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Meet Our Pastor
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father terrywelcome message from
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Hello! I'm Father Terry coonan.
I was born and raised in Fort Wayne, Indiana. I was one of eight brothers and sisters. It is truly a beautiful thing to have grown up with such a huge and messy gang, which we affectionately called the "Coonan clan."
While we certainly had fights and struggles and scars to prove them, more importantly we had our faith and a deeper love to overcome the conflicts. The faith is a gift. Without my parents, older siblings, grandparents, and my extended 'parish family' trying to live the faith, I do not think I would be your pastor today.
Our parish wants to be that "village" that helps to foster the faith of others.
Keep praying to the Holy Spirit to guide our parish in its progress towards these plans for evangelization, parishioner enrichment, and relationship-building.
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Pastor's Letters
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Easter weekend was a great success for our parish. We saw many people here to celebrate Our Lord’s Resurrection, and we will continue that joy for the next six weeks through Pentecost Sunday...Read More
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It is a joy to be able to celebrate Easter with a congregation! We must thank God for the little things, because the everyday things are really the joys of this life. We must embrace the beautiful goodness of our world with the eyes of a child, wondering at what God gives us. And this above all on this day of victory for all who are in Christ Jesus! Sin and Death are vanquished by the Risen Lord! In Baptism, we conquer with Him! And we welcome new members to the parish family at the Easter Vigil - who either were themselves baptized or have now entered the Church and received the Lord in the Eucharist! God is so good! Read More
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On this day the church recalls the entrance of Christ the Lord into Jerusalem to accomplish his Paschal Mystery. The memorial of this entrance of the Lord takes place at the beginning of all our Sunday Masses through the procession or the “solemn entrance” - this year we are doing the second option for the sake of better spacing of the congregation. The use of palm branches is another reminder of Christ’s entrance, which we hold to join in the crowds of that day. The liturgy reminds us today that it was for one primary purpose that Christ entered Jerusalem: to win our salvation by his Passion and Resurrection...Read More
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fr. terry: on our mission
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"As busy as we are with so many things pulling us and pushing us, it is easy to get swept away in our lives. If we don't live our lives on purpose, we can end up living them on accident. Sometimes this can yield drastic consequences, like hiking without a compass and finding yourself lost. Our faith, and our unique vocation, is a compass that the Lord gives us.
Our parish has been working on its compass - trying to discover the voice of God speaking over and through the noise to a deeper calling. Over the past year our parish staff has been working from a new mission statement, and the work from the past few months in our Next Generation Parishes program has given us a good final product to begin using as a guide for our parish. You may have seen it recently on our parish website:
Driven by the missionary zeal of St. Thérèse, the Lord anoints us to proclaim to the poor and broken the good news that Jesus calls us to abundant life in Him.
While these thirty-two words make a long sentence, but we believe every phrase is essential to our mission. I would like to share a little of why these phrases are important.
First we can go to the core of the message. Our job as a church in the world is to bring the gospel to others, so that they may encounter the person of Jesus. Poverty and brokenness are not always so easy to see in the soul, as we often don't like admitting our weakness and need for God. The reality is we all are poor and broken, and we all have a savior who can make us healed and whole. Evangelization is a huge part of the survival of our church in a very post-Christian culture that is not hospitable to the life of faith. If we are not bringing the Lord to others, they may never have a chance to meet Him and thus continue until death in a life that is a quiet nightmare in a desolate wasteland. Jesus' life is abundant - not just the basic "biological" life (Greek 'bios') of earthly things and hedonistic ends, but the fuller life (Greek 'zoe') of God's divine life shared with us by Grace, and ultimately stretching into eternity and breaking through into our present. This life is only found "in Him" - "there is no other name under heaven by which we are saved." (Acts 4:12)
All of us are called to be missionaries (evangelizers). Pope Francis reaffirmed this in Evangelii Gaudium, and it goes all the way back to Christ's great commission from Matthew 28, which was not just for the apostles but for all of us."-Father Terry
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