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.