – First, create a repository of appropriate and attractive teaching- learning tools and develop training modules for use at the different levels using the vast and rich array of educational and inspirational material available with the SCC National and Regional Resource Centres. Second, work on building up a strong human resource base of inspired and capacitated animators as servant leaders. It is envisaged that batches of SCC volunteer-members will be trained through a systematic set of training-animation process at Zone and Deanery levels to create a task force of about 50 of trained clergy, laity and religious animators. They will be tasked to work with about 5,500 SCC initiated members to build up more than 500 leaders-animators who will simultaneously work to increase the number of existing units from 447 to about 2,000 units in order to bring about 35 percent of the Catholic households into the SCC fold in the next two years. This revitalised human resource base will become the spearhead to work at strengthening the knowledge, and inspiring neighbourly practices among existing units – the families of believers, the Domestic Church. This will instil hope and inspire Parishes to greatly multiply the numbers of families joining the SCC movement as “The future Church of Asia will have to be a Communion of Communities where the clergy, the laity, and the religious accept each other as sisters and brothers.” Asian Bishops Conference of 1990 Bandung. The entire aim of all these efforts towards the growth and spread of SCC is to build a strong faith in the prophetic proclamation – “SCCs are a sign of vitality within the Church, an instrument of formation and evangelisation, and a solid starting point for a new society based on a ‘civilisation of love’.” Pope John Paul II: Redemptoris Missio, No.51. It is clear that this apparently daunting task will become possible only when more and more faithful take up the Holy Bible for a closer encounter with the Lord so as to live Christian lives in greater service and communion with their neighbours and the community. Because nothing is impossible for God.