From FunkTex Wiki

Class on Gifts & Talents

Page Purpose

• This page is meant to be only a guideline for the catechist, and the below are very rough notes meant as a starting point...

Guideline

• This session, which is really a set of topics, is not directly related to a chapter in the US Catechism, it was one we added that we didn't feel was covered adequately by the Catechism. When we came up with the topics last fall, what we had sketched out for this was simply the below.
• Gifts & Talents: Stewardship, Vocations, Ministries, Service
• In a typical RCIA journey (which none of our current group has had), the person would have come into the Church via baptism at the Easter Vigil. Then the period between Easter Sunday and Pentecost would be a more traditional period of Mystagogia. Along those lines, we would typically be reminding them that their journey hardly ended with Easter -- it has just begun!
• So part of this period of Mystagogia concentrates on getting the new Catholics to be active in the Church/community. You have to give of yourself and your money. Mass = Misa = Mission, which is what we get at the end of each Mass, "Go forth to love and serve..."
• One challenge for RCIA is we have them every week for around a year, they get baptized-confirmed, and boom-good-luck-adios! And if they aren't involved, they begin to drift away. So getting people involved in the parish as soon as they've "graduated" from RCIA is a real key. Or ideally before they've left us they're in a ministry already. Harder to do in practice than it seems like it would be.
• Many RCIA Teams cover each of the topics (Stewardship, Vocations, Ministries, Service) in separate classes, so you just have to know going into that there's probably too much ground to cover. But if someone told us to separate them all out, we might be stretching for material? We may have to really tweak this depending mainly on your thoughts after you've done the session. Is it 1 session or 2 or more?
• Ministries, you could cover some of the ministries that need help. You could try to give a brief description of all the major ones. Or you could remind them about the ministry fair in the fall and leave it at that. You could reach out to others in the parish for their input on this.
• Vocations: everyone has a vocation, even if they don't know it. You are called to a vocation: (1) Religious Life (2) Married (3) Single. In no order, certainly not of importance. Each as valid and dignified as the other, but each with a different set of graces given so we can live that life "correctly."
• Gifts: we all have different gifts. God did that on purpose so we'd have to rely on each other and live as a community, in Communion, One Body in Christ. I can't quite recall the funny story about the nose (or eyes or something) claiming it was more important than the colon, so the colon stopped its work, and it didn't take long to understand that no matter our role, it's equally important and we are all equal in dignity.