Fr Stephen Langridge on parish renewal: young people need "an encounter with Christ"
Essays on parish renewal from Fr Stephen Langridge, delivered at a conference in Rome
Fr Stephen Langridge, the parish priest of St Elizabeth of Portugal Church in Richmond, recently spoke at a conference on Evangelisation in Rome. He has written three essays on the talk, which can be read below.
He was invited to the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome to share insights on parish renewal, drawing on his experience as a parish priest and overseeing the initial stages of the Archdiocese of Southwark’s renewal programme, Called to Bear Fruit.
In the first summary essay of his talk, Fr Stephen emphasises the importance of creating parishes that are truly welcoming to all. He said:
“Every parish likes to think of itself as welcoming and friendly. But what is it like for an outsider visiting our churches? I fear that many parishes are perfectly designed to serve the needs of familiar and well-established parishioners. I wonder how many are really oriented towards the needs of the outsider?
“At St Elizabeth’s we try to be intentional about welcoming visitors and newcomers. Unsurprisingly, time and again we discover that many young adults come to us with little knowledge of Christian doctrine, the Church’s moral teaching, or sacramental life. Yet often they come with open hearts. They have come because they are searching for something more.”
A pattern has emerged in the young people Fr Stephen is increasingly encountering in his parish, even if they are unable to articulate exactly what they are looking for. This pattern, he said, “very much reflects a universal human experience”.
Everyone, he explains, is searching for love, for belonging and for purpose. Our duty as the Catholic Church is “to see beyond the label and to recognise that these three great universal human longings find a unique answer in Jesus Christ: in his love, in his Church, and in his mission”.
Helping people discover that answer, Fr Stephen said
“is not simply to persuade people to change behaviour. It is to cooperate with grace in the reordering of the human heart, so that people come to desire what is good and to love what is truly worthy of love.”
What young people need, he concludes, “is an encounter with Christ, and the grace to be transformed by him.”
In his second essay, Fr Stephen writes about the power of a genuine welcome:
A genuine welcome therefore says something before a single word of the Gospel has been preached: We are glad you are here. You matter. There is a place for you among us. For someone who has been far from God, that simple experience may be the first glimpse they have had of the love of Christ in a very long time
In the third and final essay, Fr Stephen writes:
When proclamation, welcome and accompaniment come together, something different begins to emerge. The parish becomes what its sacramental life calls it to be: a community of missionary disciples in which people encounter Jesus Christ, find a home within his Body, are patiently formed in the Christian life, and discover that they too have been entrusted with a mission.
You can read Fr Stephen’s essays via the links. You can also follow Fr Stephen’s Substack here.
