Letter from Father Gary Lazzeroni
April 24, 2026
Dear Friends in Christ,
I hope you are enjoying this blessed Easter season! We have welcomed many new Catholics into the Church at the Easter Vigil and in these days of Easter – a gift for which we are all grateful.
As our Partners in the Gospel Journey continues, our team is eager to share a new resource with you:
While we focus on the reorganization of our parish structures, we must not lose sight of our overall mission and goal. We are embarking on this journey so that we can better accomplish our Gospel mission to make missionary disciples and share his radical love with others. This compels us to look beyond our parish community and serve others. To help parish families creatively think of how to embrace this Gospel call, we created a new Outreach Guide with a snapshot of various ministries and models for serving others.
This guide is designed to inspire people and provide creative ideas for how a parish could embrace missionary discipleship. It provides a list of organizations and ministries, as well as examples of how local parishes and schools have brought them to life in the archdiocese. This is a good document to share with all your volunteers and ministry leaders.
Please know the idea is not for every parish to start something “new” per se. The goal is to ensure all parishes are serving their whole community with offerings for youth and young adults, families, retirees, the sick and homebound, brothers and sisters living on the margins, and people from different cultures.
The Outreach Guide is the newest resource to help your parish family creatively think of how to bring the Gospel truth to light. See the other resources below (all found on the Handbook for Parishes webpage):
Mission and Evangelization Handbook
Mission-and-Evangelization-Handbook-min.pdf
Mission and evangelization are at the core of the life of the Church, and are, therefore, at the core of Partners in the Gospel. This document outlines how parish families can embrace missionary discipleship.
Re-evangelization and Discipleship Resource
Re-Evangelization-and-Discipleship-min.pdf
The ideas laid out in this document provide inspiration for how a parish family could embrace re-evangelization and discipleship for their community. Re-evangelization is focused on reaching those who have left the Church, while discipleship is focused on helping Catholics go deeper in their faith.
Upcoming Training
Join us at 12:30 p.m. May 21 for a webinar focused on communication. Based on your feedback, this webinar was crafted to cover general communication best practices, how to communicate effectively across a parish family both internally and externally, and highlight samples of successful communications from parish families. Please register by clicking here.
Partners in the Gospel is certainly a journey with its ups and downs – but as one of you pointed out, “There is a light at the end of the tunnel, and it’s not a train.” I am blessed in my role because I get to continually hear stories from you about the successes that you and your parish communities are already experiencing. Shared staff knowledge is helping streamline processes, joint celebrations are fostering more community, combined ministries are accomplishing more effective pastoral care — and many other examples.
May the Holy Spirit continue to guide us and grace us with the wisdom on how to move forward in the future as we continue to renew the Catholic Church in Western Washington.
Blessings on your Easter Season,
Father Gary Lazzeroni
Vicar General