Like little green shoots, small church communities are emerging all over the Catholic parish landscape. They are one of the more promising pastoral initiatives at work in U.S. parishes today. In an individualistic and consumerist culture, whose spirit in some respects infects the very way we do parish, S.C.C.’s are an appropriate response to the challenges of doing parish in our time. Small church communities, or small Christian communities, as they are also known, represent an effort by harried and tarried American Catholics to reweave or strengthen the ties that bind—to God, to one another and to the larger common good.