Overview
Introduction to New Leaven
Purpose
New Leaven is for transforming the daily life of Catholic disciples. It's for taking important steps that disentangle us from the ways of the world, now that we've become serious about following Christ. The "disentangling" involves many practical issues about the way we make and spend MONEY, the way we spend our TIME, our acceptance of God's design for the FAMILY, the nature and quality of our RELATIONSHIPS, our reverence for the sexuality and fertility of the BODY, our engagement in the MISSION of Jesus, the way we WORK and its impact on the family. In all these things, New Leaven combines the truth and wisdom of Catholic teaching with the unscripted dynamic of small groups for humbly approaching the Lord and seeking those redeemed patterns of living that only the Spirit can bring. In New Leaven, the small group serves as a kind of "body ministry" whereby the group, as well as one's personal self, is transformed. As the pattern of this method repeats, from one topic to the next, Jesus becomes more and more successful as the Lord of our lives, and the Holy Spirit becomes more and more recognized and relied-upon. Because the small group travels this way together, the work of New Leaven turns out to be deeply joyful and increasingly welcomed.
Value
The strategic value to the disciple is security. Security comes through obedience to truth-more tightly weaving the way we actually live with the truth we teach. We perceive that the great majority of Catholics have no solid foundation in Christ because-no matter how many times they've heard the truth read at Mass or preached in homilies-they have not come to the transformative stage of "acting upon it", like Jesus taught in concluding the Sermon on the Mount. (see Mt 7:24-27) As a result, they are starkly exposed to the elements, as the giant cultural/spiritual storm in which we live rages through America. Jesus said that those who build haphazardly on sand will be washed away, when the storm comes. Certainly, we are all the witnesses of this prophetic truth as we see teens, young adults, marriages, families, and parishes coming apart in this modern tumult. New Leaven is thus a remedy for immature religious sentiment that, in the end, never quite reaches the point of transforming life and, thus, anchoring us to the rock foundation that the Lord said was essential.
