Parish Mission 2009

Renewing the Faith Fire in Our Community

Photos and comments/reflections on the Mission can be found by scrollling down past the "Thank You" section.

The two weeks of the Oblate Parish Mission in March were truly phenomenal: hectic and rich, intense and inspiring, exhausting and energizing, community-building and Spirit-filled, all at the same time. The Mission began long before the two weeks in March and its fruits will continue to grow and develop long afterwards. God’ gifts, discovered through our shared experience, will continue to reveal themselves in the months and years ahead.

Heartfelt thanks goes to the many parishioners who worked together to make this Mission so memorable:

· First of all, thanks to the Core Team, that first group of 20-25 parishioners who caught the vision early on and worked tirelessly on the various committees for the past 13 months.

· Thanks to all those 140 people who responded to the call to be home visitors in January and February to deliver the Mission information to all 1400 households in our parish family.

· Thanks to the 34 parishioners who opened their homes to host a Listening Centre and to the equal number of those who stepped forward to facilitate these Listening Centres.

· Thanks to the numerous volunteers who helped in the kitchen cooking meals, preparing and cleaning dishes, tables and rooms.

· Thanks to all parishioners who provided Bed & Breakfast to our visiting Missionaries, the Oblate Team, the priests, and the Youth Team.

· Thanks to the nearly 100 people who volunteered to drive the Oblate Missionaries last week. Your knowledge of the community and your dedicated assistance impressed all the Missionaries who traveled with you.

· Thanks to St. Augustine and St. Dominic Schools for opening their doors so warmly to the LEAP Youth Team. Thanks for enabling your students to take part in daily Mass at the parish. Thank you also to the Humboldt Collegiate for allowing the LEAP Youth Team to meet with our high school students.

· Thanks to all who have already contributed financially to cover the cost for the Mission. Those who still wish to make a contribution are welcome to keep doing so in the weeks ahead.

· Thanks to all who served in the various liturgical ministries for the daily Masses and at the Great Assemblies.

· Last but not least, heartfelt thanks to all of you who attended the various Mission events: the Listening Centres, the daily Masses, Holy Hour, the early morning Coffee Shop, and the Great Assemblies.

The Oblate approach to a Parish Mission intends to strengthen a parish community’s life of faith not just for two weeks, but for the months and years to come. We commit ourselves to continue watering the growth that has occurred through a renewal of our ministry and parish life.

COMMENTS AND REFLECTIONS ABOUT
THE 2009 PARISH MISSION

Thank you for the whole experience. It was a much needed visual and spiritual reminder of our need to be a faith community alive!

Thank you and God bless. I enjoyed the music and was happy for the youth, the skits were great.

The Parish Mission was awesome. It is so great to have our faith renewed. Christ is alive in us – praise Him! The Team was friendly, heart-warming and very encouraging.

Thank you! The children truly enjoyed it!
Nothing could have been better. A real kick-start for our faith. Thank you!
Great music!!

Amazing Mission! It was so neat to finally see the generations come together as one and have everyone participate together. It was a great experience and God was definitely present.

This Mission has meant so very much to me. I have met people in my own parish whom I did not know. This journey has been wonder-ful. The MUSIC – so great! That means Br. Louis is great. Fr. Al gave us so many messages to live by and journey with. Fr. Mark – just awesome in his homilies. A great teacher to us all. Enjoyed the holy humour.

This Mission has made my faith stronger and I feel so full of life, the “Holy Spirit!” Thanks a million for every-thing. May God bless you all.
Hope that all the young children who attended will keep up the faith.

It was rich and peaceful. I was amazed how quickly two weeks went by.
Thank you ALL for making such a great event possible!
WOW! What a Mission!
What an awesome journey of faith! Many thanks and God bless.

LEAP ROCKS! The Purity Rally, your passion for the truth in our Catholic faith enlightened us all.
I like the songs we sang with everyone.
I like LEAP!
This Parish Mission has been the very best spiritual experience of my life. All the Masses, the talks and the Great Assemblies were just all so meaningful! I am very glad to have accepted God’s call to come to this Mission. Thank you.
It was great! The singing was awesome! Thank you.
Thank you all – it was all so inspiring ...

Thank you for this Mission. It brought back to my life a calm and peace I had been missing for a very long time. May God bless you all!
The Way of the Cross through the streets and the dramatization of the Passion by the LEAP Youth Team was very powerful!
Thank you! Thank you! Merci! Excellent presentations.
Thank you all – it was all so inspiring.

Loved every minute of it. May God bless you all.
This Mission made me so much more aware of being part of a comm-unity and of the power of God’s love. Thank you! It was so great.
Enjoyed the renewal of wedding vows! Props used as part of the sermon gave concrete illustrations of the Lord’s message that will remain in my mind and heart for a long time.
The past two weeks have been some of the best of my life. Thank you all especially the LEAP Team. Your friend Kurt (Grade 7)

Amazing, once again! Fr. Mark is amazing! I admire his love for service and his talks!
This was a very spiritually uplifting experience for me.
The Great Assemblies and the music were awesome!

The Mission was great. I hope and pray that I can change to God’s will.
A life-changing experience. Thank you, thank you! May God bless you all.
Wonderful music! Wonderful sermons!

So great to have a Mission of this kind! The singing, the praising God. You are all wonderful. God’s love will always be here.
It has deepened the faith of our people.
It was a most grace-filled two weeks. Thank you.

Thank you to Fr. April for bringing this Mission to St. Augustine’s. Thank you, Marie-Louise, for all the hours of planning – thanks to all the committees. THANX!!

A great Mission. I enjoyed it all, great speakers. The LEAP group was fantastic especially their dramatization of the Passion. It was so meaningful. Thanks everyone!

What an uplifting experience! A most wonderful journey. Merci beaucoup!
Simply put – we are filled with the Holy Spirit as a result of the Mission.

I had a great time especially becoming closer to God through Adoration! Amazing Mission.

Great two weeks. Enjoyed it all – sermons, music, drama & ritual.

Mission was great! How about ending with a Commissioning Ritual?

Totally awesome!

Fantastic! Awesome! It couldn’t have been any better! Many, many, many thanks to everyone who made this Mission possible in Humboldt !

It was rich and peaceful. I was amazed how quickly two weeks went by.

The Mission was ever so good. Just what I needed. I was feeling down and depressed and this Mission has given me such peace a renewed spirit. Thank you, thank you, Jesus. Thank you Mission Team. It was an answer to prayer.

I have had a wonderful and spine-chilling experience during many moments of our St. Aug-ustine’s Mission. Great thanks and God’s blessings to all the Mission Team. My only regret is that I had to miss two of the sessions, Thursday and Friday. All the others and everything else was splendid. Please keep it up!!

This Mission has meant so very much to me. I have met people in my own parish whom I did not know. This journey has been wonderful. The MUSIC – so great! That means Br. Louis is great. Fr. Al gave us so many messages to live by and journey with. Fr. Mark – just awesome in his homilies. A great teacher to us all. Enjoyed the holy humour. The missionaries gave us so much. LEAP – a special gift to the youth and the adults alike. Keep up the GOOD WORK! God bless you all.

Our God is an awesome God! The most amazing moment for me was during the adoration of the cross. A young mother and her small child returned to their seats and the look on the child’s face was so over-whelming for me. The child could not believe the cruelty of it all. I thought for a moment if only we could remember the over-whelming feeling of our Lord dying for us on the cross. Thank you for your time, talents and inspiration.

(This Mission) is like the Wizard of Oz: It gave a heart to the Tin Man, a brain to the Straw Man, and courage to the Lion ... (from a beloved mentally challenged adult member of the parish)

The two weeks were fantastic! Br. Louis really set the tone and he was always there. I found myself singing some of the songs at home. They youth were wonderful. It would be nice to bottle some of the energy. We will remember this Mission for a long, long time.

It was a most grace-filled two weeks. Thank you.

We are the Body of Christ. Thanks for the Icon-activity which brought that home!

Some highlights of the Parish Mission for us were:

Daily Mass, a time for listening and reflection, a time for grace and reconciliation
Lent was a good time for this Mission. The Stations of the Cross brought tears.
Thoroughly enjoyed the visit the Oblate missionary, enjoyed his German accent, his birth land is also my birth land. We shared our common interest in farming as a way of life to learn work ethics, a good place to raise a family.
Blessing of our house. Nice guy that missionary.
Br. Louis was a key person. He sure knows his chords! There were so many good songs. I especially enjoyed “I fly away” in memory of my sister. Mighty Lord used to sing that one at St. Anne’s many a time. Thank you for leading us all closer to God. Father Emile, we love you and the entire Mission Team.

Thank you so much for the time, energy and LOVE you put into this Mission! It was so great to see our faith community come alive! Our children felt very much a part of the Mission, joining in the Masses, the Gym Blast, the visits to the schools, the drama present-ations and the wonderful Great Assemblies! Walking through the city for the Stations of the Cross brought back terrific memories of the Corpus Christi processions when school children dropped flower petals through the streets! Thanks for everything!

I appreciated the summing up at the end of the Great Assemblies. Saying it in different words clarified things for me. God bless you all – keep it up.
Truly a Parish renewal.
I think it was super, fantastic! God bless.
No words to describe how great it was. God bless. Awesome!
Wishing it didn’t come to an end … A wonderful faith experience.

It was an awesome experience.

I was unable to attend all of it but what I did was truly inspiring – opening new ways of reading the Scriptures and opening oneself to God’s awesome love. The last Great Assembly was dynamite! Deep –felt thanks.

Truly our God is an awesome God!

Great things happen when God mixes with us. Awesome! Awesome!

You really energized the Sisters of St. Elizabeth Convent!

A huge thank you for delivering the personal invitation to “come and see.” My RSVP to the Lord is YES. I know that my new journey will have bumps along the way but with God all things are possible.

Thanks for bringing the Mission. It was a wonderful and powerful experience.

His fire is burning in His people now!

It’s great to walk in this place and feel a revived spirit of God!

I got to meet new people and I was actively involved.

This has been a time of assessing , re-assessing and confirmation of faith and its growth in me is deep. Thank you for making such a time available to me and to all.

	Those that didn’t attend don’t know what a good thing they missed. I really loved the witness of the youth, their personal testimonies. This helped me the most.
	Thanks so much for helping to rejuvenate our parish. The Mission was a very good and fruitful experience. Excellent music, talks, drama and personal testim-onies. It was a lot of fun, too, to help with all the preparations leading up to the Mission.
	Enjoyed the 7:15 am talks the first week of the Mission. If I had to pick a week, I’d pick the first one especially the Listening Centres. It was wonderful. Loved it. I was very depressed due to illness, sickness in the family etc. etc. and this Mission provided the medicine I needed! It lifted my spirits and I felt many times that the messages were just for me. Great Mission!
	The conferences and all other things were a great lift for me. God bless your work. May you bring the love of God to many more. You have wonderful gifts and you use them. The singing, the homilies, dramas, all refurbished my soul.
	The outdoor Way of the Cross and rosary were very meaningful. Thank you. I enjoyed every day of this Mission. Keep up the beautiful work and do come back! The Way of the Cross outside was very inspiring. I loved it, every moment.
	It was all so wonderful – I feel lighter … Excellent! Very powerful experience. Gave a lot of food for thought. And now, a follow-up …
	We have been recharged! Much gratitude owed. It’s been great! I came from Saskatoon to visit Mom and thankfully I got to take part for two days. It was great! The testimonials were very powerful. Thank you!
	Amazing! Thank you for a great renewal. I had an awesome experience. A real spiritual uplift.
	Thanks to a huge collective experience infused with the Holy Spirit. A special commendation to the Youth Team, they are our future. Also, the team visitors evangelized in a unique way.
	This was so heart-felt and very healing, concentr-ating on the essence of our life in God and with each other in community. The people who helped with this Mission sure have the zeal and the fire of God. I especially appreciated the daily hour of Adoration and quiet prayer.
	I was very depressed due to illness, sickness in the family etc. etc. and this Mission provided the medicine I needed! It lifted my spirits and I felt many times that the messages were just for me. Great Mission!
	The Oblate Mission Team was so warm and friendly. Truly filled with the Spirit.
	The Parish Mission was awesome. It is so great to have our faith renewed. Christ is alive in us – praise Him! The Team was friendly, heart-warming and very encouraging. It was great to have the LEAP Team here – they were so awesome!
	How wonderful it was to have the Oblate missionary come to our home and have our home blessed. The missionaries gave us so much. LEAP – a special gift to the youth and the adults alike. Keep up the GOOD WORK! God bless you all.
	Muchas gratias! Fr. Al and companyh for two grace-filled weeks. We hope to meet again. Very Good! Would have liked more depth into the commandments so as to make a better confession.
	Amazing! Thank you very much for a great renewal.
	It would have been nice to get more encouragement from the church's teachings on more controversial issues. But I wonder how many actually believe the church's teaching on them ...
	I was very awe-struck and edified with all the sessions. This Mission has strengthened my faith and my desire to change.
	I would have preferred less "Pentecostal" exuberance -- not my style or that of many.
	Thank you LEAP!!! You were the best part -- Keep the faith, we need the truth! The testimonials were very powerful. Thank you!