How do we serve the 100, not only the 99?
“Enlarge the space of your tent, spread out your tent cloths unsparingly, lengthen your ropes and make firm your pegs.” (Isaiah 54:2) It’s a favourite image in Church renewal circles—but it can also become a safe metaphor: a warm slogan for inclusion that costs us little. Our Board and Stewards Formation Day, Widening the Tent (Friday 17 April), refused to let Isaiah remain decorative.
The day pressed into a sharp question: what does widening the tent demand of governance, leadership and advocacy when the Church and our communities are living through real strain, real polarisation, and real need? Our keynote, Fr Frank Brennan SJ named what many of us sense: in an age of fragmentation, a Catholic MPJP cannot afford an inward-facing identity. He borrowed Pope Francis’ language of the Church as a “field hospital” and then made it uncomfortably practical—our ministries across aged care and community and disability services, education, health, social enterprise and social justice services are engaged in the actions ensuring the healing, liberating and life-giving mercy of God.
We are to serve “the 100, not only the 99”: those distant from church life; Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples; prisoners; families under pressure; young people at risk; elderly who face loneliness; and all who fall through society’s systems. Read through the lens of our five charisms, that is not an abstract ideal. It is the concrete test of whether our governance and leadership are making room for the people and places where God’s mercy is most needed—and least likely to be rewarded with applause.
Just as importantly, we named a discipline we need to strengthen: discerning with our ministries what the emerging needs are, where advocacy is required, and who we should advocate alongside. This is also part our stewardship as Religious Institutes progressively come to completion—learning from one another so that charisms are not archived but translated into new forms of mission and leadership.
Our final session brought Isaiah’s second line into view: “make firm your pegs.” Expansion without anchoring is not mission—it’s drift. For Mercy Partners, those “pegs” include intentional partnership with the bishops and the wider Church in each diocese where we serve: regular, transparent communication; a dialogical relationship; and the habit of coming with proposed solutions, not only problems. We also identified the value of a Mercy Partners Social Impact Statement—clear, credible articulation of our scale and outcomes—because partnership is strengthened when our shared mission is visible, understood, and grounded in real communities served on behalf of the Church.
For boards, ministries and stewards, perhaps the most confronting insight was this: we cannot discern “emerging needs” from the boardroom alone. If our ministries are closest to the edges, then they must also be closest to the questions that shape our leadership and our relationships across the Church. What are you seeing now that is not yet in our strategies? Where are people being harmed quietly—by policy settings, by service gaps, by racism, by exclusion of women’s leadership, by diminishing trust in institutions? Who is already organising for change in those spaces, and are we willing to advocate with them—and to bring those realities into genuine partnership with our bishops and diocesan leaders?
Isaiah does not say, “Enlarge your tent and relax.” He says enlarge—and then lengthen ropes and strengthen pegs. In other words: widen your welcome, and then do the hard work that makes welcome possible. The invitation to every reader of Connected is to locate your own tent line: where, in your context, is God’s mercy—carried through our shared charisms—stretching you beyond the safe 99 towards the forgotten 100? And what is one peg you will drive in over the next 12 months: one concrete act of leadership or advocacy, and one intentional step towards partnership with your bishop and the wider Church, so that widening the tent becomes not an aspiration, but a way of being Church?
