UP FRONT
Forming the Faith of Teens
Is the parish up to the task?

Michael P. Horan

In this essay the reader is invited to consider two creative supports for youth ministry/catechesis that can occur when parishes collaborate. In the first section we imagine a pastoral scenario in which three parishes collaborate to hire, share, and retain a youth ministry director, leading them toward some unanticipated benefits. Following that scenario we consider how these parishes fostered quality formation experiences, not only for youth but for the adults as well. To make it happen, the leaders in these three parishes had to overcome some obstacles that prevent collaboration.

A Pastoral Scenario

Five years ago the leaders of St. Anthony’s Catholic Church connected with the pastoral leaders from two nearby parishes, St. Claire’s and St. Theresa’s, in order to share their concerns about their teens. Some leaders worried that the teenagers were not very articulate about, or committed to, their faith. What’s more, the leaders experienced spotty success in hiring and retaining part-time youth ministers; it seemed there were revolving doors at all three parish youth ministry offices. They strained to think creatively about catechizing their teenage members, even as they knew that the youth involved in the parish were small in number, and that they constituted a still smaller slice of the teenage population in the surrounding neighborhoods.

The leaders crafted a plan to hire a full-time youth ministry director to work among the youth of the three parishes. By collaborating in hiring and programming, the leaders reasoned that they could find and retain a minister with theological education, ministry training, and pastoral experience who could be well compensated with salary and benefits. This plan of five years ago has come to pass, and with great success. It has meant less financial burden for each parish, more spaces for functions that serve youth as they move among the parishes’ facilities, and it respects the reality that people no longer live or practice faith only within their parish borders.

The youth minister was not the first “shared” minister to serve these three parishes, however. Today the professional youth ministry director works closely with the director of adult formation, who collaborates among the three parishes (she is based at St. Claire’s) and the full-time parish life coordinator from St. Theresa’s. Together they have served all three parishes effectively for the past five years. Because all these ministers are well educated and current in their field, they spend dedicated time praying and creatively planning together. They “work smart” as well, not overlapping or duplicating activities or offerings. They place high priority on activities that promote faith sharing and important conversation between adults and teens. Most of all, they do not compete for a head count of people to come to their events and offerings, as some parishes do. What began as a modest cooperation has blossomed into shared faith across parish borders.

Any visitor quickly notices that the sharing is substantial and vibrant. Today one finds in all three parishes faith sharing among people of different generations, a focus on the word of God in the Sunday Eucharist (no matter in which building it is celebrated), with several chances weekly and/or monthly to enrich their spirituality. Some activities—open to parishioners of all ages—include reflection groups, meditation groups, social action teams, and outreach, held at any of the three locations and sometimes in people’s homes. Recently the outreach program has focused on home visits and invitations to inactive Catholic adults to become involved in the parish. But a hallmark of the parish coalition is the consistent personal invitation by teens to other teens in the area to join them for an hour or a lifetime. It appears that there is indeed strength in numbers, as these teens also serve the food pantry and the neighborhood rebuilding project not far from their churches, giving them cause for barrier-breaking contact with some teens who have not felt welcomed before now.

This five-year-old experiment in cooperative ministry has effectively furnished stability in parish leadership. The youth ministry director does not need to move on from ministry to get a “grown-up job” that pays well and offers health and retirement benefits, as too many youth ministers report they must do. The same can be said of the other full-time ministers. (The benefits package matters a great deal to the full-time adult formation minister, as she cares for a daughter with health issues and for an aging mother.) Stability leads to creativity, say the two priests who work among the three churches. In addition, the adults who volunteer their time to assist with some of the offerings for youth and other adults are pleased to forge new friendships with people who are committed to the same ministry—even though they are not all from the same parish.

The net effect in the past five years has been heartening for the congregations: more interesting and a greater variety of opportunities for adult faith formation, greater cooperation between the parishes and the various volunteer ministers in forming the faith of teens, even greater face-recognition and more “hellos” among former strangers as they travel the area’s supermarkets, schools, and shopping malls. Activities geared to teens are well attended, and there is a spirit of friendship that pervades the youth catechetical efforts, as the teens introduce new people into the group. Across the generations, people are finding that talking about their faith with others, even with teenagers to whom they are not related, gives them renewed hope in the future of the church even as it makes for an interesting, even exciting, present moment.

It is clear that the next challenge is to foster more serious conversation about faith and to offer people resources to go deeper in theological study, spiritual direction, and engagement in the works of justice. There is always room to grow in faith, but the leaders are grateful that they traversed parish borders to serve youth. While the needs of youth may have provided an initial focus, the new life that exists within and among all three parishes offers an example of the benefits of creative pastoral formation for all generations.

A Multi-Parish Response to a Real Need

The leaders who once crossed parish borders to register concern about the faith lives of teens are not alone. The findings of the National Study on Youth and Religion (NSYR) completed in 2005 are especially troubling to Catholic adults. The NSYR concludes that Catholic youth ages 12 to 18 trail most of their peers in their ability to express what they believe and to identify adults around them with whom they could and would pursue faith questions. The findings, summarized in the published text Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (Oxford, 2005), prompt parents, catechists, pastors, lay ministers, and bishops to reassess the practices of youth formation among Catholic teenagers in the United States and to redouble efforts to improve them.

No quick fix is likely to meet the challenges or erase the flaws that are exposed by the NSYR. But there are responses already underway or well planned by various groups. At the national level, one response comes in the form of the Partnership for Adolescent Catechesis (PAC). Representatives from three leadership groups with stakes in this issue—The National Catholic Educational Association (NCEA), the National Federation for Catholic Youth Ministry (NFCYM), and the National Conference for Catechetical Leadership (NCCL)—have formed this partnership. Aided by a grant from the Lilly Endowment, they have begun a three-year “National Initiative” to enhance the practices associated with youth catechesis. Prior to the partnership and the launching of the Initiative, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) was already articulating a framework for doctrinal content for adolescent catechesis. Yet a reasoned response will need to be larger and wider than doctrinal education alone, important as it is. The situation requires attention to the truth that catechesis embraces a vast territory of “knowing” as the disciple grows in relationship with God, church, and world. Learning theorists tell us that all people learn through a variety of methods that trip a vast array of thought patterns and responses in the learners. And it is safe to assert that no generation more than the current teen generation has accessed more methods and media for learning.
There are certain to be responses at the diocesan and parish level as well, perhaps simultaneous with or following from the National Initiative. But the findings of the authors of Soul Searching hint at the best practices that occur in all churches. Their conclusions point us in a direction toward solutions. In our rush to improve youth catechesis, it seems wise to see at least two of their conclusions and to note the story of the three parishes as one creative response. Two of the findings in the NSYR are these:

(1) Parents matter! To a very large extent they influence the religious lives and attitudes of their teenage children; teens tend to “embody and reproduce the larger adult world of which they are a part,” reflecting either the religious commitment or religious laxity of their parents. Parents may find this either consoling or upsetting, but it appears that teens are quite conventional in following the religious path of commitment or mediocrity or disengagement that their parents trod.

(2) The greater the supply of opportunities to practice faith through activities, programs, and relationships, the more likely teens will be religiously engaged and invested.

The authors of Soul Searching note that Protestant youth in the representative sample belong to churches with full-time paid, professional youth ministers about twice as often as Catholic youth; 37-44 percent Protestant respondents have a full-time youth minister on their church staff, compared with 21 percent of the Catholic respondents. The Catholic parishes’ lack of financial and personnel commitment to youth appears especially pressing when considered alongside the level of commitment exercised by Protestant congregations toward their teens. And the parents’ response points to a correlative story: Catholic parents of teenagers in the study were “noticeably less likely than other Christian parents to say that their church has been very or extremely supportive of them as parents of teens.”

One important step toward addressing the faith needs of teens is to equip them with various opportunities to grow and to meet adult mentors and role models (beyond their parents) who take their own faith seriously. If the parish institutional resistance or “drag” against this commitment stems from either a lack of money or lack of critical mass of adult mentors or both, then the story of the combined effort among the three parishes above offers one way to remove the resistance and enhance formation for all age groups.
But what forces did the three parishes at the beginning of this article need to overcome in order to forge their alliance? They needed to overcome at least two insidious forces that hold back parishes from creative activity: silo thinking and a market competition mindset.

Overcoming Silo Thinking

The philosopher of science Ludwig von Bertalanffy is credited with establishing the term “systems thinking” in the scientific community, a term that has come into common use in various other disciplines. It has been adapted to the business world. The insight of Bertalanffy as applied to business—that a system is a set of elements standing in relation—challenges organizational leaders to think expansively about the elements that stand in relation to the people they seek to serve and the elements within the organization as they interact. Silo thinking, the antithesis of systems thinking, would have us imagine that elements stand not in relation to each other but stand alone, with only the mandate to adapt in order to survive, not thrive.

While theories from science and business do not always apply cleanly to the church, we can see in this foundational yet simple insight strong links to the story of the three parishes. They practiced a kind of systems thinking in reaching across the borders of their respective parishes, which they did not regard as silos, in order to address the needs of teens within the complex systems that teens (and adults) inhabit. They rejected the silo thinking that would have them imagine or assume one minister per parish, with each minister seeking to generate enthusiasm and involvement among teens for the same activities, often in competition with each other’s parishes. They transcended the small notion that one minister “takes care of” all the parish teens.

Alive in many parishes today is a practice—actually more a mindset than any one practice—known as “whole community catechesis.” Catechetical leaders recognize that whole community catechesis thrives when people regard the parish as a complex system in relation to other complex systems. As a system, a parish forms people of all ages all the time by the rhythm of its life, as there is learning through the complex relations of community and its various activities—liturgy, service to the poor, efforts to do justice, to grow more deeply in pondering and proclaiming the word. These efforts evangelize the members as well as the visitors and outside observers who meet parishioners every day, interacting with them in complex systems of relations in workplaces, schools, and neighborhoods.

The three parishes in our story have imagined the elements that form Christians to transcend the usual lines of distinction of “programs” aimed at discrete generations, who then rarely intersect with each other for meaningful conversation about faith. The three parishes instead tended to an environment and established situations that promote conversation across the generations, serving both teens and adults. They offered a chance for adults to hone the skills they may have lacked to talk with teens, and they offered the teens the role models they may have lacked or were too timid to approach within other systems. The systems thinking of this inter-parish cooperation also has an evangelizing effect, because the neighborhood witnesses a cooperation rarely found in their local scene, having few analogues in local politics or civic life. But in order to do this, the leaders of all three parishes had to meet head-on and name squarely the insidious and damaging effects of the market competition mindset in ministry.

Rejecting a Market Competition Mindset in Ministry

The American economic system prides itself on market competition and free enterprise, with a great value placed on measurable results of the number of products sold. The market works on a currency in which one item can be exchanged for another. But the tendency toward measurable results and the equation of one’s inherent value with how much buying power one has—these features of market competition which so permeate American values chip away at the psyche and cause people to want to work harder, be more “productive,” and flaunt their “worth” based on their wealth, their exchange power.

This kind of thinking is antithetical to the gospel and strikes a blow against Catholic social teaching about the dignity of all persons. When this kind of thinking is applied to ministry, it is deadly to church life as well as to the individual minister’s soul. When market competition is applied to ministry, then ministers begin to measure their worth by the scales of “how much” and “how many.” How much growth has occurred in school or religious education program? How many people attended the bible study or the Christmas Day Masses? How much revenue came in from the bake sale? How many are enrolled in the rite of Christian initiation of adults? When attendance records and collection baskets measure success and when ministers, lay and ordained, tie their worth to this kind of success, then the tyranny of market competition clouds the ministry and the gospel it seeks to proclaim.

The leaders of the three parishes overcame the tendency toward market competition and faced the underlying fears that fuel such competition: fears that parishioners would “defect” from one parish to the other, or withhold their financial contributions, or object to innovation and vote with their feet. When church renewal is based on market competition and not on discernment of gospel values, then the parish becomes little more than a poorly run business.

Conclusion

The cooperative efforts among the three parishes described in this essay will not solve all the ills of parish life, certainly not all that the National Study on Youth and Religion exposed for Catholics to consider. But the story of the inter-parish cooperation poses one fresh example of how people can address at least two of the great needs flagged by the NSYR: more situations and opportunities to minister to youth mean more response by them, and adults who can speak meaningfully as mentors to youth exercise a positive effect on their formation. If finances, professional personnel, or a critical mass of youth are lacking in any one parish, these factors need not stand in the way of offering ministry of quality and substance to youth. Catholic leaders can find a way through this impasse by overcoming silo thinking and market competition mindsets, and by calling the neighboring parish. That requires humility and creativity, two hallmarks of effective ministry leadership.