There is an unwritten rule about pubs: don’t talk about politics, and most definitely do not talk about religion.
Liana Moric had lived by it for years. But when the 25-year-old primary school teacher found herself at a friend’s birthday party, chatting to her own friends about her parish, she wasn’t expecting anyone else to be listening.
Someone was. A man she had never met had overheard the conversation, and later in the evening he came and found her.
“He said, ‘Oh, are you religious?'” Liana recalls. “And I said yeah. And then he asked, ‘What faith are you? What church are you a part of?'”
She told him she was Catholic. He told her his father was Catholic too, but that he himself hadn’t been to church in years and couldn’t imagine going back after everything he had done.
“And I said, ‘Well, that’s the perfect reason to come back to church. Do you think I’m perfect? The reason I go to church is because I’m not perfect. We’re all sinners.'”
A year ago, Liana says, that conversation would not have happened. She wouldn’t have started it, and she isn’t sure she would have known what to do when it found her.
“I really needed to stop and ask the Holy Spirit,” she says. “I was like, Holy Spirit, help me to help this person that’s come to me. I thought that was a pretty incredible encounter.”
‘I didn’t really know what a charism was’
What changed in between was Called & Gifted, the charism discernment process run through the Parish Renewal Team within the Sydney Centre for Evangelisation, using the Catherine of Siena Institute model.
Liana heard about it the way many people do: an announcement at the end of Mass.
“I honestly didn’t really know what a charism was before I participated in the course,” she says.
Charisms are the particular gifts the Holy Spirit gives to every Christian, not for private benefit, but so that they can represent Christ and become a channel of God’s goodness for other people.
The process begins with an introductory evening, followed by a full-day Saturday workshop built around teaching on the different charisms and a written inventory. From there, the group meets fortnightly in small teams to share how the experiment is going. For Liana, those small groups turned out to be so important.
“At the beginning of the experiment process I was like, I have no idea how I’m going to experiment with this,” she says.
“But the people in my group and the group leader really guided me. I felt like they were encouraging me, too.”
Choosing the harder classroom
Initially Liana considered testing the charism of teaching but then decided on the charism of encouragement with a goal to test it well outside the classroom.
That meant her friends. Many of them, she says, aren’t practising Catholics, and she had long struggled to find a way into conversations about faith with them. What she discovered was that encouragement didn’t require a theological opening.
“It wasn’t necessarily that I was talking about God and the Bible with them,” she says.
“It was in those moments when they were low or down that I could use that charism of encouragement. Not necessarily saying come back to church but encouraging them subtly.”
Encouragement, it turned out, was what made people comfortable enough to ask the questions themselves.
“It’s not us trying to bring people to church. It’s not I’m going to change the world. It’s like, no, God is. We’ve got to allow God to work through us. We don’t need to control everything.”
For anyone still sitting on the fence, Liana’s message is simple.
“It will give you a better understanding of the Holy Spirit and how God works through us. We’re his vessel. We’re not in control. We’ve just got to surrender to God’s will.”
The next Called & Gifted Discernment Process runs from Wednesday 2 September to Wednesday 25 November 2026, with the Part 1(b) Workshop Intensive on Friday 12 September, 9:00am – 5:00pm.
Details and registration: calendar.sydneycatholic.org — or find out more at gomakedisciples.org.au/called-gifted-discernment-process
