Jesuitical Podcast Inteview - Full Text
Our Co-Founder and Director Avril Baigent is in Rome as a facilitator for the Synod Assembly, and she was interviewed by Zac and Ashley in October 2024 to talk about the concrete and practical ways a parish could become more Synodal at the grassroots.
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
(Avril’s interview begins at 13:38 minutes in)
Interviewer: Joining us in Rome is Avril Baigent. Avril is a co-founder of the School for Synodality, a project to help support the Synodal conversion of the Church in England and Wales, and she's also an official facilitator for the 2024 Synod Assembly. Welcome to Jesuitical, Avril.
Avril: Hello. It's great to be here, and thank you for having me.
Interviewer: Yeah, thanks for joining us. You're quite literally in between sessions at the Synod. So thanks for running over to allow us to facilitate this interview while you're taking a break from facilitating these table conversations.
Avril: Thank you. It's a real pleasure to be here.
Interviewer: And we want to get to your work inside the Synod Hall. But first we want to talk about your ministry, which is all about making synodality practical at the parish -diocesan level, which is great because I'm still struggling to figure out what synodality means and is practically. So before we get to your ministry - how do you describe synodality, when you're going to these places and trying to tell people what you're facilitating in their parishes? What do you say it is?
Avril: I say it's a way of building community and becoming an outward missionary church by that transformational listening to each other. And the thing is, I think that we don't really “get” listening. So it's not like listening, like you might be listening to a podcast, you might be cooking the dinner, or you might be out running. It's the listening that you have when somebody says to you “I need to tell you something”. And it's that kind of ‘pit of the stomach’ complete attention, listening. So when I'm trying to describe it to people, I'm trying to say, this is a very different way to be church, because we can just be very open with one another, and when we're open with one another, the Holy Spirit moves because we're putting our defences down. So, it's transformational.
Interviewer: But it's not, maybe, super obvious about how that's going to be transformational, or how to do it, hence founding of the School of Synodality. Yes?
Avril: Absolutely, I think because it has a huge theological aspect to it, you know, which needs understanding, like: what does this mean for the teachings of the Church? How is this unpacking Vatican II and how are we living out that kind of ‘Lumen Gentium’ vision of the church? But actually, if you're in a parish, you haven't got time for that!
But what people love about it is, number one, they love their church communities. They want to be in community with one another, and people are lonely in this day and age. You know, they're lonely in the West, and we've forgotten how to be in community. So if our church communities can be places where people really know each other, and you know, we found that out in COVID. I don't know about in America but in the UK, we suddenly discovered that Mrs. Smith, who'd sat behind us on the pew for 30 years, we didn't know where she lived, and we couldn't check in with her, and we kind of had to wait for six months until we saw her again. And that was a real embarrassment and a humiliation, really - how are we ‘community’? We don't even know each other very well.
So our work in terms of the School of Synodality - and I should say, I work in the [Northampton] diocese as well - so everything that we're doing that we're thinking about in the School of Synodality, I'm doing this day-to-day in my diocesan work. So, it's really grounded and really, really practical.
Interviewer: So when you go to a parish and you're selling them on the ‘School of Synodality’, what are the things you're offering them?
Avril: I'm asking them questions they've often never been asked before. So in my diocesean role, I'm Director of Pastoral Development, and we are trying to do a synodal renewal of our diocese, which means, like lots of places in the West, we need to rethink where we are, where our churches are, where our ministry is, how many priests that we have, and our Bishop doesn't want to do that by sitting in head office and issuing a kind of plan. He wants to do it with everybody, together with him as the bishop and with the people on the ground.
So often, what I'm saying when I'm going into a parish is: what is your dream for the future of your community? People say to me “we've never been asked that before, we've just never been asked that before”. We might be asked... what are your preferences around mass times? That is a different question, and it's actually coming from a different perspective, to dream together, to allow the Holy Spirit into that conversation is so much more deep and transformative.
And actually, you'll come around a table and people will be saying, “Oh, but I want this,” and “I want that”. By the end of the conversation, you'll have something in common that's emerging, and that is the true gift of synodality. It’s that sense of mutual giving and receiving and listening to one another.
Interviewer: Do you find that parishes are starting from zero, or are there elements of synodality that, maybe, developed organically over the last decade or so that you might point to and say ‘Oh, this is an example of this that you're already doing, do more of this?’
Avril: Yeah, for sure. So, this isn't an innovation in the church. This is a way of living that we've kind of dipped in and out of over 2000 years. It really is, really the way that the early church functioned. And if you go back and you look, you get writers like St John Chrysostom writing third century/fourth century, the Synod is church like “we have to do this together”. And I will look, and I'll say,’ Look, anything where you have a community which is open to all the voices..’ so, I'm not talking about groups which have had the same membership for 10 years. They can feel a bit funny about new people coming in.
I'm talking about where you've got real outreach, real ministries, are going out and listening. Because when we are listening to people outside our peripheries, when we're listening to what the real needs of the community are, then that transforms us. And you'll often find that people are involved in that kind of either in mission or in social action or even education, they're really passionate, but it's quite hard to kind of convey that to the rest of the community, who are like, “Yeah, but we just want to make sure our church is still here next week”, you know, like, “we haven't got time for any of that”.
One thing that synodality does is it brings those practices of listening which do exist and really, really exist in our religious organisations, we should be listening to them. They've had 30-40 years of doing chapters of listening and discerning together. They can tell us what all the mistakes are they made, and how to do this better. Wherever there is good community building that doesn't exclude outside voices there, you've got synodality already functioning.
Interviewer: Are there specific examples that you've seen whether it's pastoral council or even the way that a school principal maybe exercises their leadership in a certain way, or do we have to build these structures from scratch?
Avril: I tell you where I have loved hearing about this is in the African church. I have just been like soaking it up in the coffee breaks, listening to the African bishops telling me about their pastoral councils, telling me how they'll go. They'll spend five or six hours together. They'll pray together, they'll eat together, they'll discern together.
I've been reflecting on pastoral councils for the last three years, trying to figure out if we all should be having a Pastoral Council (and it looks like that might be one of the Synod recommendations) so let's not just make everybody have loads of bad meetings. How can this be better?
I think in the West, we got really good at exercising our agendas and our minute taking and our tracking our actions. And the side of pastoral councils, which should be about prayer for listening, should be about breaking open the Word together, should be about growing together as a spiritual community: we sort of left that behind.
I don't know about you if you've ever been to a meeting where somebody says, ‘Oh, we need to pray. Let's have a quick Our Father’. You know, that isn't enough. Our pastoral councils have said to me things like, I'm running into our meeting straight from work. I've got everything that's happened in the day trailing with me, I just need to get home. I need to get this meeting done.
If we start with 15 minutes of Lectio Divina Prayer, which I could completely, completely recommend to people, then I am grounded and rooted before I begin - and I know this isn't ‘my’ meeting, this is about handing over to the Holy Spirit. We have found that beginning with this ancient form of prayer, Lectio Divina, is about sharing a passage of Scripture together and just sharing a word or a phrase which means something to you.
As Catholics, we can be quite shy about sharing our faith, but you can't be wrong about sharing a word of Scripture. Our deans have said to us, this is transformational. This is completely changing the way that we relate to each other. But as Catholic as we kind of go, ‘Oh, look at us talking about our faith’...we don't do that very often!
Interviewer: It turns out praying: helpful!
Interviewer: One thing I struggle with is making the connection between these synodal practices and mission and reaching the people on the margins. Because people in the Synod Hall are like people who are bought in, they are church professionals or priests. And most parishes at that listening session that was mostly kind of people who were already bought in on this idea and excited about it. And so how do you, you know, in your parish, having these synodal conversations at your pastoral council with people who are already there, how does that translate to reaching out?
Avril: I have to tell you, in the Synod Hall, it is people who are challenging us. There are people from all over the world who are coming and saying ‘I'm standing up for the cry of the poor. I'm bringing the cry of the poor into this room. You have to listen to this’. So it is the global church that's gathered there. It isn't just like a few Western professionals having a nice time. I have never been in such a global gathering. It is absolutely amazing.
But what I would say is that process of Conversation in the Spirit, in the preparatory document says that if everybody's agreeing, you haven't got the right people in the room. And so there is something about saying there's a fundamental question, which says, whose voices are we not hearing? And one of the examples I give is - every parish council I've ever been to will be lamenting the lack of young people, right? Forever and ever. They were lamenting that when I was a teenager, and that's 30 years ago now. Why don't we talk to some young people? I've never heard a parish council say ‘oh, let's go away, reflect, we'll talk about it again in three months’. What if they said, whose voices are we not hearing? Who isn't in the room?
Well, who isn't in the room? It's young people, it’s parents, it’s teachers. Let's go and have some conversations with them. Let's find out what they want. So actually, when we start to break that open and we say: this synod process is not for the parish council, which is sat around the table, which likes having meetings - this in our process is for everybody.
And when you have heard somebody speak to you in that very real register, then it breaks your heart, and it rightly breaks your heart - we should be being transformed by the conversations we're having. If we are going out and prayer-walking our community, if we're going out and we're saying: Where are the needs of the people who are next door? If you're really going to start imagining that ‘Church without walls’ that Pope Francis talks about, we won't do that on our own. We've got to have those conversations.
And the thing that I love about the Conversation in the Spirit method is that it doesn't matter if your English isn't great. It doesn't matter if you have a disability, which means it's harder for you to engage. It doesn't matter if you have hearing issues, or if you're not used to sitting in those groups - everybody's voice is heard, everybody has their time, and it's incredibly empowering to be listened to like that.
Interviewer: On the School of Synodality. You frame ‘four steps to synodality’. It's sort of like an introduction based around the Acts of the Apostles and this First Council of Jerusalem, which I think is a very clever way of like pointing back to the tradition of the church and saying, you know, from the very beginning, this is kind of how we've operated. But for those who maybe have fallen asleep during that reading at Mass, could you just like, set up for us what happens during that chapter of Acts?
Avril: Yes! So Paul and Barnabas are too successful. They're spreading the gospel. People are flocking to them. I don't know what to do with all these people, because some of them are Jewish and some of them are not, and they don't know. At that point in Christianity, we hadn't figured out, do you have to be Jewish to be Christian? And in effect, the whole of our future understanding of ourselves, everybody who doesn't have Jewish ancestry, your own being in Christ, hangs on that question. And so what they have, first of all, and when you read the passage, it's really interesting is they have a fight, they have a dispute, and there are angry voices, because there is not an obvious answer to this question, and there are really good reasons to say: No, you should be Jewish if you're Christian, like you know, Jesus was Jewish. This is part of being Jewish.
What they don't do is they don't break the church. They don't say, Okay, our bit of the church, we're going to start baptizing Gentiles as Christians, and the rest of you can do what you like. They travel to Jerusalem, and they make it an official conversation, and it's pretty brutal when they get to Jerusalem as well. There's a lot of you can see it in the readings, and then there's this moment where it says and then they were silent, and this is the point at which then they start to speak of their experiences. They tell the stories, and they are really being heard. They are telling the stories of the conversions that have happened. And Peter tells the story of the conversion of Cornelius, and you get this discernment happening. But what is absolutely fantastic is it doesn't stay in the room - they get to the point where they say it seems good to the Holy Spirit and to us.
And then they make a decision, and the decision is, you do not have to be Jewish to be Christian. You just have to hold by these few rules. And they write a letter, and the church changes. And so the reason we love that passage, that bit of Acts 15, is it shows this whole process in its openness. There wasn't a good answer to the question. We had to have a fight about it. We went into silence. We listened to each other. The Holy Spirit helped us discern. We moved to action. And so we have this kind of four-fold process of discerning that something has to be decided. Like, not everything is a synodal moment. Otherwise we would never get anything done. So, like this has to be a conversation.
The second one is, is the listening, as I said, whose voices are not in the room. The third one is then the discerning, the discerning of the Holy Spirit, and really, kind of getting into that and listening to ourselves and to each other. And the fourth one then moves us to action. Synodality has to have consequences. And we can't just be sitting around listening to each other, it has to move us into new ways of being church.
Interviewer: So listening to you tell that story, there's a lot of conflict. You say there's fighting... is the Synod like, too nice? Like, are we? It's kind of designed so that there is no fighting. And you know, you're telling your story, you're listening, but you're not, It's not a real struggle?
Avril: Oh, no, I have been in conversations where there's proper - you know? I mean, people are not fighting fisticuffs, but they're definitely expressing strong opinions. And I honestly would say I have done facilitation, I mean, the most difficult and most poignant facilitation I did was when I was asked to facilitate a conversation between survivors of church sex abuse and practitioners and theologians around a report that was coming out, and that was really, really hard, but we used the Conversation in the Spirit method. We stuck to it, and we got there by the end of the day, we had definitely been able to find common understanding of one another. I've been in other conversations where somebody has just been determined to derail it, and they've been absolutely as vile as they can be. And what happens?
We should probably explain these how the Conversation in the Spirit works - but [first] you just speak. Nobody speaks back to you in the first round. If someone is absolutely horrific, you say: thank you. And then the next person speaks and they express their own opinion. And so you can hold that, I mean, that is a real opinion. It's coming from a place of hurt or trauma or a very strongly held feeling. So you hold that, you don't negate it, but it doesn't have to derail everything else. And I always think about hearing all the voices like building a chord in music, in that, you know, you get a set of different notes emerging, and then together they're forming something, as a facilitator, you're hearing emerging. The group is hearing. And it's more beautiful because you're hearing all of those voices, not just one or two dominant voices.
Interviewer: Although sometimes the keys are a bit out of tune.
Avril: That's who we are!
Interviewer: You mentioned that not every decision needs to be made in a synodal fashion. I'm thinking of a time in America [Media] where we were designing a t-shirt, and we had to get everyone's input, and the result was a not great t-shirt. So how do you decide what warrants this kind of deep listening?
Avril: With a Pastoral Council, with a decision that needs to be made I would say - is it a difficult decision? Is it a decision you have been trying to avoid? Is it the last thing on the agenda that's usually the thing that we don't want to talk about? Is it the thing that we've been talking about for five years we've never been able to resolve? Dig that out, do that first, and pray over your agenda. You know what here needs this method? And you know, I certainly wouldn't do it for every item on there, but I would say, what is the hard thing that we're trying to - or what is the thing we don't agree with? Because if you don't have agreement, it can be hard to hear that fairly, but again, this Conversation in the Spirit method, where everybody gets to speak, you don't just hear the for and against voices. You hear all the nuance in-between as well, which is really, really helpful.
Interviewer: Where are we at right now of those four steps, where is this Synod on Synodality at? Because I feel a certain sense of frustration after encountering, good with that; listening, I'm good with that too. I'm sensing a lot of like frustration with myself trying to watch the discernment and move to action part take place, and it feels like we're stalling out a little bit?
Avril: We're at discernment. We are, for sure, at discernment and anybody will tell you that is not straightforward. I mean, we are talking about discerning on behalf of 1.4 billion people. We are talking about discerning, you know, like everything in the church is so much that we are talking about. If you read through the Instrumentum Laboris, you look at the scope of what we're talking about, it isn't quick. And I honestly get the frustration. And people say to me, ‘We talk and we talk and we never do anything’ or ‘Oh, this same old talking shop again’. And you know, there is absolutely a concrete desire for something to come out of this, and everybody in the room knows that, but I would say: just keep it in prayer, please, because this isn't quick, but there is a real deep determination to bring fruit out of it.
Interviewer: In terms of concrete actions, maybe take a couple examples that are outside some of the obvious ones we think of when we think about Synodality. So maybe bringing this to the level of a family, the domestic church, if you will. I'm curious if you have any experience in your own family of trying to incorporate this, maybe then we could role play something so say, like, you know, a parent gets offered a job in a new city, and the family has to decide whether that's something they should do or not. How would that decision get made in a non-synodal way, and how might it get made in a more synodal way?
Avril: I literally did this with my family to discern whether I was coming [to Rome] or not! I got asked [to be a facilitator] on the 26th of August 2024, and I wasn't here last year - one of the facilitators who was a religious sister, got made a Provincial and couldn't come. And so with a month's notice, I sat down with my family and I said, ‘what do you think? I'm going to be away for a month. I won't be around. There's lots of things happening. So it’s got a big impact on you all’. And we did, you know, talk it all through.
Interviewer: Is this in the group chat, family group chat?
Avril: No, no, it was over dinner! And I know families who've actually taken this listening [method] to everybody. I'll give you an example from a parish, just so people can really locate it. When we have an issue in a parish, what we normally do is we'll say, Oh, I'll talk to you. I'll talk to you. I'll get two voices. Even in a parish council meeting, what are we going to do about the summer barbecue? I've got an idea. I've got an idea, A and B, and then you're off. You're only talking about those two ideas, and then on the way out the door, the really smart person in the room who didn't speak will say, ‘I wasn't sure about that. I had a different thought’. You never heard them. It's so frustrating.
So a friend of mine who just lives synodality, she's amazing at this in her parish, the parish choir was coming to an end. These things have their seasons, and it was clear they needed to move into some sort of new kind of form of music ministry. And she decided to have a synodal conversation. I'm like “Fiona you are mad, like, how are you going to have a synodal conversation about the future of music in your parish? “And so she gets tables out after church, 45 people come, which just shows you how many people had an opinion on the music. And her first question wasn't, ‘what are we going to do about the music?’ It was, ‘how has music impacted your faith life?’ And so the first conversation they had, they were sharing on that faith basis. And again, as I said to you, like we just don't do this enough as Catholics. And so they were talking about funerals and weddings and sitting in a church and hearing a piece of music, and then the question was ‘what are we going to do about our parish music?’
But actually, to take those kind of conversations, which can look like they've been sort of stitched up in a back room, and they often aren't. Because often there's only one option - what are you going to do next? Somebody offered to play the organ, but to do it so transparently, to engage people, but also to give people the opportunity to build community, to talk around a table with people they may not know, but to share their faith. And this is the really beautiful thing, I think, about it.
Interviewer: What happens when you don't reach any sort of consensus, and you have a deadline you have to meet, and someone has to make a decision? What then?
Avril: Yeah, and it is such a good question, the Conversation in the Spirit, it is about surfacing, the voices surfacing. How is the Spirit leading us? But at the end of the day, somebody has to make a decision, and that decision, in Canon Law is the competent authority. It's the parish priest or it's the bishop.
If there's a complete falling out, I would say: go again. I would say, you haven't got enough voices in the room, you haven't been listening to the right people. So if you absolutely hit a deadlock like that, if you have a deadline, it's the real world. We have to get on with it. And so this, for me, is both deeply spiritual and transformative and quite pragmatic in terms of let's not be too precious about this. It's a tool that we have been given to build our communities together, rather than something that needs polishing every day, just in case it gets a bit dirty.
Interviewer: No, that's super helpful, because I felt resistance within me when I imagine sort of what's happening inside the Synod Hall applied to, like my workplace, I think I'd go if that was like a thing happening every day for most meetings and every decision that we had to make, like a lot of nonprofits, you know, people are doing a lot of stuff, and there's just simply not time to maybe take that level of deep involvement. But you're saying this is sort of a tool that we use when we need to. It's not necessarily something that has to happen in every meeting, in every instance.
Avril: No. What I would say is it is becoming clear to me that it is a tool, and it's a tool for when we get stuck. So, if you can't make a decision, there's no agreement, or when a group is stuck in its old way of doing things and it can't envision new ways of doing things, it's a tool for healing. So, if the group's completely fallen out, and you do get this where people of passion come together, they don't necessarily see eye to eye, they get tired, they lose their capacity for empathy with one another. And then the third thing is for vision. So, if you're saying, you know, like, we need moving to a new way of doing things, it's really, really good.
I would say, you know, if you did it all the time, you'd get so sick of it. But it's also great for checking in, you know, like at the beginning of a meeting, like, how are you? And just to hear, like, two minutes from everybody, just going round, just to deepen those kind of connections. But as always, I would say, pick the hardest thing and use it as a tool for that
I had a priest run up to me at a conference recently, and he said, Avril, Avril, it works. And I was like, what works? And he said, Conversation in the Spirit – it's amazing. He was bringing a Divine Renovation senior leadership team into his parish, and he'd had a meeting with them in the parish council, and it had been a car crash. He remembered, ‘Avril said Conversation in the Spirit is a tool’, and so this priest did this for the next meeting, and they actually managed to find a way forward. So, yeah, it's very powerful.
Interviewer: So, these Conversations in the Spirit, those are happening in the Synod Hall here in Rome, and you are one of the facilitators. So, can you tell us a little bit about that role, any of the tensions that come with it, and how you keep these people sticking to the guidelines for these conversations?
Avril: Well, I should probably first say a word about it, because we're kind of assuming everybody knows how this works. And the first thing I would say is that for Westerners, it’s a deeply weird way of having a conversation, all right? Our social cues are all around supporting and jumping in.
So the very first round that you do, you pose a question, and I always try and pose a faith-based question, or a ‘how’ question to get people thinking or telling stories, and you have a bit of silence to start with. That can be tricky, because people don't always like silence, but it allows the people who are more profound thinkers time to think, which I like. The first round, you go around the table. Everybody speaks in the Synod Hall. We are doing it for three minutes each and doesn't matter if you're a cardinal or whoever you are, Prefect of a dicastery, you get three minutes.
Interviewer: Do you cut off the mics like in the political debate?!
Avril: We don't cut the mic, we don't have that power, but we do have timers on our phones, and the whole group knows when somebody's had three minutes. We just hear everybody speak. So again, as I said, the person who doesn't have great English, they have their three minutes. You know, everybody has their three minutes. And it's very, very powerful, because you hear a variety of perspectives, then have a bit of silence. Second round then is ‘what's resonated with me’, such as ‘I love this. I hated that. I never heard that before.’ And then the third round then is the moving to action. What are the fruits, where is the Holy Spirit leading us in this? What are the challenges?
I think it's actually easier doing it here [in Synod] than doing it in parishes, because these guys did it for a month last year. And I'm beginning to realise that there is a skill to be a participant. So, people are prepped. They've thought about what they want to say when they come. They understand the work that is at hand. They understand everybody needs to listen. They work together even when they disagree, to get consensus. So, I'm really impressed by how this can happen.
I think the challenges always are literally hearing. If you have got older people who don't have great hearing, they really struggle to engage with this. And so, it's around that, but things like hearing really diverse voices, honestly, you can hear very, very strong opinions, and then the next person is speaking, and it's okay, the church can be very conflict averse. We want everybody to feel happy. You want everybody to agree, but that isn't necessarily the way that you make good decisions. And so, I've learned that having people not agree is actually okay.
Interviewer: One thing I've heard is that people are encouraged not to come with their own agenda. And so, what's the difference between coming with your own agenda and expressing a strong opinion? Because if no one's expressing a strong opinion, then what are we actually listening to?
Avril: Yeah, there are strong opinions being expressed. It's coming from prayer. Honestly, it's coming from prayer. And so, people are asked to, before they come, to reflect prayerfully, and out of that to speak, and to speak with a common purpose, which is for the future of our Catholic community worldwide.
Interviewer: Do you have any challenges keeping people on topic? And is that something you must intervene on?
Avril: I mean, I actually have a great group, and they know what they're doing. People can go down rabbit holes at times, and then, as a facilitator, you say: ‘Oh, do you know? Thank you so much. That was really fascinating. Are there any other perspectives on this topic’. And so you do want to sort of bring everybody else back in.
I would say facilitation is something that I would really recommend. If you want to go down this route, you go and get some training for - we offer it for the School of Synodality. I know there are groups in the States that offer it as well. Everybody can give this a go. And there are tips and tricks for if you're doing it and you haven't been trained. And particularly, I would not do this with a difficult topic unless you've had a bit of training. Because once, if you're not confident as a facilitator, what will happen is... the first-round collapses, and people say: ‘Oh, I know what you mean’, and then they start sharing their story rather than just listening. So, there is a craft to it, and I'm beginning to appreciate just how much of a craft it is.
Interviewer: Around the tables in the Synod Hall, roughly how many people?
Avril: There's 12 of us, including the facilitator.
Interviewer: Is that the right number? It strikes me that it could be too many.
Avril: I've done it in lots and lots of different groups. I facilitated for an academic conference in Durham last year where, again, we had 12 and that's just like - how many facilitators can we lay our hands on? How many spaces do we have? Because you do need space in order to be able to do this.
If I was doing it in a parish, I would recommend six or eight people. I wouldn't have people on a timer. You need to let people tell their stories, particularly if it's a difficult topic. But I would run through a few little rules in advance, around confidentiality, around being prepared to speak around you know, sort of just recognising your own airtime and also, just being curious. One of the absolute values of this is to say, “Gosh, I don't agree with you, but could you tell me more about that, because I'm really interested in why you think that?”. And so, by doing that, we appreciate the other person as a person, rather than just as a walking opinion.
Interviewer: You mentioned that at this point in the Synod, we're still in step three of your four steps, the discerning phase, but something we're hearing from delegates is kind of like they’re itching to get to four and to have some concrete things that we can move on when we leave Rome. Do you think this process is going to lead to concrete things?
Avril: Well first of all, I would say: although what’s going in the Hall is at point three, there’s tons that people can be doing already. I would say look at your own parishes, how synodal are you? How does decision-making function in your community? How transparent is any of that? How good are you at listening to all the different voices?
Interviewer: Are there some yes-no questions that people can ask themselves to kind of, maybe, audit their church?
Avril: Yeah, we are working on an audit at the moment actually. Just to help parishes really think that through, but not in a way that you go and beat anybody up. You say to the priest: “Oh you’ve only got 5 out of 10 on your synodality” you know? That's a horrific way to approach this! But it is about saying - are you transparent about what goes on in your pastoral council? Do you enlarge the loops sometimes with the conversation? How do you get the views in?
Perhaps you could have a parish day where you are asking the whole parish to think about the future. Or perhaps you could engage groups, like I was saying, like young people. You know, like, where are the voices? And also, just to support particularly, the parish priests. Because it is a really, they're in a quite a tricky position where they're being asked to move to a way of being in ministry which is collaborative and co-responsible. And I've had priests say to me, Avril, I've tried pastoral councils in two or three parishes, and it's never worked. How can we be more co-responsible together? And they're starting to see that this method of spiritual listening and praying together actually helps to break some of that down as well.
Interviewer: And getting back to this question of concreteness that Ashley had brought up, if you find that maybe discussions are becoming a bit abstract or theoretical, do you find it's the role of the facilitator to kind of push the conversation towards something a bit more action oriented?
Avril: I mean, the title of this assembly is “How” - how to become a synod or missionary church, and so it's really practical. We can't talk about what goes on in the Hall, and that's to make it a safe space for people to speak as freely as they want to. But is definitely concrete. I've got a notebook full of notes and ideas of all the things I'm taking home to my diocese. So, we - you know - we're definitely getting there. And what's absolutely amazing is to hear that this is already happening across the global church.
I had an amazing conversation with an African Bishop over coffee, where he was telling me about their Pastoral Council and diocesan Pastoral Council structures, and how dynamic and energetic it is. You know, you'll hear from Papua New Guinea, you'll hear from, you know, Seychelles. You'll hear about people doing this in really, really difficult circumstances, where you're traveling miles and miles between communities to try and get people to listen to each other. But you just can't say, well, we'll all meet on Zoom, which we are, you know, lucky enough to be able to do where you've got good internet.
So I'm really energised because what I see is that this is not as inventing something from scratch. This already exists in the global church, and there's so much that we, as we are sharing, this is an exchange of gifts going on, which also helps to sort of de-power some of being Western Christians and having held that for a long, long time. Oh, my word there is so much wisdom coming in from the rest of the world!
Interviewer: We talk about the Conversations in the Spirit a lot, because it's a lot of what's happening in the Synod Hall. But I don't think what's well known to outside observers is that there's also these free interventions that take up a significant amount of time, and I'm curious - what role do those play in a way of being synodal? Does it have a role, or is this just something we used to do so we had to put it in?
Avril: That's a really interesting question. And I'm always sitting there as a facilitator. I'm not speaking, I'm facilitating the group, but I'm always sitting there with my diocesan and my School for Synodality ‘hat’ going: ‘’How can we use this?
What I love about the free interventions is you'll just suddenly get a story from somebody that's for the whole hall that would have otherwise sat in that small group. Because when we're producing the reports, the reports are very much a synthesis of what's been said, and sometimes you can lose the flavour, you lose the story. And so what you'll get - and I've got in my notebook names and table numbers so I can go and approach people and say, ‘go on, tell me more, tell me more’. You're getting these very specific stories coming through.
And I would say in a parish council, you don't need to do that. If you are holding a parish day, you might say, well, we'll have a talk but we'll cut you off after three minutes. Don't be rambling on for 10 minutes. That's very tedious in a diocesan assembly - if you've got 350 people together, well, it opens up the floor. And again, it's about hearing all the voices. Now, it's risky, obviously, because you don’t know what people are going to say.
Interviewer: Anyone's been to a Q & A session at any presentation, you know, it's very risky.
Avril: If you are strict on the three minutes, though, I would say that you can hear a lot of additional voices and stories and perspectives which are rich.
Interviewer: One thing I've noticed is that people from different parts of the world have kind of this reaction of like, oh well, we're already doing this. And the United States are like, oh well, we already empowered lay people in pastoral councils. That's like the norm. But then you hear, well, in the church in Asia, this type of listening is not new to them. This is how they always do it. Which one is it, like, do we all have different parts of synodality already, and this is we're coming together to share them?
Avril: What I tend to hear is the criticism. So, it goes the other way around. So, in the UK, people say, oh Avril, this is very white middle class. You know, only middle class people want to come to meetings. No one else wants to come to meetings. And then I was talking to my friend from Singapore, and in Singapore, apparently, people say, Oh, this is very development world, you know, right? This is people sitting around telling stories. Where's the agenda, where's the action.
And I love that. I mean, it just makes me laugh, that both, you know, like all parts of the church, criticizing this for different reasons. Probably we do have gifts to share, or perhaps what we all have is pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, you know, and when we're able to put our pieces down, and we don't hang on to them, but we lay them on the table, actually, as we begin to put them all together, we see this new picture emerging.
Interviewer: Avril, I want to thank you for your work at the Synod on Synodality, but also your quote unquote ‘day job’ to kind of implement this and bring it to practice. We do have one final question for you before we let you go though, back to the Synod Hall, which is: if you could canonize one person, living or dead, Catholic or not, fictional or real, synodal or not, who would it be and why?
Avril: Oh, my word. Listen, I tell you two people. It has to be two people, I think, who've been so influential on me as this. Everybody's gonna say, Oh, you're such a creep, Avril. But honestly - my bishop David Oakley, who just has a vision of the council Church, which he's really, really trying to enact in our diocese, and all the encouragement that he's given me. And my boss, who's a priest who, when he saw the Synod stuff come out at the very beginning, he just immediately said ‘this is about gracious listening, gracious speaking’. And like right from the beginning, we knew this is not about long meetings and agendas and you know, it's about the encounter. So yeah, the two of them have been super influential on me.
Interviewer: All right. Well, if people want to learn more about this, they can visit the School of Synodality, which we will link to in our show notes, thank you so much, Avril Thank you.
Avril: Thanks very much for having me. It's been a delight.