Seven Keys for Sustainable (Youth) Ministry
I have been asked to present about “sustainable” youth ministry to youth ministers in my archdiocese. I will present the following (or something like it).
What is the goal of parish youth ministry?
To make disciples (of every teen in the parish).
It’s not “having pizza with teens,” “trying to make faith fun,” “giving kids something to do so they stay out of trouble,” and so forth. Instead, it’s a (small) share in Jesus’ Great Commission that has to do with preaching the Gospel (see Mk 16:15), witnessing (see Acts 1:6), so as to make disciples (see Mt 28:19–20).
As the nascent Church grew and established itself, its current geographical structure emerged. Even in Acts, we see the beginning of dioceses (i.e., districts or regions) formed and placed under the care of a bishop who has jurisdiction and responsibility for teaching the faith, governing the Church, and celebrating the Sacraments in a his diocese.
Within a diocese, the bishop shares with priests his authority to teach, govern, and celebrate the Sacraments. He entrusts parishes, smaller geographic regions or territories within the diocese, to priests who are named pastors. The pastor must shepherd the flock within that territory.
Indeed, according to Canon Law, a parish “is to be territorial” (Can 515 §1); it is “a certain community of the Christian faithful stably constituted in a particular church, whose pastoral care is entrusted to a pastor” (Can 518). A parish is a geographical area, a region within which the pastor “is obliged to make provision so that the word of God is proclaimed in its entirety to those living in the parish . . . He is to make every effort, even with the collaboration of the Christian faithful, so that the message of the Gospel comes also to those who have ceased the practice of their religion or do not profess the truth faith” (Can 528 §1). It is incumbent on the pastor, with the collaboration of the lay faithful, that the Gospel be proclaimed within the parish.
Now, the lay youth minister has neither been given a share in the pastor’s governance of a parish, nor any ability to celebrate the Sacraments. But, he or she has been given a share in a pastor’s responsibility to make disciples by proclaiming the word of God in its entirety to those youths who are already Catholic, and through those teens, to help reach the other young people who are not Catholic yet who live in the geographical region that is the parish.
Said differently: In collaboration with the pastor, the youth minister is responsible for making teenage disciples of all the Catholic and non-Catholic youth within a parish. So, the goal is not to run events ad nauseam. It’s not to run a “successful” LifeTeen program or YDisciple effort (valuable as these might be). Goal is not 500 kids at a youth night, or 200 at a retreat, or 25 at a Bible Study. Events and programs are not the end, but some of the means of making disciples, because discipleship is the end.
Well, I suppose this raises another question: who is a disciple? What do we mean by discipleship? The General Directory for Catechesis offers this:
Faith is a personal encounter with Jesus Christ, making of oneself a disciple of him. This demands a permanent commitment to think like him, to judge like him and to live as he lived. In this way the believer unites himself to the community of disciples and appropriates the faith of the Church. (GDC §53)
To make a disciple, therefore, means helping someone encounter Jesus and intentionally and resolutely follow him — learning to think like him, judge like him, and live like him. And, not only that, but helping to get these teenage disciples connected to a community that’s on mission — people living out their baptismal call to share the Gospel.
Make disciples of every teen in the parish boundaries: No small task.
So, sustained youth ministry is really sustained youth discipleship. How do you build a sustainable approach to youth discipleship? How do you sustain youth discipleship over the long haul?
“Sustainable” Youth Discipleship
“Sustainable” means “capable of being continued or maintained at a certain level.” The Latin origins of the word literally have to do with “holding up.” Those words, “hold up,” resonate with my own experience of youth ministry (and ministry in general), which is sometimes a lonely, frustrating, and discouraging, like when teens don’t show up, parents are non-responsive, the pastor is disengaged, and volunteers flake. So often I’ve felt like I’m the only one holding the thing together, like I’m holding onto the rope — or, rather, like I am the rope — between the halves of a ship that’s split and plunging into the raging sea. So often I’ve made my way to communion at Mass making this prayer: “Jesus, I feel like I’m being crushed. Help me.” Holding up the weight of ministry is no small task, and persevering in such no small feat.
So, how can you sustain or hold up a youth discipleship effort? I could provide many thoughts here. But, for the sake of time, I will limit myself to what I’m going to call seven “keys” for sustainable youth discipleship.
1. You can’t sustain much of anything. Only God can. (Humility)
First thing to note is that you can’t sustain this effort. Only God can. This is God’s Church and God’s ministry. Not a single one of us is the Savior. Thanks be to God. The best thing we can do is participate in God’s movement. So, real humility and radical openness to the Holy Spirit (coupled with sound discernment) is essential.
Sustainable ministry depends on God making the first move. This means we have to give God the first word, allow him the first move. Or else we are just building on sand. And this is the real irony of Christian ministry: we sustain/hold up ministry by depending (the word depend literally means “to hang from,” “to be suspended by”) on God. The more we depend on God, the more sustainable our ministry becomes. So, we give God the first word when we don’t just pray at the beginning of meetings as a mere formality, but we dig into lectio divina expecting God to speak and expecting his word to impact our course. We surrender “our” plans to God and allow him to upset them. We stop the ridiculous practice of making 5-year-plans and instead focus on taking the next step the Lord has illuminated on the path and trusting that after we take that step, the next one will become clear. In this way we depend on him to be the lamp unto our feet (cf. Ps 119:105).
2. Live from the inside out. (Order)
Growing in humility and interiority is the perpetual first step in a sustained effort, which leads nicely into the second “key” — living from the inside out.
St. Bernard of Clairvaux provided a lesson on the apostolate in the 12th century that’s just as relevant today. He explains:
“If you are wise, you will be reservoirs and not channels”. . . The channels let the water flow away, and do not retain a drop. But the reservoir is first filled, and then, without emptying itself, pours out its overflow, which is ever renewed, over the fields which it waters. How many there are devoted to works, who are never anything but channels, and retain nothing for themselves, but remain dry while trying to pass on life-giving grace to souls! “We have many channels in the Church today, but very few reservoirs.”
Jim Beckman modernized this image with his inside-out schema.
The gist is simple. Most of us try to live our lives from the outside in. We devote tons of time to “everything else” — work, activities, hobbies, entertainment, travel, politics, and things we have no control over or ability to influence — thinking that we’re going to have something left for primary vocation and God. In reality, the whole thing implodes and collapses on itself. The wife gets the meager leftovers; the kids get the scraps. God gets next to nothing, or nothing at all. When this happens, we dry up, burn out, and quit.
Life from the inside out is just the opposite. It means I root myself profoundly in my baptismal identity as an adopted son (or daughter) of God through a deep(ening) interior life of personal and liturgical prayer. The fruits of this interior life spill into my primary vocation before the fruits of that spill out into my ministry. I am convinced that this is the only healthy way to approach ministry and, therefore, the only way to sustain a discipleship effort.
3. Build on a firm foundation. (Christocentric)
Begin and end with Christ. Always. Don’t begin and/or end with your own pet project. Don’t create some sort of ideal youth ministry program and idolize that ideal. Let Christ be your vision. Let him be your aim. Begin and end with Christ.
Hans Urs von Balthasar takes up this point in Razing the Bastions, when he comments on the perpetual danger of not going back to Christ, even while staying in the Catholic intellectual tradition: “To honor the tradition does not excuse one from the obligation of beginning everything from the beginning each time, not with Augustine or Thomas or Newman, but with Christ.” Begin from the beginning each time. Don’t “move on” from the Gospel. Don’t pursue some aim you made up in your mind. Simply pursue Christ and invite others to join you. Begin and end with Christ.
Making time in front of the Blessed Sacrament a foundational element of youth discipleship efforts is a concrete way to build on a firm, Christocentric foundation.
4. Adopt a marathon mindset. (Perseverance)
Set expectations from the get-go: ministry is less of a sprint and more of a marathon, though there will be times when you are sprinting. It’s a long-haul sort of thing and one makes progress gradually through perseverance and fidelity. Really, when you think about it, this is what a marathon is. It’s one big “yes, I’m going to run the whole race” and then perseverance through a series of repeated “yeses.” With each mile (or each step, for that matter), I must ask: will I go the next mile? Yes. A marathon is 26.2 “yeses.”
I was really hesitant in ministry until I said, consciously and in full-freedom said “yes.” I didn’t seek out ministry, I kind of landed in it. And I felt stuck. A few years in, I realized I needed to say “yes” to ministry, which meant saying “yes” to the whole race — the marathon. “Yes, I’m in and I’m going to run this whole race. I’m going to do this until you tell me to stop.” Each year, my wife and I review the previous year, look ahead at the next one, count the cost, and renew our “yes” to the Lord.
Sustainable youth discipleship means embracing the “I’m in it for the long-haul approach.” It means embracing the law of gradualness that says things change slowly and over time. It means moving in a consistent direction comes about through the stability of the person shepherding effort. If your parish has a new youth minister every 12-18 months, it’s going to be darn difficult to see any progress. It’s like repeatedly quitting a marathon after the first mile and then deciding to start over.
5. Embrace the cultural long view. (Patience)
This key sounds a lot like the previous one, but it is different. The previous one has more to do with the person of the youth minister. This key has to do with ministry strategy.
We are all engaging in ministry in an interesting ecclesial and cultural moment. The Church’s ability to impact culture has been in a state of decline for quite a while, even if this has only become really visible in the last 50-70 years. So, we’re dealing with a post-Christian culture that seriously impacts everyone to whom we are trying to minister (including ourselves). Reversing that trend, impacting culture, takes time. We need to take a long view when it comes to culture change.
I started thinking about this and changing my approach to ministry when I learned that, statistically, a child’s faith trajectory is set by age 13. I mean, that’s when my Jr. High ministry started. So, if we were going to do good youth discipleship, this meant impacting the water way upstream. When I was a little boy, we ran on probably a half-mile stretch of Rock Creek in my hometown. It was a sizable creek, probably 20 feet across and it always had plenty of water flowing. Once, we dammed the thing with rocks we dug out of the creek bed and hauled. It was probably a 3 foot dam with a 2 foot drop of water. That sounds insignificant, but it dramatically impacted the creek both upstream and downstream. Actually, it impacted it so much the local authorities came in and destroyed our hard work. Still, it was a helpful lesson for me that adjustments, however seemingly insignificant, can have significant effects in the long run. Applying this to ministry, I now think of youth discipleship beginning with the marriage preparation of the child’s parents — well before the child exists and long before the child is a teenager. This flows into how we handle Baptism prep, early childhood formation, family formation, etc. You get the point. We need to widen the scope of our thinking about youth discipleship and think of it more as a continuum than a blip of teenage time.
6. Invest in relationships. (Friendship Evangelization)
In the 17+ years I’ve been doing this work, I continue to find that relationship is the key ingredient to sustained discipleship efforts. Good, sustainable youth ministry is relational ministry. Relationship is the engine that drives discipleship; relationship is the glue that holds it together.
We know Jesus adopted relational paradigm for discipleship. It was one that consisted of relating to large groups (crowds) of disciples, a critical small group of disciples (The Twelve Apostles), and lots of intimate interaction and individual mentorship (most notably with Peter, James, and John). Taking Jesus’ relational model as an example, I think we can apply it similarly for the purposes of youth discipleship, which probably has (or should have) large group elements, small group discipleship, and individual mentoring.
The biggest gains in ministry came when I flipped how I spent my time. I was spending way too much time at my desk and a really small amount of time actually with teens. This seemed messed up to me, though, as a non-sanguine introvert, it was comfortable. Still, I needed to push myself out of my comfort zone and create relational opportunities for myself. So, I went from probably an 80/20 split between desk work and time with people, to 50/50. Now, it’s probably more like 40/60.
Last point, here. Core Teams are often overlooked. When I started in ministry, the Core Team of volunteers I inherited was more like a bunch of warm-bodied chaperones. They helped us create a safe environment and have the right proportion of adults to teens, but they weren’t involved in discipleship. In order to get them involved, I had to invest heavily in them and in their own journey of discipleship. This investment worked out over time and they started discipling teens. But that was not all. As my Core Team members grew in relationship with God, they also grew in relationship with each other. Suddenly, real friendships emerged and the Core Team literally became the community at the core of the ministry. This was the Christian community into which we were inviting the teens. At this point I realized that the whole of good ministry is shot through, not with gimmicks or programs or music or games or even content, but Christ-centered relationship. It really is that which sustains discipleship ministry.
7. Pray and sacrifice. (Offering)
In all of our discipleship efforts, we hope the interior life catches fire and ignites baptismal mission. I have seen this over and over. When someone falls in love with Christ, that person can’t help but share him (in words and in deeds) with others. That relationship changes as person and that change becomes perceptible over time — in other words, that change is communicated. Consequently, I watched teens bring (more and more) teens to an encounter with Christ at our events, small group sessions, Bible studies, and the like. Still, there were many who stopped coming and fell away. There were plenty who rejected the invitation. And there were far, far more we were not reaching and didn’t have a great way to reach. What about them?
Well, for them, we join our prayer and sacrifice with that of Christ. We put our supplication and suffering on the altar at Mass and ask Jesus to transform it “for many.” Jesus is the one who stands for the many and by joining with him in prayer and penance, we too, can sustain discipleship efforts and offer our lives and our efforts as a gift for those (teens) who have not yet encountered Christ and made a permanent commitment to think like him, to judge like him and to live as he lived.
Conclusion
Though not exhaustive, this list of keys provides a decent starting point for thinking through an answer to the question: how do you build sustainable youth ministry? Each point deserves much deeper elaboration than this article can contain. Maybe it’s fodder for future writing. I guess I’ll see how the youth ministers respond to the presentation first.