Synodality? How About Better Preaching, by Randall Smith

The whole business of the “synod on synodality” is above my head.  So I’m not sure how a synod on synodality, which one would have thought was about creating synods, ended up dominated by questions about women’s ordination, gay marriage, and clericalism. When you’re organizing a planning session to create structures to deal with various problems, you don’t start by trying to resolve all those problems.  If the representatives at the U.S. Constitutional Convention had spent all their time discussing the problems of the country rather than setting up a sensible system to deal with them, not only would they not have solved the problems, we also wouldn’t have a country.

I’ve also been subjected to too many “planning sessions” to have much faith in what is always called “the process” – as in, “trust the process.”  In my experience, never once has “the process” resulted in what was promised. …