This is great motivation for outreach. We can never be satisfied with how many teens we have at our Life Nights or at our retreats, we always need to be reaching out to and sharing the Gospel with more. We always need to go after that one.

But what happens if that one decides they aren’t interested? Or what happens if that one is a teen that was really involved, but suddenly disappears and you start hearing about all of their unholy exploits? What happens when that really involved senior goes to college and becomes an atheist?

Maybe it’s the dark earlier that makes your nights seem later when you’re turning off the lights alone. Maybe it’s the cold. But I always seemed to lose focus around here – worrying about numbers and fundraising goals. I forgot the real reasons I was in youth ministry and the blessing of the call and started thinking about the “work” I was burdened with.

So how do you deal with it? How do you deal with the Confirmation coordinator who wants your job and thinks his/her way is better? How do you deal with it when the popcorn relay game got the maintenance staff upset? How do you deal with getting bumped off the parish hall list because there is a more important event than youth group? What do you do when your ministry becomes more of a competition?

Well, here we are. Every youth minister’s favorite time of year: Spring – when Proms seem to happen every weekend, Spring Breaks feel like they last for the entire semester, and youth group numbers tend to plummet faster than stock in Facebook.

I always dreaded the Spring Semester, and the same questions seemed to always arise:

How come so many teens stopped showing up?

The teens and parents don’t seem to appreciate all my work. Is it time to quit?

Some Sunday nights, after the floors have been swept and the chairs put away, as I was turning off the lights and locking the doors, I would just think “I can’t do this.” Countless nights after rough bible studies or Life Nights gone wrong or social events that seemed more solo than social, I would have similar thoughts.

Having recently started working for the Archdiocesan Youth Ministry office in Toronto, I entered into the exciting/terrifying role of cold-calling parishes around the Archdiocese to find out who is doing what, where, how, and when . . . if at all.

Going through that process, I found an extraordinary number of common factors that if I wasn’t on a mission for real information, probably would have found absolutely comical. As a person intentionally looking for information about a parish’s youth ministry I found it a bit disappointing as to how little helpful information was available, let alone current information. Generally the problem could be fixed up in a few minutes.