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From the Editor
Jean Bach
When a new church is built in a Glenmary mission community, it’s a time to celebrate. But the real celebration isn’t about the construction of the building. It’s about the construction—and growth—of the Catholic community in a home mission county. As Margaret Gabriel writes in this issue’s cover story on page 9, “a new church signifies that the mission community has grown and is now an established, permanent part of the greater community.”
Glenmary has established and turned back over 100 missions to their respective dioceses for continued pastoral care since 1939. Each of those missions—as well as our missions today—began with Catholics meeting in storefront churches like those featured in Then and Now on pages 12-13. The storefront and those who attend Mass there become part of the evangelization effort, a way of letting the folks of the county know “the Catholics are here!”
As missioners work to build the Body of Christ that gathers each Sunday inside the Catholic church doors, they also work to build the Body of Christ outside those doors by collaborating with local Christian churches to form ministerial associations.
In the rural counties that Glenmary serves, ministerial associations are often key to beginning the cooperation necessary to establish and sustain county-wide outreach. These associations can affect change as evidenced in Brother David Henley’s article on page 5 about the recovery efforts following a devastating fire at the Cargill Meat Solutions plant in Booneville, Ark.
Father Wil Steinbacher says on page 12 that “It’s the missionary effort to begin to plant the seeds of the Church that will grow.” The seeds planted by Glenmary in these Kentucky, Tennessee and Arkansas missions have taken root. Let the celebration begin!
The story above first appeared in the Summer 2008 Glenmary Challenge.
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