Partners in the Gospel

Partners in Gospel is a strategic pastoral planning effort taking place across the Archdiocese of Seattle to re-invigorate and renew our local Catholic Church.

A parish is defined as a certain community of the faithful stably constituted within the archdiocese, whose pastoral care is entrusted to a priest as its proper pastor under the authority of the Archbishop of Seattle. (c. 515§1)

Note that the term parish refers to the community of people and not the sacred building designated for divine worship — the church (with a lowercase “c”).

A parish family is a group of two or more neighboring parishes under the leadership of one pastor and one or more parochial vicars. Over time, the parish family will determine its own consultative leadership team(s) and how they may share resources such as staff, ministries and outreach.

This is a multiyear, consultative synodal process and everyone is invited to participate.

In the first phase, the archdiocese will share and request input on a draft of the parish families with priests and parish leaders, school principals and leadership, archdiocesan employees and all Catholics across the archdiocese in the Fall 2023.

Once all the input has been collected, the Oversight Committee and the Presbyteral Council will finalize a recommendation. Archbishop Etienne will discern the recommendation and then officially promulgate the new parish family structure in early 2024.

In the next phase, parish families will work together over three years or so to determine how they will best become one parish (by summer 2027). Each parish family will have a liaison assigned to them to help throughout the process.

Schools are a vital ministry of a parish, and they will benefit from stronger parish families through Partners in the Gospel. As parishes join their parish families, so too will the schools associated with each parish. Some parish families will inevitably have more than one school.

Further explanation: The new parish family will have three years to determine how to join together as one canonical parish, which includes discernment around all ministries, including Catholic schools.

Catholic schools are key to our formation and evangelization efforts in the Archdiocese of Seattle and there is a strong desire to bolster our Catholic School ministry.

Parish families – with the support of the Office for Catholic Schools - will discern together how to foster strong Catholic education. This may mean no changes to the school ministries in one parish family while changes to schools in another parish family may be discerned.

For example, in some cases, a parish family may wish to make one campus an elementary school and another campus a middle school – or turn one campus into an early learning center. There is also a possibility that a parish family may choose to merge schools over time or add another school based on community need. Any changes to schools would be a result of a discernment process by the parish family leadership and in partnership with the Office for Catholic Schools.

Today we face many realities that are impacting parish life and making it difficult to fully live out our mission. We face an urgent — yet exciting — opportunity to transform parish life.

Over the past few decades our local Catholic Church has experienced a decrease of engaged parishioners, fewer priests, dwindling finances, deteriorating campus conditions and more. Here are just a few statistics:

• Today the archdiocese has 80 diocesan pastors for 174 locations; by 2036, we estimate we will only have 66 diocesan pastors, an 18% decrease. (We also have fewer seminarians and fewer lay ministry leaders.)
• While the overall population the Archdiocese of Seattle is growing, registered households are declining, along with Mass attendance, baptisms, first communions, marriages in the Church and parish giving:
  • From 2010 to 2019, Mass attendance declined 11%.
  • Between 2010 and 2019, baptisms declined 32% and weddings declined nearly 19%.
• Currently, 67% of parishes operate with a financial deficit (excluding extraordinary income, which is income from sources such as leasing properties and endowments).