Nairobi, 07 January, 2020 / 12:52 am (ACI Africa).
A workshop seeking to create awareness among clergy, religious, and laity ministering in parishes about “professional and systematic” ways of Church administration and management has been planned from Tuesday, January 7 at Tangaza University College (TUC), a Kenya-based Catholic institution of higher learning, an organizer of the four-day meeting has told ACI Africa.
“We are moving away from the traditional way of running parishes to a very professional and systematic way of managing parishes,” Sr. Sr. Agnes Njeri who is among those coordinating the program said in an interview Monday, January 6 referencing the significance of the workshop and added, “when the Church is well managed it means the dioceses are well managed and finally the global Church is well managed.”
“When priests are ordained, they really don’t have the expertise of management since they are taught theology and philosophy during their formation and immediately after ordination they are taken to parishes to manage, so they really don’t have the skills, yet we have professionals in our Churches and they expect things to run professionally,” Kenyan Sr. Njeri who heads TUC’s Institute of Centre for Leadership and Management (CLM) explained.
She added, “We want to provide them with skills to know how to manage parish finances, how to manage their time, the human resources and how to effectively carry out the parish council (meetings), that is why we want to impart those skills to them.”
Speaking about beneficiaries, the member of the congregation of Sisters of St. Joseph-Mombasa (SSJ) said, “The workshop is meant for priests, deacons, religious men and women, seminarians and lay men who are actively involved in parish ministry so that eventually the skills will help them know how well to manage the Churches.”
