Our Next Most Faithful Step

Re/Generation offers participants and staff the opportunity to discern vocation as individuals and as a community, as members of a community.

Over the past four years, Call To Action (CTA) has transformed our organization to center the vocational discernment of our members—especially our young adult members. Re/Generation is CTA’s intergenerational discernment program that gathers a cohort of young people from around the country, pairs them with a mentor from the progressive Catholic movement in the US, and over the course of 6 months helps them design and implement a project to address the injustices of the hierarchical Catholic church.

At the end of each cohort, Re/Generation members and CTA staff wonder what the next most faithful step might be—not only for the individual members—but for the program and our organization. And this is the heart of our transformation, Re/Generation offers participants and staff the opportunity to discern vocation as individuals and as a community, as members of a community.

One of the most exciting ideas emerging from this shift in discernment is the idea to develop a new network of intentional communities at the grassroots of the church. The past few years have revealed how many people within the CTA network are already living in intentional communities, are actively looking to join one, or are in serious discernment about intentional community life. CTA has long held healthy tension between justice-oriented work in the world and reform of the church. The design for our intentional communities will embody that generative tension.

We imagine that CTA intentional communities will be:

• Old and new. CTA chapters and house churches are examples of alternative church and community structures.
• Rooted in place and relationship. CTA intentional communities will develop in partnership with local organizers to develop the unique charism of each community.
• Committed to transformative Catholicism. CTA intentional communities will be Catholic in the tradition of our movement, drawing on the spirit of Vatican II: they will be homes for people whom the church has marginalized.

Rye House, CTA Intentional Community of the Future

The Rye House is our prototype—a place for us to learn how a national organization like ours can support a locally rooted community. We are partnering with members of the Minneapolis Catholic Worker community and their allies to build a program to connect Catholic church reformers with local leaders of color and uplift their much-needed work. Intentional communities provide an alternative model for living, one that allows folks working at the margins, from various religious and justice-oriented backgrounds, to continue to thrive.

We see intentional communities as one of our next most faithful steps for our work—and we are excited to take a sustainable first step in this process.

Call to Action is a member of FTE’s Community of Practice Cohort, a select group of ten organizations serving a critical mass of young adults. Throughout the past year, the Community of Practice Cohort has been exploring the practices that make up the acronym CARE—Create hospitable space; Ask self awakening questions; Reflect theologically; and Enact next most faithful steps.