“The most important thing for us, for our community, is how to pass from maintenance to mission.”
Jacqueline Marie | Nov.19, 2024
In 2018, Švč. Mergelės Marijos Ramintojos bažnyčia (Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Peacemaker) in Vilnius, Lithuania, started its first Alpha. Today, their Alphas are so fruitful that over 60% of participants identify as unchurched — and even as they run the course twice a year, they still need to put people on a waitlist.
But the history of this church is much older and more convoluted than their present-day evangelistic fruitfulness would suggest.
Built in 1768, the church was taken over by the soviets post-World War II until Lithuania’s independence in 1991. The soviets divided the building into three floors and used the church as a vegetable warehouse.
Recently, the church has been undergoing a very different kind of renovation. Despite the physical divisions in the building, they are unified in their focus on renewal.
The church’s Pastor, Father Algirdas, says, “the most important thing for us, for our community, is how to pass from maintenance to mission.” He continues, “renewal is always … revival through the Holy Spirit, it comes not from our capacity…it is like the Eucharist, always to be in touch with this experience of the Holy Spirit that acts; if not we become spiritual consumers.”
His passion for renewal led him to cross paths with Divine Renovation and go on to spearhead a movement for parish renewal in Lithuania alongside his leadership team members: Zaneta and Vilma.
He was first introduced to DR in 2021 when the Manager of Alpha in Eastern Europe gave him a copy of the book, Divine Renovation: From a Maintenance to a Missional Parish. One of his parishioners, Zaneta – now the Alpha Coordinator and a member of Father Algirdas’s leadership team, picked it up and read the book first. She summarized the principles – the primacy of evangelization, the power of the Holy Spirit and the best of leadership – to Father Algirdas. Excited, he soon dove into the book as well. By 2022, they arranged to meet with the DR UK team and ask to be coached. From there they went on to be the first Lithuanians in group coaching.
Coaching and aligning to the Three Keys have changed many things, including Zaneta and Vilma moving from volunteer positions to staff members. It also changed their approach to Alpha. Zaneta says, “previously we only had the best people…” meaning only those who were already trained and ready to go – at the time a team of 20 – were running Alpha. But now they have a leadership pipeline and “the team is 32 people, which is quite big.” She says it is more of a challenge to manage but gives more opportunity for people to be formed as leaders. “People go through the Alpha team, not just the course, but especially the team” which leads, she says, to them staying in the church and being folded into the community.
Father Algirdas finds it also shifts the culture from consumer to giver: Alpha helps people “to have an experience of Christ – without this you cannot pass from a consumer to a giver,” and with that personal relationship they become part of the “givenness” of the Church. The church even sends out four Alpha leaders as missionaries to other parishes that are starting up Alpha and need help.
"...to spread this idea of Divine Renovation: as a movement and as the renovation, in a real sense, of the Church in Lithuania, so that there would be more and more priests and parishes...having the vision."
Zaneta says, “it was a bit difficult to change the perception to ‘strangers are welcome’ – that the stranger becomes part of the community and takes up your ministry.” But now the culture has shifted and what before had seemed like a “club” of ministry leaders is now open to everyone. Another way the vision for a missional, welcoming church has been passed on is through the leadership team coaching more than half of the church’s small groups in the principles of DR. Now the community as a whole is oriented to the direction the church is headed. Zaneta says there are “over 100 people committed to discipleship in small groups.”
Along with going through group coaching, Father Algirdas and Vilma are now also coaching other Lithuanian priests. So far, they have coached five cohorts of priests (35 priests, including two bishops) – multiplying parish renewal throughout Lithuania.
“We need the Church alive with the disciples of Christ!”
Part of the dream moving forward, Zaneta says, “is to spread this idea of Divine Renovation: as a movement and as the renovation in a real sense of the Church in Lithuania, so that there would be more and more priests and parishes… running Alpha, having the vision, having a leadership team.”
The bigger picture is that “the priests and the lay people, …that they would start with that holy discontent that the church is dying and that the people — even those who come to the church — are not disciples, they are just consumers of ritual services.”
Zaneta says emphatically, “We need the Church alive with the disciples of Christ!”
Father Algirdas, Zaneta and Vilma are leading by example at the Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Peacemaker: “so that through the example, both by doing Divine Renovation, by doing the kickstarts [group coaching] and by finding those priests that are also on fire” they can bring renewal to their whole country. That others will “catch the fire,” that priests and parish leaders would feel this calling within their hearts and “they would be brave enough because it’s definitely not easy.”
As Father Algirdas says, “this mission is bigger than you,” and that we can “ask the Holy Spirit for grace to remain in the identity of the mission of Christ each day.”
