The Ministry of Presence
Reflections From The Crossroads
Transformation, Leadership, and Religious Life
REFLECTION NO. 4 · SEPTEMBER 2026
In January the Dicastery for Institutes of Consecrated Life sent a message to religious worldwide titled “Prophecy of Presence.” It named where dignity is wounded and faith is tested: conflict, forced migration, poverty, violence, and institutional fragility. Then, without warning, it added prosperous societies where “well-being coexists with loneliness, polarization, new forms of poverty, and indifference.” Rome was not drawing the line usually drawn, mission territories on one side, comfortable churches on the other. The same vocation, it was saying, is asked of both.
That vocation, in the Dicastery’s own word, was “remaining” — staying put rather than withdrawing, when withdrawal would be easier and no one would blame you. But remaining only says where a person stands; it says nothing about what happens once he or she is there. A community can remain for decades and still be absent to itself — technically present but otherwise gone. The word Rome reached for in its title but never opened up is presence: not a location but a practice, something that can be learned, practiced, and just as easily neglected. That is the question this reflection means to sit with — not whether a community remains, but whether what it calls presence is a discipline being practiced, or only the label left over after everything else has stopped.
When the Buildings Had Their Names On Them
For a century and a half, religious life in North America and Europe answered the question who are you by pointing at what it had built: schools, hospitals, orphanages, colleges, clinics, agencies, and academies. The answer was in the buildings, and the buildings had their names on them.
Those are going, or gone, or now governed by boards with a mission statement and a photograph of the founder in the lobby. The sponsorship transition is often the right decision, well made. It is also a bereavement, and it is frequently processed as a transaction.
So a community that once knew precisely who it was walks into a Chapter and asks a question it can barely stand to ask aloud. If we are not doing, are we anything?
I have watched that question sit in a room and take the air out of it. I have also watched communities answer it too quickly, which is worse.
The Answer We Reach For Too Fast
The cheap answer is that presence is enough — delivered in a tone that means we have stopped expecting anything of ourselves. I have seen “ministry of presence” and “ministry of prayer” function as dignified names for having quietly given up. Not always. Not even usually. But often enough that we should not pretend otherwise, and often enough that members can tell the difference long before leadership names it.
Communities have learned to speak of a shift from doing to being, and there is something real underneath the phrase. But when I hear it I have sometimes asked, not entirely innocently: what does a being do every day, anyway? The question is not meant to be clever. If we cannot answer it — if being turns out to mean nothing more specific than continuing to exist in the building — then we have not described a vocation. We have described a census.
The question is not whether presence counts. It is whether what we are calling presence is a practice, or simply what was left after the practices stopped.
That is not a comfortable distinction, and it is not one an outsider can make for a community. It has to be made honestly from inside. But it can be made, because presence is not a vague spiritual atmosphere. It has a definition, a discipline, and a set of skills — and if it is going to be claimed as a ministry, we ought to know what we are claiming.
What Presence Actually Is
Some years ago Beth Lipsmeyer Dunn, my wife and partner, and I wrote a book on the conversational skills that make community possible, and we put presence at the center of it — the cornerstone, we called it, without which none of the other skills would matter. Conversations we hope would be meaningful are rendered hollow unless we are genuinely present to one another.
The definition we settled on has held up: presence is the quality of being with others in such a manner as to bathe them in your full attention. It is the ability to listen as if for the first time, to surrender your need for control and be rapt in awe and wonder. It is demonstrated behaviorally, through a physical and emotional quality of being with another that communicates charity, curiosity, respect, engagement, and partnership.
Notice what that definition refuses. It will not let presence simply be a feeling, or an intention, or a way of describing the fact that we are still here. Presence is a gift, a labor of love, and a skill all wrapped into one. A gift, because it is given rather than manufactured. A labor of love, because it costs something — it is, we argued, a form of asceticism, and a discipline most of us fail to exercise. And a skill, because it can be learned, practiced, improved, and neglected like any other.
Neglected is the operative word. Relationships are like a garden: stop weeding and watering, and it dies. Communities rarely destroy their common life through some dramatic incompatibility. They lose it through benign neglect — and I have long thought that if people spent a tenth of the time nourishing relationships in community that they spend in their ministry, it would change everything.
Margaret Wheatley describes the discipline exactly: being witness is the simple practice of being brave enough to sit with human suffering, to acknowledge it for what it is, to not flee from it, patiently sitting with someone we would rather avoid. That last clause is the one that separates a practice from a posture. Anyone can be present to people they enjoy.
This is why the language of presence goes wrong so often in community after community. Not because presence is a weak vocation, but because the word gets taken up without the discipline it requires. A congregation that never learned to listen without defending, that cannot sit with another member's anguish, that categorizes people and leaves them with a reputation built decades ago, is not going to become a ministry of presence by announcing one.
Norma
Let me tell you about the most complete instance of presence I have witnessed, because it happens to answer the question the Chapter room cannot: if we are not doing, are we anything?
Beth's sister, Norma Lipsmeyer, was a Sister of Mercy. When she was nearing her final days with ovarian cancer, she called her family together for what she called her “come to Jesus party.” We were facilitating a Chapter in Oregon at the time. We left it and arrived at the Sisters of Mercy residence in Fort Smith, Arkansas the next day.
Norma could do nothing. She had no ministry left to perform, no institution to administer, no plan to offer anyone. Severe fluid retention had made clothing unbearable, so she lay unabashedly naked as the day she was born, welcoming each person to her party in gratitude and love. When we walked in, her eyes met ours and she smiled saying, “Thanks for coming.”
She spent time with each one of us. Regardless of who else was in the room, it was as if no one else was there. She told each of us why she loved us and how we had been a gift to her. She was so entirely present in her loving way that we could not help but be drawn to her in the same way. The clocks and calendars that ordinarily prodded us through life mattered not. Pain and laughter, tears and smiles, grief and gratitude, stillness and conversation were all comfortably juxtaposed, and in it all Jesus kept saying, “Of course.” Life and death stood side by side, and all was acceptable.
I want to be careful not to make this prettier than it was. Norma did not want to die. She did not want to leave us. She was as frightened of death as the rest of us, and being a Sister of Mercy did not make her immune to being human — she was not shy about expressing her anguish, and when she did, we felt it as if it were our own. What we witnessed alongside that anguish was her total acceptance of the truth, a love that knew no bounds, and a faith stronger than most. We were transfixed and transformed by her astonishing presence while she and Jesus loved us through it all.
That is the answer to the question the Chapter room is afraid to ask. Norma had nothing left to do, and she was the most powerful thing in that house.
Presence was not what was left over after her ministry ended. Presence was the ministry.
She had written a question in her journal not long before: “Is there anything I would hold onto, rather than let God use it, for the building of the Reign of God? My own will? Self-determination? My right to choose?” We never spoke with her about those words. We did not need to. We had watched her answer them.
Nobody Sits Under a Dying Tree
Writing to the major superiors of Africa and Madagascar this year, Sr. Simona Brambilla offered an image I have not been able to put down. She spoke of consecrated life as a sacred tree — in many African settings a place that offers shelter and meeting along a journey, where the parts of the tree are themselves healing and nourishing. She named the palabre tree in particular: the living place where heaven and earth meet, a safe space where conflicts are resolved and broken or lost threads are reconnected. And she asked those superiors to tend both the roots and the shoots.
A tree does not become a shelter by trying harder. It becomes one by being rooted somewhere long enough that other things can live in its shade. But a tree that offers shelter has to be strong enough to hold weight. Nobody sits under a dying tree.
So the honest question for a community drawn to the language of presence is not about numbers or average age. It is about strength of a particular kind. Is this a community someone could bring a conflict to without it being weaponized? Is grief metabolized here, or stored? Can a hard truth be spoken in this house and survive the week?
That is inner work, and here is what matters about it: it is entirely available to a community of eleven members with an average age of eighty-four. It is not available to a community of eleven that has stopped speaking honestly to one another. Age does not disqualify a community from being a place of shelter. Avoidance does.
What the North Is Being Asked to Learn
A sister staying in a displacement camp in the Sahel (Africa) and a sister staying in a nursing wing in Dubuque (Iowa) are not doing the same thing. The stakes are not comparable, and I will not insult either woman by pretending they are. But they may be doing the same kind of thing. Both are with people who cannot leave. Both have surrendered the illusion of fixing. Both are, in the Dicastery's word, remaining — and what that staying produces, when it is done well, is presence.
For most of our history the North sent and the South received. The direction of that traffic has changed, and not only in personnel. The North is now being asked to learn something communities in the South have understood far longer: how to be faithful without being in control, how to stay when you cannot fix, how to be the Church in a place where you no longer set the terms.
Religious communities under occupation, under poverty, under persecution have been living that lesson for generations while we were building institutions. Sr. Teresa Maya put the reframe about as economically as it can be put when she said that we are learning we are enough for the Gospel.
The comfortable congregation is not outside the global story of religious life. It is finally inside it.
Other traditions have often named this more plainly than Christian religious life has. Thich Nhat Hanh taught that the most precious gift we can offer others is our presence — and that when mindfulness embraces those we love, they will bloom like flowers. He was not describing a consolation prize for people who had run out of options. He was describing the thing itself.
Stay with us, because it is almost evening and the day is now nearly over. — Luke 24:29
The disciples on the road to Emmaus had walked all day beside someone they did not recognize. What they asked for at the end of it was not an explanation. It was that he stay. And it is only after he sits down at the table with them that they know him. Their hearts had been burning the whole way; the walking alone had not been enough to tell them so. Something happens in the staying that does not happen in the passing through, and the tradition has a word for it.
Practices of Presence
Presence is not a strategic plan, but it is not formless either. A few things make it real rather than rhetorical.
Name what you have actually stopped doing, and grieve it rather than renaming it. Much of what passes for discernment in this season is vocabulary management — a ministry is not ended, it is “reimagined”; a house is not closed, it is “released.” The language protects us from the loss and, in protecting us, keeps the loss from ever being finished.
Decide what your presence is for, and to whom. Presence with no direction is just occupancy. Presence has purpose. Who, concretely, in the twenty miles around you, is your community present to? If the honest answer is one another, say so — that may be exactly right for this season — but say it, so that it is a decision rather than a drift.
Then treat presence as the discipline it is. It begins with a choice to share time, which sounds trivial until you count how rarely it is actually made: close the door, turn off the phone, stay as long as it takes. It requires listening as if for the first time — which in a community of fifty years means unbinding one another from the boxes built long ago, letting people be who they are now rather than who they were twenty-five years back. Presence requires surrender, not capitulation. It requires a humbling of ourselves and an easing of our willfulness, letting go of the need for control, for safety, for a certain outcome, for looking good so that grace has room to be born through the conversation.
Tend the palabre tree. Ask where conflict goes in your community. If it goes to leadership, or to the parking lot, or nowhere at all, then whatever else you are, you are not yet a place where broken threads get reconnected. That is repairable. It is slow, and it is repairable.
Finally, tend the roots and the shoots together, as Brambilla asked. The roots are memory and charism, which do not preserve themselves. The shoots are whatever small, awkward, unimpressive new thing your community is willing to try this year. A community with only roots is a monument. A community with only shoots has nothing to draw on when the dry season comes.
The Question That Lingers
Religious life spent a long time being known for what it built. It may now become known for who it is present to. That is not a lesser vocation, and it is not a consolation prize handed to communities that have run out of options.
For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them. — Matthew 18:20
Two or three. Not a province. Not a motherhouse at capacity. The promise was always scaled to the number most of our communities now actually are, which suggests the number was never the problem.
But it will only be true of communities strong enough to be sat under, and that strength is not a matter of budget or median age. It is a matter of whether the truth can be told in your house, and whether anyone there has done the work of learning how to be present to another human being.
So the question I would leave with a council or a Chapter is this. If someone in real trouble came looking for shelter, would they think to come to us? And if the honest answer is no, is that because we have grown too few — or because we have become a place where the difficult thing cannot be said?
For Reflection
Who, in the twenty miles around us, is our community present to? Is that a decision or a drift?
Presence is a skill that can be practiced or neglected. Where have we let it go through benign neglect, and what would it cost us to take it up again?
If someone in real trouble came looking for shelter, would they think to come to us?
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Translations
Written translations are available as downloadable PDFs.
More reflections will follow in the months ahead.
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Ted Dunn, Ph.D.
Graced Crossroads
Sources and further reading
Dicastery for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, message on consecrated life and the prophecy of presence, January 28, 2026.
Ted Dunn and Beth Lipsmeyer, Transforming Communities Through CARE: A Conversational Approach to Relational Effectiveness (Comprehensive Consulting Services, 2023), Chapter VII: Presence, pp. 87–93.
Margaret J. Wheatley, Turning to One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future (Berrett-Koehler).
Sr. Simona Brambilla, MC, Prefect of the Dicastery for Institutes of Consecrated Life, New Year message to the Conference of Major Superiors of Africa and Madagascar (COMSAM), January 2026. See also her address “Consecrated Life in Africa: Pilgrims of Hope,” May 26, 2025.
Thich Nhat Hanh, on presence as the most precious gift we can offer.
Sr. Teresa Maya, CCVI, on reframing the narrative of numbers, Global Sisters Report.
Ted Dunn, The Inner Work of Transformation: A Guide for Personal Reflection and Communal Sharing. CCS Publications, 2021.
Luke 24:13–35 and Matthew 18:20, New Revised Standard Version.
