My first port of call was our Monastery at St. Ives, near Sydney, and it was there I met and was welcomed by Fr. Peter McGrath, founder and co-ordinating Director of the Family Group Movement.

Family Groups had a very modest beginning in the early 1970's in the Passionist parish at Terry Hills, about five miles from St. Ives. Fr. Peter McGrath became Parish Priest there at a time when the parish began to expand rapidly. In its early days, Terry Hills was so small that everybody knew everybody else without any great difficulty. The expansion and increase in numbers meant that that kind of intimacy was being lost. Fr. Peter and some of the people there looked for a new way of trying to retrieve this. They thought of dividing the people into Family Groups. The rest is history.

Joining a Family Group is like joining an extended family. Ev ery one is welcome in a family group; it is inclusive' rather than exclusive. It promises to support family in whatever form it presents itself. The function of Family Groups is not to sit in judgement on what kind of family you find yourself in but rather to offer support for family in what shape it comes. In this way, we find people in family groups who are very much in tune with and actively involved in their parish alongside people who are less involved or who may even consider themselves somewhat marginalised or even excluded from the worshipping community.

The real strength of Family Groups is that they enable people to get to know other people within their group. This alone can take weeks and sometimes months to achieve. When people are at ease with one another and trust and confidence are built up in the group, they then begin to look out for one another.

Family groups can be very instrumental in building up that whole sense of community that should be at the heart of every parish. Even people who are not regular churchgoers at all will point to a lack of that sense of community in society today. How many people do we meet who will tell you that after ten or twenty years living in a particular area that they still do not feel accepted? Would I be very wrong in suggesting that acceptance is a two-way process?

We launched Family Groups at Mount Argus in February of this year. The initial response was not just encouraging but almost overwhelming and we were able to start up no fewer that 21 groups. This comprised twelve groups that include children and nine more senior groups that do not include children.

Some groups took off almost from Day One. Others were slow to start or having started, have struggled to survive. We are now at a point where we must review the working of all the groups, appraise them realistically and take steps to see that everybody who is interested in being a member of a Family Group is in a group which is functioning.