Parish Renewal

Parish Groupings

Many of today’s challenges require looking and working beyond our individual parish. The only way to make sustainable change in our communities is to work together in new and bold ways. Groupings are called to greater collaboration to take on these challenges with bold vision.

All parishes are organized into ~100 parish groupings that will work to plan and discern where God is leading their communities and the archdiocese. Each grouping consists of two to eight parishes. Grouping parishes together allows for local-level ownership and planning to take place and ensures that local feedback is present within the process of renewal. Grouping allows for assessment of new parish models such as multi-site parishes. Additionally, parish groupings help strengthen relationships between parishes, provide a better evaluation of the current realities within their community, make for a clearer discernment of what configuration would be best for their community, and more effectively identify what they each have to share and what the spiritual renewal in their community will look like.

How were groupings assigned? 

Groupings were originally assigned through a consultative process in 2016 that included feedback and input from archdiocesan and parish leadership, including vicars, deans, pastors, parish councils and lay leadership. Since then some parishes have changed groupings as we have learned more about the grouping discernment process based on the early pilot experiences and reviewed the original groupings with each regional vicar’s team and pastors.


A set of parishes should be considered a good grouping if they:  

  • are reasonably close geographically.
  • serve the same broader community (e.g. the parishes serve the same public-school district).
  • have obvious commonalities and affinities (e.g. parishioners occasionally attend Mass at more than one parish in the grouping).