BRAINTREE -- The Boston College Clough School of Theology and Ministry has received a $1 million grant from Lilly Endowment to establish "So I Send You: Together in Christian Leadership and a Synodal Church," a joint effort between the Clough School and the Archdiocese of Boston Secretariat for Evangelization and Discipleship.

"So I Send You" is a five-year pilot program that will train 160 lay leaders in 16 of the archdiocese's parishes. The secretariat, serving as a liaison between the archdiocese and Boston College, will recommend the parishes and leaders to the Clough School.

The program will include eight multilingual educational sessions, four workshops, a retreat, an annual ministry renewal day, an evaluation summit, and an online course. All of the training is centered on the work of the Vatican's Synod on Synodality.

"This is the way moving forward for the whole universal Catholic Church," said Wendy Mejia, the secretariat's director of multicultural ministry. "We are called to be a synodal church."

She said that being a synodal church means being "aware of each other's gifts, our joys and hardships."

"It means walking together to fulfill our baptismal calling to be missionary disciples," she said, "to bring Jesus to others and proclaim the good news."

Sister of St. Joseph Pat Boyle, the secretariat's associate director of pastoral planning, added that a synodal church knows "how to listen to one another, to be discerning in our listening, to listen to the Holy Spirit, and also being able to break down those barriers that keep us from being willing to walk with one another in the midst of our differences."

The Clough School approached the archdiocese with the idea for the program and suggested that the two organizations apply for the grant together. The secretariat "loved" the idea, Mejia said, and brought it to Archbishop Richard G. Henning for approval. He approved and said that the training should focus on implementing the Synod's teachings in multiple languages to serve the archdiocese's diverse population. The secretariat told the Clough School about the archbishop's recommendation, and the school agreed.

"Their thought is, and continues to be, that it's better to work together with the church as opposed to in silos, separate from one another," Mejia said.

Funding for the grant came from the Lilly Endowment's Pathways for Tomorrow Initiative, which provides leadership training to theological schools in the U.S. and Canada. The endowment was developed by the Lilly family of Indiana, who made their fortune in pharmaceuticals in 1937 to fund Christian education and train lay leaders in parishes. It is one of the largest private philanthropic foundations in the world.