Youth ministry today: Its strengths and limitations

Jun 26, 2015

-- Continued from last week

Conventional parish youth ministry programs are not suited for small group discipleship and relational ministry

Writing as a former director of youth ministry (DYM) with wide experience working with a great variety and number of DYMs in different parishes, I can state unequivocally that the vast majority of Catholics working in parish youth ministry recognize the necessity of precisely the kind of relational ministry laid out above. In fact, the more successful Catholic youth ministry programs used by parishes all stress the importance of relational ministry and offer many resources that aim at training adults how to do this.

Typically, such youth ministry programs are set up in something like the following manner. The parish hires a DYM. The DYM sets out to recruit enough adults and young adults from the parish to form what is called a “core team.” The DYM then subscribes to a Catholic youth ministry program and uses the resources the program offers to train the core team in the following main areas: how to relate to young people; how to plan and run weekly youth group meetings; and how to lead small-group discussions. 

Ideally, if the DYM is blessed to find a sufficient number of committed core team members, he or she will hold weekly core team meetings where the team will not only plan and organize the weekly youth group meetings (and retreats, and events, and trips), but will be offered spiritual formation so they can grow deeper in their own faith. Additionally, the core team helps the DYM organize and put on one or possibly two weekend retreats for the teens each year, and they accompany the teens to large-group evangelization events, such as summer youth conferences and March for Life trips. Finally, core team members are encouraged to attend the extracurricular activities of the teens in their small groups.

If signing up to be a core team member appears to require a huge commitment of time and kind of sounds like becoming a parent, that’s because it does and kind of is. Yet to do relational ministry correctly, this is precisely what is necessary. The only way to enter into a relationship with people—even, and perhaps especially, with teenaged people—is to spend a lot of time getting to know and love them: there is really no such thing as quality time without quantity time.

If you belong to a parish that offers a youth ministry program like the one described above and you’ve been at the parish long enough, you’ve undoubtedly noticed one glaring fact: the success of such programs is highly cyclical. It could be firing on all cylinders for a couple of years, then fizzle into mediocrity for a couple years, and even disappear for a couple of years before reemerging once again. There are practical and theological reasons for the difficulty in sustaining such a program.

From a practical view, consider the following. The DYM position rarely pays a family wage. This is one reason why DYMs are typically young adults. Young adults, however, frequently get married. Once they get married, DYMs may continue to work for the parish, but young adults who get married also frequently have children. When children come into the picture, DYMs not only feel the financial pressure more acutely, but also begin to feel the pressure of constantly having to spend time away from their spouse and children. As you can imagine, this particular scenario accounts in large part for the high turnover rate of Catholic DYMs. Moreover, if it is the DYM who recruits, trains, and forms relationships with the core team, you can imagine the high attrition rate of core teams when an old DYM leaves and a new DYM comes in.

Here’s another practical consideration: there is no day, night, or time that can possibly fit the schedules of most teens in any given parish. Thus, even if your parish youth group is drawing in 200 or more teens, those teens probably represent less than 10 percent of the teens who belong to the parish. Typically, teens who are serious about sports, a musical instrument, or other time-intensive extracurricular activities are left out of participating in their parish youth ministry program.

From a theological view, consider the following. The Church teaches that parents are the primary educators of their children and thus have the primary obligation and responsibility for their children’s faith formation.

Who, then, is most equipped with the grace needed to ensure that their teens become faithful disciples? Who can discern best the adults who are best suited to play an active role in their teens’ faith journey? Finally, who has the most incentive to devote their time and energy to make sure their teens have an effective small disciple group and make sure it actually happens?

If your answer to the questions above is precisely the person that many youth ministry programs disallow or only begrudgingly accept—i.e., parents—you’re absolutely correct. Conventional youth ministry programs screen out, for the most part, the very persons God intended to have the most impact on a teen’s faith in the first place.--CWR