The Archdiocese of Detroit (AOD) has been engaged in a planning process called Together In Faith since 2000, and this process surfaced “New Evangelization” and “youth ministry” as top priorities for the diocese to address.  However, little or no research on the New Evangelization (NE), from a sociological perspective, has been conducted.

Sociologists have not even answered basic questions, such as, “How many parishes have a NE committee?” or “How many people have heard of the NE?” Consequently, I started a research project on the NE in the AOD.  After several years in the field, 3 telephone surveys of parish offices, and the administration of a social survey to six suburban parishes, I am prepared to present some basic descriptive statistics on how many parishes within the AOD have NE committees and how many parishioners have heard of the NE.

Table 1—Does Your Parish Have an Evangelization Committee? (Archdiocese of Detroit)

In 2005, 2008, and again in 2011, we made telephone calls to every parish in the archdiocese asking if they had an evangelization committee.   Table 1 presents the results and suggests the reach of the NE has doubled over time in the AOD, but I’ll note a few caveats.  First, while the percent of parishes in the archdiocese with an evangelization committee increased from 17.9% to 35.2%, this increase between 2005 and 2011 might be deceiving for a couple reasons.  First, the change is due partly to the substantial number of parishes that closed since 2005.  That is, while the percentage of parishes with evangelization committees doubled, the number of evangelization committees has not (55 to 96; or 14 less than a doubling rate).  Digging even deeper, the simple question, “Do you have an evangelization committee?” elicited a variety of vague responses.  Indeed, vagueness prevailed in the phone conversations.  Calling parishes and asking the above question, prompted the following responses: “well, I think so but I’m not sure – what do you mean exactly when you say evangelization?”   “We used to have one I think, but maybe it is just done through our Christian service commission now.”  “I think we just sort of do it but have no committee per se.”  “Well, yes, sort of, it is just in everything that we do.”

First, let’s deal with the issue of parish closings and changing numbers of parishes over time.  Since we are examining the same population of parishes over time, calculations about change over time can be made—as long as we keep only parishes that responded during all years.  Dropping cases with any missing data is what sociologists call listwise (or casewise) deletion.  For example, of the 327 parishes in the telephone database, 240 responded to the NE question in both 2005 and 2008.  Using these 240 parishes as a base, 22% of parishes had an evangelization committee in 2005 and 30% in 2008.  Then, for parishes who responded all three years, N=220, we find that in 2011 39% said they had a NE committee.  So, even after taking into account the closing of parishes, it is clear that the number and percentage of evangelization committees reported in the AOD has increased; the trend is clearly upwards.  And this linear trend of approximately a 10% increase each wave is significant: 20% or 44 of 220 in 2005; 29% or 64 of 220 in 2008, and 39% or 86 of 220 in 2011 for parishes with complete data (F linear(1,219) = 46.232, p<.001).

Regarding the vagueness theme, however, the percentage coded as “sort of” also increased significantly over the years, from 1% to 2.1% to 5.5% (F linear (1,219) = 10.74, p = .001).  These data confirm, in our estimation, the ongoing “vagueness” if not outright confusion about what the NE is among our respondents.  Indeed, I was giving a presentation on these data in April 2011 and several professional ecclesial ministers said to me, “I see your giving a presentation on the NE; you know, what is the NE anyway?”  This confusion was exacerbated by the lack of distinction between evangelization and NE in our phone call question.  Many of the “YES” responses referred specifically to RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults).  In other words, these parishes (approximately 20) considered the RCIA their evangelization committee (we coded them yes, because in the end they said “yes”).  In reality, however, the RCIA and the NE are not coterminous.

So, while there has been an increase in the percent and number of parish evangelization committees between 2005 and 2011, most parishes do not have such a committee and many asked us “What do you mean by the new evangelization?” or “What is the new evangelization?”  Remember, too, the percentages above are inflated by inclusion of RCIA as evangelization by some respondents.  So, a clear majority of parishes in AOD do not have a committee focused on evangelization and are not organizationally structured to focus on the NE.  At most, perhaps 45% of parishes will have a committee in 2012 focused on the New Evangelization in AOD.  This liberal estimate is based on the linear trend presented above.

Obviously, some parishes do have active evangelization committees, and some parishioners might know about NE regardless of whether their parish has a committee.  So, we decided to directly survey parishioners and staff.  Our survey was conducted in three parishes that had evangelization committees and three that did not.  All six were suburban parishes and had similar socio-demographic profiles — thereby providing a basis for assessing the unique influence of evangelization committees.  The first question on the NE survey was: “Have you ever heard of the New Evangelization (NE) in your parish, vicariate, or diocese?”

Examining staff members within the parishes, we pulled from the survey how the professionals in the parishes answered the question “have you ever heard of the NE?”

Table 2— “Have you ever heard of the NE?” by Position in Parish

We found that 43.7% had never “heard of the NE” (table 2).  Still, an equal number of staff members at the parishes had heard of NE as did not hear.  If the NE is to continue to grow, it is important for more parish staff to “hear” about the NE — for only 22.8% of their parishioners have heard of it (Table 2: out of 2,598 parishioners, only 731, or 22.8% had heard of NE).

Finally, parishioners in parishes with evangelization committees have heard of the NE significantly more than those who are in parishes without evangelization committees (see table 3 below: with committee 32.3% and without 10.9%), and these committees appear to be spreading, albeit starting from low levels.

Table 3—Having Heard of the NE by Type of Parish

Consequently, we believe NE committees are an indication of a larger process of the institutionalization of the NE in the AOD.  Michelle Dillon asked not long ago, how will John Paul II’s influence be institutionalized in the Church?  One answer might be the NE.  Future blogs will try to substantiate that claim.