 If you've done this prayer with me before, that's okay. It's an oldie but goodie. So to prepare for our prayer, I'm gonna ask you to call to mind one of three things, okay? You have a choice. So, and we're not gonna confess these. These are things we'll just hold in our hearts, okay? So one option would be, is there an area of your life or work, I should say, that feels like it's a need of renewal, you know? Just need some new life breath into it. So that's one option. The second option would be, is there a decision that's part of your life? Maybe you're in the middle of trying to make a big decision or you know that one's looming on the horizon, all right? And your third option would be, is there something going on in your life or your work or both that puts you in need of comfort? There's just a struggle or a sorrow of some sort and some comfort would really be appreciated, okay? So those are your three choices. Area of life or ministry in need of renewal, decision that's part of life or ministry, something going on that puts you in the need of comfort. And if it was like all of the above, if you were checking them off and saying, yeah, I actually have three of those and you know, four of those, that's okay too. Just hold those in your heart. I'm gonna pray a sort of an oldie but goodie prayer in the church just for us and you can just sort of hold those intentions in your heart while I pray in the name of the Father and of the Son of the Holy Spirit. Amen, come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful in kindling them the fire of your love. Send forth your spirit and they shall be created and you shall renew the face of the earth. And let us pray, oh God, you instruct the hearts of your faithful by the light of your Holy Spirit. Help us by that same spirit always to know what is right and constantly to enjoy his holy comforts through Christ our Lord. Amen, name the Father and the Son, the Holy Spirit. Amen, certainly in our lives and in our work as diocesan leaders, there are those occasional areas that feel like they need some new life breathe into them depending on how long you've been doing this. If you didn't have one of those, trust me, one will come up in a year or two and decisions are certainly a big part of what we do. And yeah, we need comfort once in a while but sometimes the wheels come off of a project that we're working on or an event that we're trying to put together. So yeah, I hope this week has been good for you so far and I hope it's yet another experience of the Holy Spirit's presence and power and desire to do all those good things for us in our lives and in the ministry of leadership that God has called us to, okay? Yeah, I think the fact that you're here makes, it says great things about you. You know, you're definitely making an investment in your own, in your own formation. I know some of you traveled a long distance. So again, I just, I pray that it's a fruitful week for you. My name, as it probably says on things, so I'm Ken O'Gorick. I serve on Archbishop Charles Thompson's leadership team in Indianapolis, Indiana and I help coordinate the work of about a dozen different offices and ministries. I'm not gonna read you the laundry list, but it falls under the umbrella of evangelization and catechesis. So here we are at the St. John Bosco Conference for Evangelization and Catechesis. I don't have a whole lot to tell you about myself. Some of you know me, you might be surprised by that because you know, that's one of my favorite topics, but it really isn't. I really wanna dive into our topic. I could tell you some stories about like the early days of the Diocesan gatherings here, because this is the 28th year of the St. John Bosco Conference. So those were a little bit more like secluded. There might have been like 11 people here. What you're experiencing this week is it's a relatively new way of just making sure that Diocesan folks are able to connect with each other and participate in some workshops. And I'm sure Chris was kind of explaining to you, this morning especially, I know working genius, he had to talk a little bit more, but we really, these Diocesan workshops, yes, we're gonna put some thoughts on the table and facilitate some things, but there's a lot of wisdom and experience in this room. So they're a bit more interactive. I think that's all I was gonna say about that. So just by way of a quick preview, our topic generally is hiring, personnel is policy hiring, that whole area. And I wanna say hiring broadly defined, because we all know that some of the people who lead ministries in some of our parishes, I often say they're part-time volunteers with high school diplomas and day jobs. So it's not like there's a huge hiring process per se, one that you're gonna get involved deeply in. But I think it is a fair question. Even in those situations, can you offer some support to father as he discerns which of those parishioners to sort of put in those ministries? So I'm sort of using the word hiring pretty broadly defined. So I'm hoping to share some practical tips that I've maybe picked up over the years, but again, there's lots of wisdom and experience in this room, so we'll be sharing with these other as well. So yeah, I'll talk a bit on the front end, especially, but you'll have an opportunity to connect with each other and do some sharing. And I'm an old high school teacher, many of you know that. So I'm always aware when the dismissal bell's gonna ring, so especially when it's like dinner time on the, not that you remind me of a bunch of hungry teenagers or anything, but some of you might. But yeah, we'll be sure to wrap up in a timely fashion. And just one other quick thought as we were kind of going around and just matching some names with faces. You know, Chris Bergwald and I were always working with Bill Keimig, especially trying to tweak this the experience of diocesan leaders who come to Bosco. And one thing that has come up often on a little bit is a desire to maybe just have some less structured time where people could connect on specific topics and just kind of, you know, do some sounding board. You know, hey, I'm dealing with this. You know, are you dealing with it too? Can we talk about it? So towards the end here, you might, some of you might be actually standing up again because I might ask you, you know, if there's a topic that you would really just like to connect with someone about one or two people, you know, in between things, we can just maybe, again, match a name and a face. And oh, Judeen, she wants to talk about onboarding new employees or something like that. So, you know, we don't have a structured, like a set apart session for that, but maybe if we do a little of that towards the end of this session, that can kind of prime that pump a little bit and give you that opportunity. So just a word of the wise, you might be standing up and telling people your name again. So let's dive in. I think it was, well, it was a little over 20 years ago that I first heard the phrase, personnel is policy, right? And it really stuck with me. We all know that policies are important, guidelines, mandates, you know, with those air quotes, you know, but we also know that if people who are well suited for those ministry roles aren't in place that, you know, policies are only gonna go so far and guidelines and so forth. And I think also the flip side is true when we're intentional about who we discern as a person to help get into one of those ministry leadership roles. I mean, the policies and things are still important, but they're sort of less important in that these folks will intuitively tend to approach ministry in ways that kind of fit the vision that we're trying to put in place. I forgot to mention that some of us are involved with hiring and onboarding and things like that, sort of laterally maybe, or in our DOS and roles. So a lot of this stuff will translate to that, but I'm thinking especially about what happens in our parishes. I often say the reason, you know, the reason people like me have jobs is to support ministry and parishes, right? So what can we do from a personnel point of view that can help enhance by God's grace, of course, what's happening in our parishes? So let me see a show of hands real quick, maybe a little bit of a show of hands here. How many of you, in your current role, how many of you are able to get pretty involved at times in who's being hired for ministry in your parishes? Is there a process or something in your diocese, sort of? At least in theory? Okay, so not a large number? Okay, that's not surprising necessarily. We'll certainly talk more about that. I wanna encourage you, well, I wanna encourage you, maybe there are some ways to get involved. I mean, I know you can't wave a magic wand or have the bish up a company of you everywhere and say, hey, he wants me to help you hire people, but maybe there are some things you can do to kind of get a little bit more involved. And I'll just share a quick story, a quick example. So when I first started doing diocese and work about 26 years ago in Pittsburgh, okay, 50% of my job, of that job, it was focused on the teaching of religion in our Catholic high schools. And we had a pretty firm and well understood policy in place that even though principals made the final hiring decision, that they were to choose from a pool of candidates that had sort of been vetted, if you will. And that held pretty firm. So I did kind of a screening interview and then the principals kind of took it from there, okay? And then of course, once that hiring was done, then we connected with that new high school religion teacher right away. So fast forward, I was with the diocese in Pittsburgh for 10 years, 16 years ago, moved back to my home state of Indiana. We're a friendly little state, really we are. Maybe some of you will be in Indianapolis about a year from now for the Eucharistic Congress, but I arrived at the art sites in Indianapolis. My role was different, not only was my role different there, but I found out there was nothing in place, like no guidance at all in terms of who taught religion at the high school or middle school level, just no guidance at all. And anecdotally, I would hear things like, hey, Joe the janitor, can you cover this extent of religion? I mean, you're Catholic and it's only religion. I mean, come on, how hard could it be? And that's probably exaggerating a little bit, but maybe not too much. Actually Joe the janitor might have been a fine, might have been a fine catechist intuitively, but there wasn't much of a process in terms of background or what have you. But the thing is I knew, based on the way my job was structured, I couldn't get as involved as I was in Pittsburgh, so what could I do? I worked with some folks, including Archbishop Daniel Beekline, may he rest in peace, he was a staunch supporter of good catechesis and evangelization. So we put a policy in place, and it was kind of a happy medium between nothing and sort of the screening process or vetting process is probably a better word that we had in Pittsburgh. And I won't bore you with the details of the policy itself, although it was pretty well written. I include a little haiku in it, it was really popular. I was trying not to drown you in too much paper, so but you can find it on the internet, if you just type in the name Arch-Indy is like a magic search engine word for anything it has to do with our archdiocese. So really if you type in, I think I did this morning, if you type in high school, catechist hiring policy Arch-Indy, a PDF of it will probably pop up right away. So again, maybe you're not involved at all or as involved as you would like to be, and you don't necessarily have the power or authority to get super duper involved in all cases, but maybe there are some things you can do to kind of move the needle a little bit in the direction of helping folks discern who has some of these different roles in our parishes especially, okay? So I wanna encourage you to do that. I wanna encourage you to think about how, whatever your situation is right now in having some influence in that area, is there something you could do? Is there a resource you could offer pastors? And believe it or not, some of them might actually appreciate it honestly. Is there a way that you could support pastors in helping to hire full-time or part-time paid people or to discern if that's not the kind of situation it is, at least to discern maybe who among those two or three possible parishioners might be best suited for that role in the parish, okay? Maybe there are some things you can do to help with that. And we'll talk a little bit more about that in a bit. So onto the handout, I wonder if I just hit it. Maybe I did, okay, all right. Any backup batteries back there? We won't worry about it. So a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, there were these things called perceivers. They still exist, okay? And there used to be a thing called the DRE perceiver, I would love to see, I mean, gosh, it would be like a relic if I took an article of your, were any of you ever trained to sort of give or administer the DRE perceiver? You've heard of perceivers generally speaking though, that it's basically an instrument. It's a list of questions, right? And you ask each question to the person as written and then there's a lot of listen for's, listen for this, listen for that. And then you sort of painstakingly and meticulously go through the transcribed answer, looking for those keywords and phrases and things that the person said in the interview. And it gives you, in theory at least, it gives you a sense of, again, how well-suited might this person be for that role of Paris Cataclytus leader? How effective might she or he be? How happy might she or he be? But it's funny, so I knew these things existed, but again, right around 16 years ago when I hired on with the Archdiocese of Indianapolis, the Gallup people, because I believe Gallup is the outfit that kind of produced things. And there's perceivers for all kinds of things, right? There's actually a priest perceiver, or there might be a psychology professor perceiver, if not, you can make one probably, but they stopped doing training on it. So I, at the time, we had what we called a personnel team, the way we were structured back then. Those of us who worked closely with Paris Cataclytus leaders, principals, youth ministers. So I sort of worked with our personnel team to put together my own perceiver. It wasn't very scientific, but at least it allowed us to talk about, as a staff, what kinds of questions do we think are important? And again, we're not looking for cookie-cutter images at all, but what would some words and phrases be, or what would some ways of responding be that might give us a little insight into this person? Again, effectiveness and happiness, which I think hopefully go together. So again, I didn't give you the whole perceiver if you want to see it, it's like three pages long. So it's just a few questions and maybe a short paragraph about some things to listen to. Feel free to email me, I'll send it to you. I'm easy to find, I'm not in the Catholic Witness Protection Program. You probably got an email from me before you came here. So I can send you that. But what I did give you is that short little one-page document that you got when you walked in. And that was also produced by our personnel team. And honestly, a lot of the questions on that Paris Catechicata Leader, little informal perceiver document that I've used for a long time, and even other interviewing situations that I find myself in, they sort of flow from that document. So a little bit about that document. I sometimes call it the no flip-flops document. And by flip-flop, I don't mean like political flip-flop, but the person who hired me in Indianapolis, she was kind of legendary. And she would sit on these personnel team meetings. And she said she had been to a high school graduation at one of our Catholic high schools recently, sort of representing the Archdiocese. And as the staff was walking in in their caps and gowns, kind of a formal pomp and circumstance, whatever that is, she heard this, and she looks, and one of the faculty members was wearing flip-flops. And so my boss at the time, and it isn't that she thinks we should all be super formal and formal rigid, that kind of stuff. But in her mind, she was like, you know, there should probably be some standards of, I'm just not sure that flip-flops by a faculty member at the graduation ceremony is a good thing. So it led to a discussion on our personnel team. How would we articulate? When you have a role of ministry leadership in the church, what are some expectations, if you will, or standards, if you wanna put them that way? So we came up with this document that you have in front of you. I think we originally gave it a boring name, like 10 guidelines for effective ministry, your leadership or something like that, but I think we ended up calling it, you are the face of the church. So I just wanna give you a couple examples of if you read that over, you might find that a lot of the interview questions that you're inclined to ask one way or another connect to those. And looking it over might even give you some new ideas for some interview questions that you could ask. So let me just give you a couple of examples. And I'm not doing these in order. If you look at the second one, be enthusiastic. The very first question, and this is just me, I'm not saying this should be the first question you ask in an interview, but I am involved right now. I should have said this. We do have a process in the archdiocese where in theory at least, I'm supposed to be someone involved when a pastor is hiring a parish kind of ketical leader. It doesn't always happen, but actually oftentimes it does. So the first interview I ask, or the first question I ask when I'm doing the screening interview, I just say Shane, what do you like best about being Catholic? What do you like best about being Catholic? And in some ways, I don't even care what Shane says. But I just wanna hear something. I wanna hear some joy. I wanna hear some enthusiasm. And I know we all express that in different ways. Everybody doesn't have to be super effusive. But I just, I think it's hard to lead in ministry if you don't sort of have a little bit of that joy and enthusiasm that shows through. So that's an example of an interview question that I asked that flows from this. Take a look at number 10. We're jumping around here. Gosh, I think isolation in ministry. I suppose it's always been a bit of an issue, but I just feel like in recent years, I see a lot of my, we have 126 parishes. And I just see some of my parish catechetical leaders, you know, just with sort of a lone ranger attitude and in a sense what they end up doing is working in isolation. Isolation from their fellow parish catechetical leaders. And to some extent, isolation from sort of the broader catechetical vision that our bishop, and in Pittsburgh, I was always taught to call the bishop our chief shepherd and catechist, you know? So there's a connection, right? What we do in ministry has a, it's part of a broader vision. And so that number 10 on the sheet leads to some questions like, you know, what do you see as the connection or the relationship between this parish ministry and maybe even the role of the bishop or, you know, the bishop's ministry, especially when we're talking about catechesis, okay? Go on here, okay. Back to number two. I actually took some direction, believe it or not. I wanted to come up with a question that would be about orthodoxy, frankly, you know, really. And so the way the personnel team suggested phrasing it was, and I think this is pretty much verbatim, you know, is there any aspect of church teaching, particularly as it appears in the catechism, that you couldn't teach sincerely and authentically, you know? So I didn't, I wouldn't just say, hey, are you president of heresy of the month club? You know? So, but some kind of question that gets to that, that gets to that, you know, are we thinking with the mind of the church, basically? And I don't wanna go off on too much of a tangent here, but it's just, it's an important question to ask one way or another. Yeah. Yeah. Is there any aspect of church teaching, particularly as it appears in the catechism, that you couldn't teach sincerely and authentically? All right, yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Yep, so I don't know if you're able to hear all that, but yeah, yeah, contextualizing the question, almost in more of, you know, sincerely, authentically, comfortably, you know, for one reason or another. So absolutely, good point. And it's interesting, the question, regardless of how you ask it, it's often led to some interesting, I mean, sometimes it's a pretty short answer, but other times not, at least some interesting discussions. So yeah, so quick side notes, these aren't really side notes, but they relate to this question. You know, my experience has been in recent years, most people who are interested in getting into ministry, they tend not to have a lot of, like, doctrinal access to grind with the church. So this hasn't been a huge issue. And yes, you're right, people can certainly be a little less than truthful. That happens occasionally. It's been pretty rare for someone to say, oh yeah, you know, there's like three teachings, I think, are stupid, you know? So that doesn't happen too often. I will say on those rare occasions, when it's happened, I usually don't turn into like the soup guy on Seinfeld, it's like, no interview for you, the conversation goes on, but a lot of times I'll ask them, I will circle back to it eventually, and I'll usually do two things, depending on the issue, I'll say, hey, have you ever read X or have you ever read Y? If I'm aware of something that really explains that teaching pretty well, and then depending on the rapport that's developed between me and the person at that point, I'll say, hey, the people you hang out with, are there people in your life who challenge you on that, or do you find that you mostly hang out with folks who kind of feel the same way? And maybe it just gets a little thought process going, and then I always leave the door open, because if a person is really saying, no, I just, I flatly deny one or more basic, basic doctrinal or moral teachings of the church, I'll explain to them, we can't really move on with the process, I'm not really comfortable giving your information to a pastor at this point, but again, please take a look at this stuff, follow up with me, I encourage you just to keep learning, keep praying, and if you find that you're changing your point of view on this a little bit, please, please circle back with me, so it's not too harsh. I will say, a priest that I used to work with in Pittsburgh, this is how he asked that question, I wouldn't do this, but he would say, Gary, if you could change one basic doctrinal or moral teaching of the church, well, what would it be? You know, and of course the answer he's looking for is, well, gosh, I wouldn't change any of them, but to me, that's a little tricky, but he's a good guy, you can wanna guess who he is, we can talk later about it, but anyway, a good dude, a good dude, a good dude. Finally, and then we'll move on here, number five, I often ask, yeah, how do you just keep your life balanced? Cause that's another, maybe it's related to isolation somehow, but we know how easy it is just to get off kilter, you know, if we're not tending to our bodies, minds, hearts, and souls to the degree that we should, so we wanna see that this is a person who's, yeah, who really is mindful of that need for balance understood that way. And it's funny, that question often circles back up to number one, because you see item number one on here, when we wrote this, these were in all sorts of different orders, we talked about them and teased them out, and eventually the team said, well, immerse yourself in a sacramental prayer life, but that's gotta be number one, that's kind of where all this flows from, so I find more often than not, when we talk about just balance with folks, a lot of folks, one ingredient, they'll say, well, one way that I try, well, actually I should say this, everybody always laughs a little bit, because I would worry about a person who said, I'm completely balanced, and let me tell you exactly how, usually they chuckle a little bit, and they'll say, hey, it's an ongoing process, I don't know if I'm completely balanced, but here's how I try to keep life in balance, and oftentimes that sacramental prayer life will come up, okay? So again, you'll have some opportunities to share some of your own thoughts about all this in a moment, or in a few moments. So I wanna spend a few moments before you do that. I wanna talk a little bit about what I have seen over the past four years. I see a trend, and I wanna kind of put it out there, and maybe this isn't your experience, but I'm just kind of sharing with you something that I see in this area of recruiting, onboarding, retaining, supervising, lay ecclesial ministers. So I just wanna kind of put this out there and share some thoughts with you of my own, and again, this can be for us to discuss, but so I mentioned to you I started working for the Archdiocese 16 years ago, and that we do have a process where pastors typically will work with the Office of Catechesis to like work with their search committee and maybe do some vetting interviews and so forth. It's really, it's a nice process, okay? So probably up until about four years ago, it wasn't unusual. I would say maybe once a month or every other month, someone would approach me out of the blue, maybe a college senior, or someone who was wrapping up a master's degree. They would just contact the office and say, hey, I think I might be interested in getting into parish ministry, or I think I might wanna be a DRE or something like that. And sometimes it would maybe be a career change situation too, but the point is people would contact me and I would, usually I would bring them in and kind of do the screening interview, not because there was a specific job opening, but just to kind of have this pool of folks. And then usually in April and May, when a lot of openings happen or they're announced, and I would go to meet with the search committee at the parish like early on in their process, do a little orientation, but it was awesome. I would actually take resumes with me, right? And I would say, hey, here's a jump starter pack, and you're gonna post your position and more people are gonna express interest in it, but I was able to give them resumes. And so yeah, they would often do a first round of interviews with a couple or three of those folks, and then they would maybe interview a couple or three more who sort of specifically responded to that job posting. Well, guess what? Again, I don't know what your experience has been, but sometimes it's hard for me to put a finger on this because yes, COVID happened, right? And there was that stretch of time where a lot of stuff kind of ground to a halt. Although I will say it's interesting, at least one of our parishes right in the thick of COVID, their parish catecholator left, and it was not for a bad reason. It might have been a retirement or something. And like they took the leap of faith because my first thought was, oh geez, if people leave now, these parishes are reeling, they're not gonna replace them, but they took a leap of faith and they actually hired during that time. And praise God, that's the praise God they did and that was great in them to do that. So yeah, COVID happened. So you would expect the well to dry up a little bit, but man, it's been over three years now. And it's like crickets chirping for me. I don't get any, I can't even remember. I don't think I can remember the last time someone reached out to me and said, hey, I think I'm interested in ministry. So I see some heads nodding, so either you're getting sleepy or, or you know, that's your experience or both. So just let me share with you briefly. I started asking some of my friends who, especially who work in university settings like here, there's a Catholic university in Indianapolis called Marion University. So some friends who work there, and then I don't know if any of you are familiar with at the University of Notre Dame, they have the McGrath Institute for church life. So I have good friends who are part of the McGrath Institute. So I just kind of started asking around. It's like, nobody's coming to us and saying they want to get in the minute. It's like, what's going on? And here's what they said to me. And again, maybe this resonates with your experience. They said, you know, our students, there are students who are interested in ministry, but oftentimes it's their parents who are pressuring them and all kidding aside, most of you were at the dinner last night, right? I love Scott, Scott Solum. And I'm gonna talk to him about, I'm gonna circle back with him because he's actually one of the people I talked to about this. But do you remember his little remark of when he was talking about the evangelization minor? And he said something like, you know, yeah, yeah, he's like, well, so that way they can major in business or nursing, you know, because their parents want them to have jobs, you know, but they can have this evangelization minor. So what I was told was the students are often willing, but the parents are very reticent about this. There's this perception, I would call it a misperception, that if you do church-related work, you're doomed to a life of abject poverty, all right? And it's not true. It's not true. It is not true. You might not be able to work for the little country parish that you grew up in, but that was never gonna happen anyway as a full-time job. But again, every diocese is different. Every situation is different. But, you know, I believe that if God is calling you to ministry in the church, that, and I know it's not a big case, it's not a big case, and that was a 40-in-sleep. It's not a vocation like holy orders or holy matrimony, but there's probably a place for you in the church somewhere. And we all know this, yeah, are you gonna drive a Lamborghini? No, but this perception of, you know, everybody who does church-related work, you know, you either don't get paid at all, or you get paid less than a server at a restaurant. You have to get tips from the parents in your program. So there's that concern. There's student debt. We know that's an issue for some kids. I call everybody a kid because I'm old. So there's that double whammy of graduating with debt, and then this perception that you're gonna make zero money. You know, you're gonna make zero money. So me being, you know, whatever my, I guess I do know what my working geniuses are supposed to be. That's a different workshop. Personality type temperament. I'm like, what, I just, I wanna try and do something about this though. So here's what I've started to do. So I feel like there's an education problem. I feel like there are some misperceptions among parents and among young people. You know, do they even know that church-related work is a possibility? It's actually something you can do with your life, you know? And again, yes, you're not gonna make a ton of money, but depending on the situation in a lot of places or at least a decent number of places, you're gonna make reasonable, reasonable money. Again, that's a very personal topic. Your definition of reasonable money might be a lot different than mine. The cost of living on Long Island is a little different than the cost of living in Indianapolis. But that perception of, you know, is this on people's radar screens? What is their perception of it? So there's that. And then I actually, a long time ago, and I still sort of do, in a way, in terms of interacting with benefactors, I used to work in fundraising and public relations, you know, in development. So I'm like, okay, money, money. Can we start an endowment fund that would help, maybe help young people who are interested in ministry not to accumulate as much debt, you know, while they're getting their degree. And could we also, could we help parishes compensate a little bit better, you know, under some set of circumstances? So to me, it's a three-pronged approach. It's education of students and parents, and it's money, it is money. You know, can we help people with debt and can we help with compensation? So, and I don't know that, I don't even know if I'm perceiving the situation accurately, or if any of these things would actually help, but I'm kind of taking some baby steps. I'm working with a coworker to develop some lesson plans for say like seventh grade, eleventh grade. That would sort of present lay ecclesial ministry to students as an actual thing, you know. And I'm not quite sure, I suppose that lesson could have a parental interaction component of some sort, or, you know, maybe schools that teach this lesson would be willing to host a panel presentation of people who actually do church-related work. So enough of that, I'm babbling a little bit, but just this topic of human resources and personnel. We haven't done this workshop here since, we did this workshop in 2019, and when I sat down to think about it, I was like, wow, the landscape's a little different here in 2023, to say the least. So just kind of moving toward wrapping up here, some resources, you probably figured out that a lot of us in the diocesan officials' track, we kind of like Patrick Lencioni. I mean, you take everybody with a grain of salt, nobody has all the answers, but he certainly has some good stuff. So his secular consulting firm is called the Table Group. So if you've never been on the tablegroup.com webpage, they've got some helpful tools and resources. They've got this thing, I mean, he's written several books and he always gives them clever titles, but so there's something called an anti-miserie worksheet, and it's basically, what are the sorts of things that make a staff member miserable, and how can a supervisor kind of get out in front of those in providing that meaningful supervision? He also does the whole humble, hungry, and smart thing. So there's some resources on the tablegroup webpage that can help with interview questions and things like that, how to mine out some of those traits. Also, there's a flock note group that some of you are in. It's been around for a while. It's called Bosco Friends, it's diocesan staff. Most of us work in catechesis evangelization, and again, we're not cookie cutter images of each other. We do tend to think with the church, we're not gonna get into big debates in the flock note group on basic doctoral and moral stuff, but we do, we vet speakers, we just communicate with each other about different things. One of the things we do is we post job openings. So if you wanna get in on that group, again, shoot me an email, or just, I guess if you just go on flock note and look for Bosco Friends, you can ask to be in it, and yeah, so we have found that helpful in posting positions. Other than that, yeah, if you're, if you want the folks here to know what workshops you've gone to, again, just continue to fill out this sheet, and there will be a box at the back of the field house that you can put this in. You know, it's funny, the diocesan official certification, it's a little different, right? Like right now, you pretty much just have to come for two years and go to a fair percentage of these, and you're gonna get like a certificate of completion. There's not like a, you know, writing assignments or things like that. So, and yes, you're probably not gonna get a $10,000 raise for getting a diocesan official's certificate from the Catechetical Institute, but you know, hey, it's all to the good. There's also, if you pick this up and there's more up here, there's a super brief questionnaire if this is your first year year or your second year, just a little feedback that you can give Chris Bergwald an eye also, and just fill it out if you want to, put it in that box, and it just helps us tweak this track if you will from year to year, of course, working with Bill Kyneman. So, all right, well, hopefully this has been kind of timely and pertinent. We're certainly, again, judging by the engagement and the conversation, this is some things that we all deal with. Hopefully you got a few practical tips from each other, if not me. And yeah, I meant what I said earlier. I admire you guys for the investment that you're making in your own formation. So let me close with a brief prayer, and we'll send you on your way right around five o'clock in the name of the Father, and of the Son, the Holy Spirit. Amen, Heavenly Father, I thank you for these sisters and brothers that you've given me your adopted daughters and sons who you call to live in a personal disciple relationship with your only begotten son, Jesus Christ, who you call to live that relationship in full communion with his body, the church, and who you have called to ministerial leadership in your church. Father, I ask you to bless every person here, every area of her or his life, those areas in need of renewal, those decisions that are a constant part of life, those areas of life and ministry where comfort is desired. And Father, every now and then, please show these good folks just a little glimpse or glimmer of the goodness that they're bringing into the lives of those they serve, all by your grace and mercy. And we ask these blessings as we pray for all good gifts in the most holy name of Jesus, the one savior of the world. Who together with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns as God for all eternity. Amen.