20 Ways to Promote Vocations in your Parish or School
- Have public recitation of the diocesan vocation prayer at masses on Sunday and the daily masses.
- Provide Eucharistic adoration on certain days, asking for prayers for vocations.
- Send greeting cards to each of the seminarians of your diocese at the beginning of a new semester, holidays, exam times, birthdays, ordinations, etc.
- Sponsor poster/coloring/essay contests with vocation related themes and exhibit the results.
- Encourage interviews of pastors, priests, sisters, brothers and deacons for the school newspaper or parish bulletin, especially on how they discerned their call.
- Create a page on your parish/school website with vocation information.
- Host an Altar Server Appreciation Night and ask one of the priests to speak to the servers.
- Before a regular meeting, have your ministry or group get together a little earlier to say a decade of the rosary together for a specific priest or seminarian.
- Create a collage of photos of priests, brothers, and sisters who have been part of your community.
- Include Vocations Awareness lesson plans and programs at each grade level of religious education. Each grade can do a special project and the reports can be combined into a resource booklet.
- Have the vocation prayer printed on refrigerator magnets and distribute.
- Find out the Ordination date of your parish priests and celebrate within the parish and school.
- Promote the lives of saints in various ways, e.g. in the bulletin, on the bulletin board, on posters, in a bibliography, etc.
- Take a group from your parish or school to attend the ordination of a diocesan priest or deacon. Check out the vocations calendar for dates of upcoming ordinations.
- Invite a priest, sister or deacon to supper to discuss vocations around the family dinner table.
- Sponsor a Communion Breakfast with a vocation speaker.
- Invite the Director of Vocations to the parish for a weekend, for masses and meals with parish families.
- Ask 31 parishioners to volunteer to pray the rosary or attend mass on one of the 31 days of the month for vocations on behalf of your parish and committee.
- Celebrate feasts of the saints, such as attending Mass on the Feast of St. Therese of Lisieux, patroness of missionaries and patroness of many vocations.
- Provide intercessory prayers for vocations for Prayer of the Faithful at Mass