Delegates have one more week to register for the PROCLAIM 2016 conference.

Registrations for PROCLAIM 2016 will close on 1 August. The event will features three international keynote speakers, 30 exhibitors supporting parish life and 35 practical workshops focused on one evangelising mission.

Hundreds of parish leaders from Australia and abroad  will gather together for the event hosted by the Diocese of Broken Bay in partnership with the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference.

The full conference program is available online.

Some of the workshop topics include: connecting parish and school, renewing sacramental preparation, family-friendly liturgies and evangelisation strategies.

Fr John Pearce CP & Paige Bullen will lead the workshop on ‘Connecting the Parish and School for Christ-Centred Mission. The relationship between the parish and school represents one of the greatest opportunities for evangelisation in the Australian context. Growing relationships and connections at various levels of parish and school life has been the key ingredient in the story of St Brigid’s, Marrickville.

Fr John and Paige will share the story of this Christ-centred and Eucharistic community, identify several principles to grow the parish-school connection while acknowledging those titles, roles and factors that can impede our working together as Church. Participants will be invited to reflect on the potential of leadership in this collaborative relationship and also to consider their own success stories and challenges in building up parish and school communities in the unity of Christ’s mission.

The Very Rev Dr David Ranson will lead the workshop on ‘Parishes of Mercy: Responding to the Sexual Abuse Crisis’. The disclosure of a history of sexual abuse within our Church is a mark of our generation. There is no part of our Church that has not been affected by the scrutiny afforded consistently over the last thirty years by judicial processes and by the media. We now find ourselves in the midst of a Royal Commission which seeks to attend not only to the incidents of abuse but also to the way in which our Church has not responded well to the pain people have experienced.

What is the challenge to our communities of faith by this crisis? How might a community of faith live through this experience which deeply impacts upon the whole Church in a way that is genuinely redemptive? How might a community of faith journey with, and contribute to the healing of those who have suffered, especially when the experience of the community and its leaders has been as damaging? The seminar seeks both to provide some lines of reflection and to draw from the wisdom of the participants themselves.

Lana Turvey will deliver a workshop about ‘Parishes of the Poor for the Poor: A Practical Response to Pope Francis’ vision’. In Evangelii Gaudium Pope Francis invited “a Church which is poor and for the poor” (EG 198). What does this mean? This workshop will unpack the challenge of Pope Francis’ call to poverty and outreach to those who suffer in our midst.

It will provide practical strategies and practices of parish formation so that all members of the parish can be prepared to be an authentic ‘sanctuary where the thirsty come to drink in the midst of their journey, and a centre of constant missionary outreach’ (EG 28).

This radical conversion of the parish for mission demands an awareness of our own poverty, a radical commitment to the other, especially those living at the ‘margins’, and the building up of a parish culture that understands itself and acts unceasingly as a living instrument of Gospel simplicity and mercy.