Many parishes today face similar pastoral pressures: limited leadership capacity, increasing administrative demands, and growing expectations for mission and outreach.
Collaboration offers a practical way for parishes to strengthen ministry together rather than carrying these challenges alone.
It was a powerful experience to witness the Church in Sydney come together in communion at the Sydney Synod 2026 to reflect on the Spirit-led hopes and longings which emerged after years of consultation.
Among these, one stood out strongly: a desire for parishes within each deanery to collaborate more intentionally, particularly by expanding access to the sacraments, prayer opportunities, and keeping churches open longer for the faithful.
As followers of Christ, we are called into communion daily, whether through participation in the Eucharist, in our family lives or as we gather as God’s people to witness and serve in our local communities. Communion is who we are.
This call to collaborate for the mission of Christ presents a significant opportunity to strengthen parishes and faith communities and deepen evangelisation and outreach across Sydney.
While collaboration requires intentional effort, communication, and patience, operating in isolation also carries significant costs that are not often recognised — which can limit capacity, duplicate effort, and place unsustainable demands on individual communities.
Collaboration offers a way for parishes to share responsibility, strengthen one another, and bear greater fruit together than they could alone.
Importantly, this longing for new ways of exercising mission is not new.
In his Archdiocesan Mission Plan Go Make Disciples and subsequent forums, Archbishop Anthony Fisher OP explicitly invited parishes and ecclesial communities into both spiritual renewal and new ways of organising for mission.
One such approach is informal collaboration between parishes.
At the deanery level, collaboration enables parishes to coordinate practically — for example, by offering complementary Mass times and increasing availability for the sacrament of confession and Eucharistic adoration.
Beyond liturgical and sacramental life, collaboration allows communities to unite their gifts, talents, and resources to strengthen evangelisation and outreach efforts.
Parishes within a deanery might host shared youth ministry nights, run deanery-wide initiatives such as Alpha or RCIA together, share communications and social media efforts, or combine leadership formation or volunteer training.
A concrete example of such fruitful partnership is the 2024 inter-parish Lenten Cross pilgrimage in the Central Deanery, which brought together four parishes: St Peter Chanel and St Joseph, St Joachim Lidcombe, St John of God Auburn-Berala, and St Raymond Maronite Parish.
On Palm Sunday, parishioners walked a four-kilometre pilgrimage together, visibly witnessing unity in Christ.
Participants reflected on the strength and impact of parishes coming together, helping make Christ visible in the wider community.
From my experience working with parishes, for collaboration to be effective and sustainable, parish and deanery leaders can look to focus on four key principles:
1. Align around a shared outcome
Collaboration must begin with a clear, shared purpose.
Parishes should agree on a specific outcome or challenge (e.g. shared sacramental access, a regional ministry, or outreach initiative) and define what success looks like together.
Collaboration is most sustainable when it grows from concrete pastoral needs and practical experiences of working together.
Start small and recognise that the act of working together is itself a fruit of the Holy Spirit who draws us to Christ and one another.
2. Share responsibility for the outcome
Effective collaboration requires both clergy and lay leaders to take shared ownership. This includes regular engagement through meetings, prayer, and reflection, as well as a commitment to both naming challenges and implementing solutions together.
It also requires patience, recognising that meaningful collaboration and lasting pastoral outcomes develop gradually rather than through immediate results.
3. Cultivate mutual trust and respect
Strong collaboration is grounded in relationships. Parishes must be able to recognise one another’s strengths, respect differences in culture and context, and intentionally build trust between leaders and communities.
This trust develops over time through leadership that demonstrates respect and a passion for mission, through reliable communication, clarity of expectations, and through the experience of working through challenges and opportunities together in a spirit of shared responsibility.
4. Commit to ongoing communication and discernment
Sustained collaboration depends on consistent communication and spiritual discernment. Regular rhythms of meeting, praying, and reflecting together ensure alignment, foster learning, and maintain responsiveness to the Holy Spirit. These practices also create space to review progress, address emerging challenges, learn from experience, and remain responsive to the Holy Spirit over time.
If we are to become the “new wine” of spiritual renewal, we must also embrace “new wineskins” of working together.
Parishes in Sydney have already begun this journey and the International Eucharistic Congress in 2028 presents a perfect opportunity to work together even now in deaneries, across parishes and even with other dioceses to worship and enter into Christ’s mission of evangelisation.
Like all things, informal collaboration is not without effort; it requires time, trust, coordination, and a willingness to think beyond individual parish boundaries.
Yet working in isolation also demands energy and often limits what communities can sustain on their own.
When parishes work together, the gifts of each community can be united for a greater mission, revealing more fully the many parts of the one Body of Christ working together for the mission of the church.
