The Rebuilt Field Guide: Ten Steps for Getting Started

You know your Catholic parish needs to change its focus, but you’re not sure where or how to begin. In The Rebuilt Field Guide, award-winning authors Rev. Michael White and Tom Corcoran walk you through ten essential steps for getting started with your church’s reawakening.

After publishing their groundbreaking book Rebuilt in 2013 about the rebirth of the Church of the Nativity in Timonium, Maryland, Fr. Michael White and Tom Corcoran were inundated with requests for help from other Catholic parishes about where to start. Subsequent books in the Rebuilt Parish series—Tools for Rebuilding, Rebuilding Youth Ministry, and Rebuilding Your Message—offer additional means to reach the end goal of making church matter and growing disciples by challenging the faithful and reaching the lost with the life-changing message of Jesus Christ.

In the newest book in the Rebuilt Parish series, White and Corcoran lead you and your leadership team through assessment and goal-setting exercises and provide meeting templates that include prayer, scripture reflection, storytelling, and “rally cries” that become reminders of the change the team is striving toward. This workbook offers practical steps that will help your team set change in motion with tools including:

• A checklist that helps identify the real problems facing your parish and seven questions to help you prioritize them
• A seven-part exercise to help you decide which parish activities do not support your disciple-making mission and then make a plan to stop doing them
• A simple, focused demographic assessment to help you identify your own “Timonium Tim”
• A discussion and planning guide for moving toward great liturgical music
• Seven conversation starters to help your team set a course for dealing with the conflict that inevitably comes with change

The exercises are adapted from those used at Church of the Nativity and correlate to the chapters of Rebuilt. The book will show you how to stop everything you are doing, rethink your purpose, and focus your attention on discipleship and evangelization.