Small Christian communities are plentiful in Brazil, for example, but are not usually thought to be exportable to the First World. Visiting Adelaide, however, the author of Basic is Beautiful found flourishing communities formed out of Catholic households in each neighbourhood. TWO women are sitting around a kitchen table, talking about the Church with an enthusiasm, conviction and purposefulness rarely heard in these days when there is despondency in the West about decline. They are speaking of the building of basic ecclesial communities (BECs) in the Adelaide archdiocese. Cathy Whewell, a wife and mother, is co-ordinator of the BEC diocesan team, and Ruth Egar, a Mercy Sister, is her predecessor in the job. Their animation is perhaps all the more surprising, given that we are in Australia, where a recent report on women?s participation in the Church (Woman and Man; one in Christ Jesus) uncovered a can of worms in terms of women?s disillusionment. The dominant feeling of participants in the written submissions, public hearings and targeted groups was one of pain and alienation, the report declared, because of the strong sense of women?s marginalisation, struggle, disenfranchisement, powerlessness, irrelevance and a lack of acknowledgement within the Church. But if Cathy and Ruth are not sharing that sense of powerlessness, it is not from any lack of a critical sense: on the contrary, they are devoting their lives to a radical transformation of church structures. What fire Cathy and Ruth are the powerful stories of encounter coming out of the promotion of lay people as pastoral visitors. Each member of the neighbourhood pastoral team is responsible for making and maintaining contact with a dozen households, comprising Catholics who want to live out the belief that the Church should care for about 100 per cent of its members, and not just the 15 or 20 per cent who go to Mass. There is no suggestion that people might like to come along to church. In the last year alone, the visitors have made more than 6,000 contacts. One team member discovered a disabled man who knew nobody in the street; neighbours had even been throwing rubbish over his fence. But now neighbours have helped to clean up his garden and got to know him, and a eucharistic minister brings him communion. Another woman found one of the lonely people on her list singularly unresponsive, until the seventh time she came to see him, when he told her, to her amazement: I do so enjoy your visits. The age-old dilemma of how to deal with requests for baptism from those who are not churchgoers is here turned on its head. The choice is no longer between setting church attendance as a condition for baptism, or of baptising everyone, however unknown the family is to the Christian community. Baptism is treated as entry into the community, but the responsibility for joining lies not with families who are expected to go to church, but with the neighbourhood pastoral team, who are expected to offer their friendship. In Adelaide, says Cathy, one does not join a BEC. One belongs simply by being a baptised person who lives in the area. Ruth says: Community is formed when you knock on the door. The practical means of expressing such a universal and inclusive conception of the Church is by drawing up a map of the parish and dividing it up into smaller zones or BECs, each containing about 100 Catholic households. In that way, no one is left out of the Church?s pastoral care. Cathy says: This decision has set the work of the Church in Adelaide apart from the forms of BEC in other countries. In many Third World countries it is enough to set up a meeting and advertise it by word of mouth for people to come and form a Christian community, but that method does not work in the developed world, where people are either too busy to want to come or too lonely to dare to. And because First World culture is characterised by its intense work demands, the visiting schedule is kept at a level that is manageable and sustainable: two visits a week is the aim, so that a team member will get through a list of 12 households in six weeks, and go back to each perhaps only three or four times in the year. The support of Archbishop Leonard Faulkner has been crucial. There are now 107 BECs in 34 of the diocese?s 76 parishes. But Faulkner is due to retire next year, and there is concern that the dynamic should not be lost. Cathy says: We are identifying a new mission ground. This is where we rub shoulders with those we do not choose for community, but rather with those whom God has called us to love ? literally, our neighbours. The street is the place where the range of social problems is found: domestic violence, racism, loneliness, the trials of old age, adolescent rebellion, family stress and mental illness, not to mention a wealth of happiness, skill and generosity, waiting to be tapped. One woman, who has a lemon tree in her garden, takes the gift of a lemon with her to make the contact easier. Another pastoral visitor received a tirade from a woman in a wheelchair about how awful the Church was; but at the end the woman said: If only the Church was all like you, I don?t think I would ever have left it. Another angry householder cried out: Where was the parish when my husband left me last year? No one came near me because it was too embarrassing. And where has the parish been for my son? He is 18 years old and has been unemployed for two years. To show that the work of the pastoral team is validated by the Church, a letter from the parish priest is dropped through the letter-box before the first visit, letting people know that someone will be calling round who will not be expecting anything, but may on the contrary be quite shy. The visitors avoid knocking on doors in pairs, as it could seem more intimidating, not to mention reminiscent of the Jehovah?s Witnesses. The power lies with the person whose door is being knocked on, says Cathy. While the mandate of the neighbourhood pastoral team is to make contact with the Catholics, it is not long before the commitment to be neighbourly spreads beyond the Catholic households, for often a visit to a house will reveal that the Catholic family moved years ago. The act of being visited seems to give ?permission? to everyone in the neighbourhood to be more friendly, says Cathy. The benefits are as energising for the team as they are for those visited. BECs are giving me permission to say hello to people, says one. Another speaks of how she used to feel silent embarrassment when she met a woman who had been living for years with a violent husband. When she found her name on the list of those she had to try to get to know, she began to smile and greet her in the street. After 20 years I have been given the means to speak to her, she says. ONE woman took her 10-year old son with her visiting. Why are we going to this house? he asked as they went up the path to an unknown door. She gritted her teeth and said: Because the parish thinks we ought to be more caring of each other and get to know people. He responded with the joyful alacrity of a child: Oh that?s a good idea. For him every door knocked on was a potential new friendship. Another team member was standing at her gate with a friend, who noticed three passing cars beep in greeting, and then someone else pass and smile; all were contacts made through the BEC. You know everyone around here, said the friend. The Adelaide BECs see the task as getting the Church to go to people, not getting people to go back to church. But there are the beginnings of small liturgical events in streets and homes. Carol singing is one of the easiest ways to begin, and Lent is another opportunity. Some teams, adopting an idea of the Better World Movement, take a little envelope of ashes to people with a prayer on Ash Wednesday. Others take palms to the houses in their community or hold a Palm Sunday picnic, and others invite people to the Stations of the Cross in a park or a garden. Saints? days are sometimes celebrated, and the patron saint may depend on the cultural background of the locality ? Italian or Irish, M Maltese or Lebanese. Then, before All Souls Day, some BEC teams found people were appreciative if they went to their doors asking if they had a friend or relative who had died and whom they would like remembered. They were invited to write the name on a card that would be taken to the gathering, to come themselves to join in the prayer if they wished, or to light a votive candle at home on that day. This received a very positive response. The extent of the need for a new approach was illustrated a couple of years ago by two surveys, in Sydney and Melbourne, which revealed that 97 per cent and 94 per cent respectively of young people had abandoned Mass-going within a year of leaving Catholic secondary school. Without a new approach, says Archbishop Faulkner?s vicar general, David Cappo, we will simply see a diminishing Church, with parish closures and amalgamations. Are BECs really important? If we are interested in the future, they are. I have enormous hope that this is the way of the future, that this is the Gospel.

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