3. Accompaniment
I think it is important to have clear in our minds that welcome is not the destination. Instead we should think of it as a doorway. I know lots of parishes that have become very good at hospitality. When you visit there is always a warm welcome at the church door, coffee after Mass, a friendly atmosphere and a genuine desire to make newcomers feel at home. All of this matters. But the danger is that unless someone eventually invites the newcomer to take another step, they can remain a permanent visitor: welcomed into the community without ever being helped to become a disciple. That is why proclamation, welcome and accompaniment are not three separate ministries but three inseparable dimensions of a single missionary reality.
If purpose is ultimately discovered in embracing Christ’s mission, accompaniment is where that purpose begins to take shape. It is the patient work by which someone who once needed to be helped gradually becomes someone capable of helping others: the person who needed to be accompanied becomes, in time, equipped to accompany others. I think embracing Christ’s mission is a sign of Christian maturity: in the Great Commission we are called not simply to be disciples but to make disciples. Accompaniment is key for that to become a reality.
Out of proclamation, welcome, and accompaniment, we should recognise that accompaniment is probably the most demanding. It requires time and patience. Much of its work is quiet and unseen. Its most important fruits resist easy measurement: growth in prayer, increasing freedom, a deepening relationship with Christ, the courage to make difficult decisions, the discovery of one’s vocation, the gradual emergence of a missionary heart.
Having worked with many parishes over the years, I have come to think that this is precisely where many initiatives, particularly those involving young adults, begin to lose momentum. It is not necessarily because Christ has not been proclaimed, nor because people have not been warmly welcomed. Often it is because no one remains close enough, for long enough, to walk beside them as they take the next step.
Pope Francis calls this the “art of accompaniment”. In Evangelii Gaudium, he writes that we need to learn to remove our sandals before the “sacred ground of the other” (EG 169). The image is important. Accompaniment begins with reverence for the person before us and for the mysterious work of grace already taking place within them. It does not do another person’s thinking for them. Respecting freedom and conscience, it avoids manipulating them into predetermined decisions, or trying to replace their freedom with our own by making decisions for them. It is a demanding way to love. Often, particularly for those of us who are gifted at teaching, it is easier to instruct than to accompany. Instruction allows us to retain a certain distance whereas accompaniment requires us to draw close enough to listen, and sometimes to walk at another person’s pace rather than our own.
If proclamation is the invitation, and welcome is the open door, accompaniment is the journey that follows. It is the patient and faithful work of helping another person respond to grace and take their next step towards Jesus Christ. Notice that I say their next step. Not the step we would like them to take, nor the step someone else once took, but the step God is asking of them today. This does not mean that accompaniment has no direction, as though every path were equally good. The destination is Christ. The task of accompaniment is to help someone discern and respond to the movement of grace that draws them towards him.
One of the most striking features of Jesus’ ministry is that although he frequently addressed crowds, he transformed lives one by one. He preached to thousands, taught in synagogues, and captivated multitudes on the hillsides of Galilee. Yet so many of the Gospel accounts of conversion are intensely personal. Jesus sits beside a Samaritan woman at a well. He invites himself into Zacchaeus’ house. He receives Nicodemus in the silence of the night. He restores Peter beside a charcoal fire.
On the road to Emmaus, we see perhaps the most complete biblical picture of accompaniment. The two disciples are walking away from Jerusalem. Their hopes have collapsed. They had believed that Jesus was the one who would redeem Israel, but now he is dead and they are leaving the city bewildered and disappointed. But then the risen Christ draws near and walks alongside them. He does not tell them what to think. He asks a question and listens to their struggles. Only then does he begin to interpret their experience in the light of the Scriptures. And when they reach their destination, he does not impose himself upon them but waits for their invitation: “Stay with us.” He enters the house, breaks bread with them, and their eyes are opened.
Then something extraordinary happens. They turn around. The two disciples who were walking away from Jerusalem now hurry back towards it. The people who needed to be accompanied have become witnesses. Encounter leads to conversion and conversion leads to mission. That is the goal of accompaniment.
Jesus never treated anyone as a pastoral project. He listened, asked questions, challenged, encouraged, and sometimes waited. It is striking how often in the Gospels he asked questions to which he already knew the answer: “What are you looking for?”; “What do you want me to do for you?”; “Why are you afraid?”
The questions matter because accompaniment begins by taking another person’s experience seriously. Before we speak, we must listen. Before we teach, we must understand. Before we can help someone discern what God may be asking of them, we need to know where they are in their relationship with him.
I suspect this is one of the greatest challenges facing our parishes today. Many of our churches are very good at administration. We know how to prepare children for First Holy Communion, organise marriage preparation, maintain sacramental registers, arrange rotas, and coordinate programmes. All of that matters and should be done well. But administration is not accompaniment. Administration helps move people through a process. Accompaniment walks with people through conversion. Administration asks whether someone has completed the course. Accompaniment wants to know how Christ is transforming their life.
We need both. Administration is indispensable. But administration alone cannot form missionary disciples because Christian formation is not simply the transmission of information or the completion of a programme. It is the work of Christ, through grace, within the sacramental life of the Church and through relationships in which faith is witnessed, shared, tested and allowed to mature. That is why accompaniment can never be reduced to just another parish programme.
In practice, this means creating relationships that no course or conference can replace. A young adult needs people with whom they can learn to pray and speak honestly about their faith. Small groups need to become genuine Christian communities rather than simply gatherings that last for the duration of a particular course. Younger Christians need mature disciples, a little further along the road, who are prepared to share something of the journey with them.
Programmes can create the opportunity for conversion. They can proclaim the Gospel, teach the faith and bring people together. But programmes alone cannot accompany anyone. I know it sounds obvious, but let’s not forget that people accompany people.
Healthy accompaniment always has an eye to the next step. At first, that step may simply be returning next Sunday. Later it may mean joining a small group, learning to pray each day, going to confession after many years, discovering the gifts God has given them, finding somewhere to serve, or beginning to discern a vocation. Eventually, however, there should come a moment when the disciple who once asked, Who will help me? begins instead to ask, Whom can I help?
The goal of accompaniment is not dependence but freedom; not permanent consumers of pastoral care but missionary disciples capable of accompanying others. The Christian life is received as a gift, but the gift is given so that it can be given away. That is Christian maturity.
I often think of a mountain guide. A good guide does not carry the climber to the summit. Nor does he stand at the top shouting instructions from a distance. He walks beside them. He knows the destination and he knows the path because he has travelled it himself. He encourages when the climb becomes difficult, adjusts the pace when necessary, warns of danger and sometimes allows the climber to struggle, knowing that strength is forged precisely in the struggle. That is accompaniment.
And there is a challenge here for anyone who would accompany others: we cannot lead someone along a road we are unwilling to travel ourselves. Accompaniment requires more than trained volunteers. It requires mature disciples — men and women who themselves remain close to Christ, who know something of prayer, conversion, struggle, forgiveness and grace, and who are prepared to share the journey with another.
Conclusion
We began with three of the deepest questions carried in the human heart: Am I loved? Do I belong? Does my life have a purpose? The Gospel does not answer those questions with abstractions.
Proclamation says: You are loved. Before you had done anything to deserve it, God loved you. Before you went searching for him, he came searching for you. In Jesus Christ, God has entered our world, borne our sin and death, and opened the way to life.
Welcome says: You belong. There is a place for you in the Father’s house. The Church is not a gathering of the spiritually successful but a people summoned by grace, a Body in which every member matters and in which the stranger can discover a home.
Accompaniment says: Your life has a purpose. Christ does not simply welcome us and leave us where he found us. He calls us to follow him. He forms us, heals us, challenges us, gives us gifts and entrusts us with a share in his mission.
These three realities belong together. Without proclamation, welcome can become little more than friendliness. Without welcome, proclamation risks becoming a message addressed to strangers who have no reason to trust the messenger. Without accompaniment, those who are warmly received today can easily become forgotten visitors tomorrow.
But when proclamation, welcome and accompaniment come together, something different begins to emerge. The parish becomes what its sacramental life calls it to be: a community of missionary disciples in which people encounter Jesus Christ, find a home within his Body, are patiently formed in the Christian life, and discover that they too have been entrusted with a mission.
And perhaps that is the simplest way to describe a missionary parish: Someone arrives at the threshold uncertain whether they are loved, whether they belong, or whether their life has any real purpose. They encounter a community which proclaims Christ to them, makes room for them, learns their name, walks with them and helps them discover the life to which God is calling them. The person to whom the Gospel was once proclaimed learns to proclaim it to another. And, by the grace of God, there comes a day when that same person is standing at the doorway, looking out for the next stranger who arrives. The disciple who once needed someone to walk beside them becomes mature enough to accompany somebody else — a disciple who makes disciples
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