Whew!

That’s what I thought after listening to a 20 minute presentation last week at a regional gathering for Synod members.

Back in April, I attended Agape’s Dialogue Session for young adults. It was a great experience and I really felt the Holy Spirit working in my heart (read more here). Afterwards, I kind of forgot about it all (I got married in July so I’ve been busy!) so it was really interesting to hear how the AOD took the Dialogue Sessions and turned them into something useful for Synod members to vote on.

In all, there were about 180 parishes that hosted dialogue sessions and over 8,000 people

participating in them. That’s an incredibly powerful amount of voices, and a scary amount of data to wade through, especially open ended, wordy answers.

Since there were scribes summarizing the words of dialogue session participants, that cut down on the amount of responses to sift through, but there were still well over 11,000. It took about 250 man hours for the AOD team to sift through, tag, and evaluate all the responses.

That’s right, they read every single response.

Twice.

The second time, the responses were grouped by category and so they were read to get a general feel for the needs of the faithful. Thus the responses were synthesized and discussed. In the addition, a few key groups were surveyed (priests, families, etc), and the responses and analysis of these teams was included in consideration for the propositions. The team created propositions to help address these needs at the AOD, parish, family, and individual levels.

This four-part model was labeled the “missionary model”, focusing first on the individual who needs a relationship with Christ, the family which fosters the relationship daily, the parish that equips the family, and then the AOD which provides the structure and support to the parishes.

These four categories are the focus of the propositions that each Synod member is praying over in the lead up to Synod 16. We’ll vote and rank them, providing the Archbishop with some guidance on what the starting point should be for transforming the AOD into a band of joyful missionary disciple.