It is truly my hope that my readers are finding this article thought-provoking. As you know, it is the wish of our Patriarch and Synod of Bishops that each Ukrainian Greek-Catholic parish in the world become engaged in thinking about and engaging in those activities that will make the parish a vibrant Christian community, that is a place where people can truly encounter our living God. I have already shared with you the six different areas that our Synod of Bishops identified that must be a part of the thinking of any vibrant parish. In a summarized form these include:
(1) making the Scriptures a real part of our lives;
(2) engaging in authentic worship and prayer;
(3) being leaders in sharing the Gospel;
(4) serving others;
(5) fostering unity; and
(6) embracing a missionary spirit.
As I have been sharing with you, I believe that in order to accomplish this goal, all of us must first come to an understanding that we are called to holiness. This, I know, may be frightening to some since it is hard to think of ourselves as called to be saints. The fact of the matter is that we have all been called to be saints, that is people who truly understand that it is important to have God at the center of our lives and to learn the lessons that life presents to us.

Once we realize that all of us have been called to holiness, I think that we must wrestle with what it means first be a church and then a parish. I wonder, if you were asked, how you would respond to this basic question: What does it mean when we say that we are a church!

One of the first, simple answers to this question is: A church is a community of believers and, in our case, a community of people who believe that God became man, in the Person of Jesus Christ, in order to teach us how to live as human beings so that we might learn the lessons that life has been designed to teach us, preparing us for the next stage of existence after human death.

So, to be a church means to be a believer, that is someone who accepts as true many things which cannot be proven (e.g., Holy Communion is the Real Body and Blood of Christ; Jesus is God Himself incarnate; human life is somehow a sharing in God’s own life). To be a    believer is, perhaps, the first great struggle since we modern people want to have proof or data that what we are asked to believe is true.