A Youth Leader Must…. 1. Make it about Christ and not themself 2. Strive to have ministry flow from their spirituality and not have spirituality flow from their ministry 3. Form a strong team of leaders who help them reach out to teens 4. Be living the Paschal Mystery (die to self and rising with [...]
Is there Parishnormal Activity happening surrounding youth ministry at your parish? – do the Knights of Columbus accuse the teens of taking all their left over ketchup packets from last year’s Parish picnic? – is the key to the closet in the Parish Hall now attached to a Hockey stick because you as youth leader [...]
The past few months people keep sending me planking photos. Planking is an activity or game consisting of lying face down in an unusual or incongruous location. The hands must touch the sides of the body and having a photograph of the participant taken and posted on the internet is an integral part of the game. Players [...]
There is a sports pre-game show that has a feature called “C’mon Man”. I love this feature as it shows various athletes, coaches, officials and team owners caught doing something either lame or foolish. The premise of the show is that the featured C’mon Man personality hasn’t kept it real and created a “what are you thinking?” moment. So I thought as Catholic men we could translate this into how we live our faith authentically.
This summer, we surveyed over 600 seminarians and found that relationships with parish priests and youth ministers were among the most influential in seminarians’ vocational discernment. 30% of surveyed seminarians stated that Life Teen played a role in helping them discern their vocation. In addition 49% had attended at least one parish or national Life Teen event during high school. What makes this statistic worth considering, is the fact that Life Teen is currently being implemented in only 1400 of the 18,000 U.S. Catholic parishes.