By Everett Fritz

This is part four of a four-part series.

I had lunch with 2 youth ministers from a local parish last week and there was something that they said that struck me. These youth ministers work at one of the larger parishes in our Archdiocese and have the reputation of running one of the most successful youth ministries. The conversation went something like this:

Me: How many teens receive the Sacrament of Confirmation each year at your parish?

Youth Minister: Between 130 and 180.

Me: How old are they when they receive the Sacrament?

Youth Minister: Freshmen year of high school.

Me: How many of them do you retain in your youth ministry all the way through senior year?

Youth Minister: Around 80%.

Me: What?! 80%?! How did you manage that?!

This parish has been intentional, for several years, of developing discipleship groups with teens – small groups of teens that meet regularly to learn the faith and follow the example of an adult core member. The Core members disciple teens through Bible studies, fellowship and community, service projects etc. They have been intentional about shrinking their ministry down to small groups and because of this, they are reaching more teens with the Gospel than they ever had before.

Discipleship: Started by Jesus

Discipleship is nothing new. Jesus had the intention of spreading the Gospel to both Jews and Gentiles all over the world. But he did not do this Himself. It is true that he had a large healing ministry, and he traveled around Judea meeting different people. At times, he had thousands of followers and he had over 70 who were relatively faithful followers of His. However, he put all of His attention on 12 men. In Ancient time, if invited by a Rabbi, a Jew would live with a Rabbi for a number of years to learn from his way of life. The Jew would not only learn from the teaching of the Rabbi, he would learn from everything the Rabbi did. Jesus was the Rabbi of the 12 apostles. They learned from the way that he woke up every morning and started His day, from the way He approached prayer, from the way He handled conflict and the way that He taught and interacted with people. It was these 12 men who spread the Gospel all over the world. Jesus had a small group ministry. He trained others to do the work that He hoped to accomplish.

Y.Disciple – A new youth ministry model for the New Evangelization

In the same way, we can model our youth ministry after the way that Jesus modeled his ministry. In youth ministry we offer programs, resources, large group youth nights, methods, conferences, rallies, mission trips, etc. All of these things only take us so far with teens. The heart of effective evangelization, catechesis and the purification of youth culture is in discipleship – mentoring teens in personal relationships. People learn the faith from the example and witness of other people. The first goal of any youth ministry should be personal holiness and spreading holiness to our adult leaders. Holiness and faith should then be modeled to the teens and the best way to do this is in personal relationships. For any youth ministry wishing to go deeper – discipleship requires us to select the teens who have potential to go deeper and mentor them in the faith through one-on-one regular communication or small group development. Youth groups that do an excellent job in fostering vocations, preparing teens to live their faith in college and keeping upperclassman invested all spend a lot of time focusing on a small group of teens. The final step with teens is sending them out to recruit and disciple others, so that the Gospel spreads.  This small group approach is the heart of the Augustine Institute’s Y.Disciple program.

“Just Get 2” – the FOCUS Model

When I was in graduate school, Curtis Martin – the Founder of Fellowship of Catholic University Students (FOCUS) – came and guest lectured in our class. FOCUS is the most successful college campus ministry organization in the world and it is rapidly growing throughout the United States. Curtis spoke about the goal of, “just getting two.” He teaches his missionaries to each focus all of their attention on developing relationships with two college students. Through those relationships, the missionary would evangelize, catechize and prepare the college student to be sent out to serve the Church. Those two college students would recruit two more students each and next thing you know, the ministry grows. Curtis Martin said that they figured out, with this approach, they could reach an enormous amount of college students within 20 years.

The idea of discipleship remains the same through the centuries. Instead of focusing on inspiring many teens, focus most of your attention on a few. With those small group of teens, prepare them to be evangelists and strong in their faith. By doing that, you multiply your outreach exponentially and the Gospel spreads.

The Challenge of Depth

Youth Ministry is a challenging field and there is so much work to be done for His Kingdom, we can forget the most important thing – developing and sustaining souls in their relationship with Jesus Christ. If we create ministries that are a mile wide but an inch deep – we are not building up the Church. It may be easy to create enthusiasm in a lot of teens. However, if we do not develop their intellect, prayer lives and lead them to make sustained choices for Christ, we risk sending them to college where they will lose their faith after one class with a liberal professor or one fraternity party on a Saturday night. Depth takes time, patience and a sustained, personal effort into the lives of the teens. We cannot sustain the Church in the future without developing the young Church today.

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By: Everett Fritz

This blog is part three of a four-part series.

This past World Youth Day, I had a group of approximately 50 young people with me in Madrid. We walked in late on Tuesday morning to catch catechesis and Mass with Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadephia. The archbishop did a wonderful job with his presentation and answering questions from the English speaking pilgrims in attendance. As the Archbishop retreated to the back of the stage to prepare for Mass, the worship band led us in some praise and worship music to prepare our hearts.

The music started, “I’m trading my sorrows, I’m trading my sickness…. Yes, Lord. Yes, Lord, Yes, Yes Lord.” If you have been working in youth ministry for a while this song is not unfamiliar to you. It is usually accompanied by a series of hand motions using your fingers and thumbs. Teens all over the stadium began doing the hand motions that the worship leaders taught. I threw up in my mouth a little bit…

Hand Motion Sickness

 I have hand motion sickness and I don’t think I am the only one. When the praise and worship song starts, I have tried to follow. I’ve moved my fingers, flapped my arms, waved my hands over my head, clapped in the shape of the cross and I once did the hokey pokey. Putting hand motions to songs is nothing new in youth ministry and it can be a worthwhile tool to teach youth to engage and participate. However, I quickly noticed something about hand motions during praise and worship music – it’s not prayer. Because it is not prayer, I have stopped doing hand motions and no longer encourage my teens to participate. In fact, the sight of hand motions makes me just a little bit sick. I know there are many youth ministers who would strongly disagree – but the challenge of these blogs is to go deeper, and to go deeper means we need to evaluate if what we are teaching is working. Prayer is supposed to bring us into intimate relationship with God. It is supposed to bring us to encounter Him and through the practice of prayer, our heart converts.

Praise and Worship

What is praise? What is its intention? The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that the prayer of praise, “is a form of prayer which recognizes most immediately that God is God. It lauds God for his own sake and gives him glory, quite beyond what He does, but simply because HE IS.” (CCC 2639). I believe – and the Tradition of the Church would teach us – that the prayer of praise is one of the most foundational prayers to learn when growing in deeper relationship with Christ. It teaches us humility by teaching us to give God the glory. St. Ignatius Loyola – in his “First Principle and Foundation”- goes so far as to say that man, “is created for the praise, reverence and service of God and by this means to save his soul.” Praise is so important, that he says that man is created for it and he obtains the salvation of his soul from it. When St. John had a vision of Heaven, he saw choirs of angels never ceasing to praise God by singing, “holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty.” (Revelation 4:8). We could go on and on with examples of the prayer of praise in the Scriptures and Tradition – whether it is Job in his tragedy, Mary’s Magnificat, Zechariah’s Canticle, etc. All of these prayers were not written, but rather expressed out of the heart with humility. Teaching teens to praise is as important as teaching any other form of prayer, because it is what we were created by God to do.

Praying with our Body

                  Don’t get me wrong, Catholics pray with their body. We lie prostrate, we kneel, we sit, and we fold our hands in a posture of prayer. Sometimes we even extend our hands over our head in an open posture of worship. All of these postures, even the hands over the head, are rooted in Scripture and the Tradition of the Church. They reflect the interior disposition of the soul and it’s receptivity to Christ. So what about hand motions? Why do I say it is not prayer? When I was doing hand motions, the first thing I noticed is that my attention was not on Christ and giving Him glory, but rather on myself – what I was doing and what the group was collectively doing. I wouldn’t criticize hand motions if I thought they were generally benign, however it would seem that hand motions completes the complete opposite objective that praise is supposed to accomplish. While there are many youth leaders that would disagree, some Catholic worship leaders have been calling attention to this for years. I remember one instance in particular where popular Catholic worship leader – Matt Maher – caused a minor twitter war in 2009 when he declared war on the “cross clap” following NCYC. The criticism remained the same. He questioned whether we understand why we are doing it, whether it serves any purpose in prayer and he basically said that it can distract us from union with Christ. People focus on their motions rather than entering into a song and declaring, perhaps for the first time in their life, “God, your grace is enough for me.”  If we wish to take teens into deeper relationships with Christ, learning to pray is vital for ongoing conversion and we need to look deeper and be more intentional about what we model and what we teach.

Discipleship

My final blog of the series will address the how we catechize and purify the youth. As youth ministers, Christ provided us the best model for training youth and preparing them for the mission of the Church. More and more, I believe that the Catholic youth ministry is moving to discipleship – intentionally focusing on individual youth and their private journey with Christ.

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By Jim Beckman

This article is part 2 of a summary of George Weigels’ talk at the Napa Valley Leadership Conference.  Click here for part 1 if you haven’t already read it.

Catholics, a creative minority!  “A force for great cultural change; a force that can give this country a new birth of freedom, a birth of freedom tethered to truth.”  How can Catholics be that creative minority?  “Only be being authentically Catholic!  Only a robust Catholicism will do!,” says Weigel.

As I heard Weigel speak, I remembered a line from John Paul II’s Familiaris Consortio, “Families, become what you are!”  John Paul was referring to the unique role that families have in renewing the culture around them:

“The family finds in the plan of God the Creator and Redeemer not only its identity, what it is, but also its mission, what it can and should do. The role that God calls the family to perform in history derives from what the family is; its role represents the dynamic and existential development of what it is. Each family finds within itself a summons that cannot be ignored, and that specifies both its dignity and its responsibility: family, become what you are!” – Familiaris Consortio, 17

It strikes a similar cord to what Weigel is saying.  It’s almost as if he is saying, “Catholics, become what you are! You are a minority, yes.  But you are a creative minority!  One that has the potential for great cultural change!  Catholics all throughout history have faced insurmountable odds and have been a force for positive cultural impact, precisely because of their unwavering commitment to being authentically CATHOLIC!”

How do we do this?  How do we, as Weigel suggests, be “ever more intentionally, and ever more intelligently Catholic?”  He offers four practical ways:

• Each and every one of us needs to have a deepening of our friendship with Jesus Christ
  • Pope Benedict says over and over again that Christianity is about friendship with the person of Christ;
  • We need to personally and individually pursue that friendship in all it’s depth
  • This can be accessed through a more intense Sacramental life, and a more intense Biblical life
• We must strengthen our resolve to be evangelists – EVERYWHERE
  • Weigel used an example of an Evangelical church that had a sign at the exit of its parking lot, “You are now entering Mission Territory”
  • He suggested that maybe we need similar signs at the exits of all our Catholic churches – at least in our minds
  • We MUST see ourselves as evangelists in every corner of our sphere of influence – our families, our businesses, our politics, and our wider culture.
• We have to learn how to appeal to those four foundation truths, especially in defending human life and promoting the right to life, marriage rightly understood, and the integrity of the family
  • We must learn how to have conversation with those who don’t necessarily hold our same religious convictions, and be able to defend and advocate for these fundamental realities of human life.
  • And not just conversation with those who approach us, but the unique skill of engaging modern people in these kinds of dialogues.
• We have to model a more human way of life
  • The early church grew at an amazing rate the first 300 years.  By the year 300, Christianity accounted for more than 50% of the Roman Empire.
  • The early church grew precisely because is offered a more humane way of life than the secular, pagan Roman culture
  • It was better for women, better for children, it cared for the poor and the sick, and helped people grow in virtue and decency.  This is still who the Church is and can be today!

Very much like the early Christians, evangelizing the pagan Roman culture around them, OUR capacity to summon forth a more humane, decent, compassionate, generous way of living can be a magnet that will attract people to us, and can open up the opportunities for us to share more about this incredible faith we have.

As youth ministers, this is a message that we can bring to our teens, but also to their families, especially their parents.  It’s a challenging message, but one that is also filled with hope.

The Napa Leadership Institute has as its mission to equip Catholic leaders to defend and advance the Catholic Faith in “the Next America” – today’s emerging secular society.  For more information, check out their website: www.napa-institute.org.

Sessions for the Institute last summer were recorded.  If you are interested in this talk by George Weigel, or any others, check out their multimedia section, http://www.napa-institute.org/multimedia.

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(Excerpt from God Help Me: How to Grow in Prayer, by Jim Beckman)

This is part two of a two-part series, providing a personal example that brings everything talked about in part 1 into a real lived experience. 

Here’s a quick example of what I mean. It’s very basic, but communicates the point here well. I was talking with my son one day as he was trying to work through some difficult circumstances. I felt as if the conversation was not really bearing any fruit – we seemed to be talking in circles, and he was getting increasingly frustrated.

I finally decided to pray with him instead of talking so I asked him if he would be willing to pray with me. At first, I think he was more annoyed, but he went along with it. I tried to help him enter into prayer by using Christian imagination to find himself in some place that had been to that was really peaceful. He quickly picked a beautiful valley that he had just visited a couple weeks earlier when he was on a trip with his school. I had him describe the scene to me, even asking questions that would cause him to engage his senses with what he was imagining, sounds, smells, sights, etc. Within a few minutes, he seemed to be completely absorbed with what he was imagining. His eyes were closed, his face looked contented. He described himself as sitting on a small ledge overlooking this beautiful valley below. The ledge stuck out slightly from the ridge, giving the sense of “hanging” above the valley (his words). A gentle breeze was blowing; the sun was out, but it wasn’t too hot.

As he engaged this scene with his imagination, I asked him to invite Jesus into the scene with him – to have Him come and sit with him on the ledge. He did this, and when it seemed like he had enough time to adjust to this new image, I then asked him to turn and look at Jesus, to look him in the eyes. “Tell Him what you are feeling in your heart,” I said to him. But then, very abruptly, this incredibly peaceful experience turned into a disaster. My son started screaming and crying uncontrollably. It was so startling – I almost jumped out of my chair. I had him open his eyes, and started trying to find out what had happened. When he calmed down, he was able to tell me that when he looked at Jesus, Jesus put his hand up on the back of his neck, and pushed off the ledge and said, “Go to hell, Aaron!”

I was stunned. How could this happen? Here I was trying to help my son pray through some very difficult circumstances. I had him enter into his heart, and was leading him to relate to Jesus the deep feelings he was having in his heart – then BAM, the whole thing turned south on me! I quickly realized that what was happening was the work of the enemy. So I told my son that Jesus would never say or do anything like that, and that he needed to reject that thought/feeling right away. I lead him in a simple, yet decisive prayer of rejection, followed by a new prayer for receptivity. It was bit challenging to return to the peaceful place we had been, but I knew it was critical to reclaim this whole experience for Jesus. We finally got there, and I lead him to the same encounter with Jesus, looking right into his eyes as he told Jesus how he was struggling – related what was going on his heart.

There was a long time of silence as he was having this experience, but I could tell that something was happening. He had tears running down his cheeks, yet he had a very peaceful look on his face. It finally ended, and he opened up his eyes. I asked him if he could share what happened. He told me that he shared everything with Jesus, and it felt good to just get everything off his chest. Then Jesus put his hands up on either side of his face, looked right into his eyes and said, “Breathe”. He said that he really didn’t understand what that meant, but it made him really peaceful, as if everything was going to be okay. His whole demeanor had changed, all the agitation that I had been experiencing for the past hour was gone, all his anxiety over his troubling situation – gone. Several times in the next couple weeks, he thanked me for that experience. He said in particular that the image of Jesus gently putting his hands on either side of his face was one he kept going back to – it made him feel really good about himself.

What I have just described here is a perfect example of all that we have been talking about. My son was deeply troubled, was even experiencing some desolate thoughts and feelings, at the deepest level of his heart – fundamentally spiritual ones. I tried to talk him through it, but realized that I was just trying to fix it and figure it out for him. I believe that by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, I was moved to lead him into prayer with all his troubles. I helped him acknowledge his deep thoughts and feelings.

Then I helped him, through the gift of Christian imagination, relate those deep feelings to Jesus. Remember, with Christian imagination, careful discernment is always necessary – is this authentically from God or not? His first experience was clearly NOT from God, so we rejected it and persevered in prayer, even praying for greater receptivity. We returned to prayer, and then related those deep feelings and thoughts to Jesus. And what did my son receive? I will never know completely, but he clearly received peace that removed all the turmoil and anxiety he had been experiencing. I helped him respond in thanksgiving to the Lord for being with him in his prayer, and for the beautiful image he had received. 

In addition, his experience became what my spiritual director calls “an incarnational hook” – the image he saw in prayer was one that he returned to over and over again over during the next several days. Each time he did it reconnected him to this deep feeling of peace and contentment. You can also see the critical importance of discerning what we receive in prayer and making sure it is authentically from God. Having a basic knowledge of our heart, and knowing the reality of multiple sources (the Holy Spirit, the human spirit, and the evil spirit) of thoughts, feelings and desires, particularly in the deepest level of our heart.

I’m sure as my son matures, as he becomes more and more informed about who God is and how God relates to us, he won’t be so quickly thrown by something that is so clearly NOT from God. As he has experiences in prayer that are authentically from God, he will become more familiar with His voice and with his subtle moves in his heart. As he has those experiences, counterfeit experiences will be much easier to identify and quickly dismiss. And that is exactly the type of maturity in prayer that this book is inviting us all into. It is an invitation to a new and constant awareness of the move and work of God in our hearts, recognizing how He is trying to love us in the midst of our daily lives.

These two articles are drawn from an excerpt of Jim Beckman’s book, God Help Me:  How to Grow in Prayer (chapter 7 on Christian Imagination).  If you want to grow in prayer, consider ordering a copy of the full book from our online store. Click here for more information.

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