Hi, everyone. This is Nick Jorgensen from Acts 29, and you have tuned in to our podcast. You are born for this with Father John Ricardo. But in this episode, we're recording a special podcast to announce the publishing of our new white paper. In this shorter and different episode, I'm going to be interviewing

Father John about this paper. It is our hope that this white paper will circulate as widely

as possible, but in this episode, we want to give you a look at our motivation in writing

this. In other words, the goal here isn't to summarize the white paper as we think it speaks for

itself and we want you to read it.

Instead, we want to offer a quick peek behind the curtain to see how the Holy Spirit has moved us to put this together.

With that said, you can find this white paper entitled, Reimagining what a Catholic parish can be, a destination for the 21st century by going to our website,

axe 29.org or the direct URL, imagine this.ax29.org. And Acts 29 is spelled,

a CTSXX I.org. So with that, let's begin. Welcome, Father John.

Hey, thanks, Nick. Father, this has been a labor

of love for all of us on the Acts 2019, as this is truly a collective effort. Maybe the best

place to start is by simply asking you, what's a white paper, Father John? Yeah, we've been saying

to all sorts of friends, hey, we're praying a white paper and over and over again, they go, hey, cool, what's a white paper?

So, first of all, just huge thanks to you, to Deacon Steve, to Mary, to Chris, to Kelly, for all the help on this.

This really has been just an amazing grace for us all to work on together.

So a white paper,

maybe the easiest way for us to think of it is it's a genre that proposes a solution to a

problem. But even saying that, like we want to be really careful in setting a tone that we don't

think there's a solution. We don't think God's given us the answer to reimagining Catholic

parishes. But we do want to begin a conversation, and we want to share things from our own

experience in parish ministry, in diocese in ministry, and from ministering to people over the last

number of years, that we think are certain just kind of crucial elements at arriving for a solution for what

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