The Fours Way Forward - Final Verdict

Unqualified "Buy" recommend if you are the target audience. This is the go-to book on strategic management decisions for the evangelizing parish.

Today I’m doing a capsule review of The Four Ways Forward: Becoming an Apostolic Parish in a Post-Christian World by Susan Windley-Daoust.

Longtime readers will recall I made some initial notes way back in 2022, and after a long pause due to random disruptions, I finished the second half of the book earlier this year. My slowness in getting a review up has no bearing on the quality of this book. If you are the target audience (see below) I give this an unqualified “buy” recommend.

What is this book?

Four Ways Forward is a compact strategic management manual for parish evangelization and revival. The focus is on helping parish administrators (pastor, staff, leadership team) make management-level decisions about what kinds of approaches will be helpful to this specific parish.

After some essential introductory material in Part I, the book looks in Part II at four well-known models for parish-level evangelization, and explains what each one is and how it works. There are case studies from real parishes (including parish clusters) of how the various approaches work in real life, and what the common difficulties include.

Finally, the book finishes by explaining how the different approaches work together, and how to figure out what the right strategy choices are for your specific parish.

—> This is especially invaluable if someone in your parish or diocese has read about one of widely-popularized models (Rebuilt? Divine Renovation?) and now a food fight has broken out because what worked there might not be exactly right here, or maybe someone else in leadership wants to try this other thing . . . Four Ways Forward exists specifically to make sense of a multitude of choices and help you see the big picture of what will be most effective for your parish in particular.

What’s the reading level?

The book is eminently readable, but it is technically solid. If you are comfortable reading this newsletter, and you are comfortable reading The Catechism of the Catholic Church, you should be fine. If you’re “not a reader” recreationally, but you do regularly digest technical materials as part of your work, this will be no problem.

—> Other than the quotes from Church documents, the book is a very pleasant, conversational, fun read (if evangelizing strategy is something you love). The quotes are necessary though, since the author is making the case for decisions on how to run local parishes, and that needs to be done in accordance with the beliefs and practices of the Catholic faith. You can just skim the proofs if you are already on board.

Not everyone in parish leadership, though, is necessarily going to have an easy time reading this book, because there are other attributes than bookishness that make for great leadership! So, related . . . .

Who needs to read this book?

The must-read group is the bishop (or counterpart religious superior where applicable), parish pastors, and anyone in a decision-making role about parish activities. BUT, we know very well that not every pastor is going to be the guy who has the time or energy to take this on.

So be it. Likewise there are members of your parish council and heads of ministry who are enthusiastically on board with the desire and commitment for parish evangelization, but are going to find this book a little too much.

Not to worry. The main thing is that the ideas get communicated and taught. It’s okay if you assign that person on the parish council who’s just really good at digesting and explaining information to help lead the group through the key points of the text.

How is this book different from other evangelization books?

I consider this one a must-buy because it covers territory that other evangelization books do not.

Here are some benchmarks for perspective, comparing three books that I also heartily recommend, but for completely different reasons:

Sherry Weddell’s seminal work Forming Intentional Disciples lays out the scope, symptoms, and causes of the problem. Four Ways Forward provides a set of validated templates for how to address the problem at a parish-wide level.

Marcel LeJeune’s The Contagious Catholic is an up-close, personal-level look at the heart of evangelization through relationships. If you want to understand what evangelization really is, deep at the center of it all, this one takes no prisoners.

Four Ways Forward builds from the assumption that this is what you want to do, and asks: Okay, so what does that look like in terms of managerial-level decisions about what my parish as a whole should prioritize, given our unique set of circumstances?

And finally, my book The How-to Book of Evangelization is a compendium of all the different elements of evangelization that we have to work with (focusing on a typical American parish for most of the examples). It lays out some fundamental non-negotiables, but also includes many chapters of possible tactics that may or may not be what your particular ministry is called to do.

Four Ways Forward is the book that helps parish leadership decide: Of all these elements, which ones are best for us to deploy, and what is the most effective way to deploy them?

Questions?

I’d encourage you to reach out to the Mark 5:19 Project if this is a topic you want to explore further, or are looking for help in how to communicate these ideas to others in your parish or diocese.

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Obligatory full-disclosure notes:

• Pretty sure Susan sent me a review copy of this one. She is a reader here, but we’ve seen each other around online for ages, starting way back when I was an anonymous fan of The Ironic Catholic, for any of you who are that old in internet years.

• I have no personal experience working with the Mark 5:19 Project. But I have an MBA, strategic management was one of my strongest courses, and my goodness this woman just understands what end is up and how to think strategically.

• I rarely, if ever, post negative reviews, because I don’t have that kind of time, and furthermore if I dislike a book I toss it. I am not one of these people who feels obliged to finish a lousy book. Because I am very slow with most reviews, authors probably assume my silence means I didn’t like their book, but no, not always.

And if you were looking for a personal update since my goodness it’s been a month, yes I was laid out flat with some stupid thing, and now I’m doing better though still not back up to baseline. Many thanks to the prayer team whom I credit with my getting to see my far-away child during that time, which I thought wasn’t going to happen, and it did. Bless you all.