Youth ministry in 2010 is lived "out there" first...
Go out and fish. Just don’t catch and release!

June, 2010
by Kevin Driscoll
Diocese of Gary OYYA

Randy Raus, president of the national youth ministry resource LifeTeen, wrote an excellent blog recently entitled “The ‘Come To Us’ Model and Why it is Not Cutting it in Catholic Youth Ministry!” In it, he reminds us of the need to be relational ministers first, because teens simply aren’t coming to youth ministry activities on invitation alone.

By the way, if you go back and replace the word “teens” with “Catholics” I think the premise holds up. Ask any priest and he’ll tell you it’s not just teens that aren’t showing up for youth ministry. You don’t need statistics to show you that Catholics of all ages aren’t filling pews like they used to.

But I’ll repeat a theme I’ve been saying for years to youth ministers I train: forget advocacy and clamoring for respect in a parish, we in youth ministry have the power to chart a course for the direction of the parish! If we’re going to turn the corner and get Catholics back to Sunday Eucharist, we have gifts other segments of the parish do not have: namely an enthusiastic, impressionable and idealistic audience that truly believes they can transform the world (see: The Upper Room).

I’ve also been saying for some time that Youth Ministry in 2010 is lived “out there” first, and “in here” second. One of the most referenced articles of Vatican II documents comes from Sacrosanctum Concilium (Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy), which beautifully details how Eucharist is both the source and summit of our Catholic faith. To put that in practical terms, our Sunday Mass experience is the source of inspiration for our Monday-Saturday lives, and we bring our Monday-Saturday real world lived experience (for better of worse) back to the summit of Sunday Mass. We seek balance between source and summit.

However youth ministers for years have been operating out of a primarily “source-first” model. We work hard to make our youth programs as sharp as they can be. We practice skits, buy lots of markers and poster board, train our volunteers, and keep our local Papa John’s in business. We seek to inspire them at our events and send them out two by two (Mark 6:7) to evangelize and transform the world (Matthew 28:19).

But given the sex abuse crisis, the incredible influence negative media culture has had in beating down the concept of religion, celebrity after celebrity telling teens that it’s okay to be “spiritual” without participating in religious activities, and—look in a mirror—our own neglect for connecting faith to the real world, it’s not hard to realize why teens (and their parents for that matter) aren’t beating our doors down.

Meanwhile our teens live in that Monday-Saturday world wrought with sin, temptation, and, well, ick. So, youth ministry in 2010 must be lived first “out there.”

Randy wrote that we must go to them out there, and I agree. While we still seek a source and summit balance, we must consider strategies that allow us to adopt a “summit-first” approach to ministry.

Teens are swimming in ick, and we know we believe in a healing Christ who gives the Church the Sacraments that will allow them to become clean and whole. That healing Presence is “in here,” but we need to convince them that we have the very thing that they’re missing “out there.”

A summit-first approach to youth ministry is to follow the Lukan account of the parable of the fisherman (Luke 5: 1-11). In that Gospel, they bring the great catch back to the shore. Christ was “out there” with them, the nets were filled, but they didn’t catch and release! They brought the fish back to the shore.

When we’re out there at football games, malls, plays, coffee shops, on Facebook and via cellular phone wires, we have to be the face of Christ for the teens we serve, and seek to bring them back to our shore to continue to walk with them along their journey with Christ. At our shore we have what they’re missing out there in their turbulent seas.