You are Invited! You are invited to participate in one of the 6 Justice Matters’ house meetings being held in St. John Parish beginning on October 2. These meetings are sacred conversations, held in confidence among those present. It is an opportunity to raise new issues that need to be addressed or to find other areas of those issues we are already working on to be explored.

At present, we have 6 team leaders: Jean Drumm, Ruth Entwistle, Pat Lechtenberg, Vicki McMurray, Joe Snyder with Marilyn Page, and Carol vonTersch. Our goal would be to invite all parishioners, but with only 6 of us extending invitations we will do miss a lot of people at St. John.

Doing justice may sound strange or new to you. I remember when Catholics, back in the 1970s, thought evangelization was a Protestant activity. There might be a similar reaction to ‘doing justice’. To fully live out the two great commandments of loving God and loving neighbor we are called to ‘do justice, love mercy and walk faithfully with God’. (Micah 6:8) In similar words in the gospel of Matthew 23:23-24 Jesus reminds us not to ‘neglect the weightier matters of the law, justice, mercy and good faith’. We are a truly faithful people with lots of opportunities to worship and praise our God and to grow spiritually. We have multiple mercy ministries that see to the needs of our brothers and sisters. Where and how do we do justice in our parish? How can we change systems that are not fully mindful of basic human needs in Lawrence? Justice Matters is an opportunity to ‘do justice’.

Doing justice is what loving your neighbor looks like in public. Please prayerfully consider being a good steward of 2 hours of your time and participate in a Justice Matters house meeting in October.

We hope to have 100 parishioners give input at the house meetings. If you are willing to host a conversation but aren’t ready to make a commitment to be a team leader, please let us know. We can arrange to have another parish team leader facilitate that conversation. We want to be sure to have at least 10-15 participants in each home.

For more information or to sign up to attend or host a house meeting please contact Joe Synder (785-550-6421 or joesnyder42@gmail.com) or Pat Lechtenberg (785-842-1992 or plek10berg@aol.com)