In the same way, we can model our youth ministry after the way that Jesus modeled his ministry. In youth ministry we offer programs, resources, Life nights, methods, conferences, rallies, mission trips, etc. All of these things only take us so far with teens. The heart of effective evangelization, catechesis, and the purification of youth culture is in discipleship – mentoring teens in personal relationships. People learn the faith from the example and witness of other people.
Don’t get me wrong, Catholics pray with their body. We lie prostrate, we kneel, we sit, and we fold our hands in a posture of prayer. Sometimes we even extend our hands over our head in an open posture of worship.
All of these postures, even the hands over the head, are rooted in Scripture and the Tradition of the Church. They reflect the interior disposition of the soul and it’s receptivity to Christ. So what about hand motions? Why do I say it is not prayer?
Enthusiasm is fruit of an encounter with Christ.
It does not need to be encouraged because it develops naturally from the invitation that Christ gives all of us. As youth leaders, the challenge is to look past the emotion and help the teenager make firmly rooted decisions to follow Christ and articulate prayer to Him. We must teach them to respond to His invitation. As youth ministers, it is our job to help a teen navigate the emotions to find their individual decision to follow Christ.
Getting teens to events and in the doors of our parish is effective pre-evangelization and evangelization. However, that is often where youth ministries stop. If we were successfully converting, catechizing and purifying the lives of our young people, we’d see a lot more fruit from the thousands of American teens and millions of international teens that attend our big Catholic events. To develop saints, we have to dive deeper and do more than get them in the door.
The next three blogs that I will write, focus on developing saints and diving deeper. I will evaluate how we measure conversion, how we bring teens through conversion and finally, I will discuss the discipleship model that Christ gave us for developing the last steps of the evangelization process.
Here are 7 points to focus on if you wish to transform Youth Culture and build the Kingdom of God. Be Holy. When asked what the greatest problem in the Church is, Pope John Paul II responded, “We don’t have enough saints.” Teenagers are starving for truth, but they live in a false reality and they do not know what truth looks like. They need people to witness to holiness. If you become holy, the youth will naturally follow you because you will stand above the lies of their world. Someone once asked, “Why is it that spending ten minutes with Mother Teresa can change someone’s life more than spending ten years with me?” We need to be holy if we want to transform youth culture. Youth ministers need personal prayer time, sacramental grace, spiritual direction and community more than teenagers need it. We need to make sure that we are pursuing holiness if we wish to make teenagers pursue holiness.
If you have been following along with my previous blogs, I have discussed why it is important to study youth culture and what we can learn from the history and development of youth culture. In studying the current youth culture that we live in, here are 10 principles that can be observed: Youth are driven by a false sense of reality. The most popular movie series among teenagers today (as of 2010) is the Twilight Saga. This is a story about a girl who is in love with a vampire and a werewolf.
My wife and I were channel surfing a few weeks ago and we came across a television show called Criminal Minds. The television show is about a group of detectives who solve crimes simply by “profiling” the criminal mind. They study a crime scene and determine who the criminal is that they are looking for simply by looking at what the evidence of the crime can tell them about the person that committed the crime. This technique is applicable to youth ministry. The more we study youth culture, the more we will be able to determine how to effectively reach that disengaged teen that stands in the back at youth group and won’t participate. This blog will look at the history and development of youth culture and the impact it has on youth in our ministry.
There is a tendency among Catholics who are frustrated with the poor quality of catechesis in the last few decades to look back on “better times in the Church” and say that we need to go back to methods that we used and the traditions that were emphasized back in the days when seminaries were full, youth were disciplined and children knew their catechism. The problem with this logic is that there has been an enormous cultural revolution since these days in the Church. In particular, “youth culture” has exploded in Western Civilization. Youth culture is a world that is entirely different from the world that the rest of us live in and it requires an entirely different approach to evangelization.
I work at a parish in South Florida that is located about 5 miles from the beach. It is sunny and warm year round and the dress attire of the parish usually reflects the weather. Recently, I was at a funeral at our parish and I looked around to discover that I have never seen so many people at a funeral in tropical shirts, shorts and flip-flops! The dress of the teens in our youth group usually reflects the warm weather as well – but in a different way. Let’s just say that I frequently want