In recent months, I have found myself spending time thinking about and reflecting upon the subjects of social justice and outreach to youth and young adults. In my reflections, I found myself asking a lot of questions regarding how best to engage those who are different from us, those we feel uncomfortable around, those we don’t completely understand.  

Although my experience and background has been with youth and young adults, I realized in reflecting on the lessons I’ve learned in Youth Ministry over the years, that the lessons I’ve learned, the best practices I’ve come to understand, the methods that are most successful, apply not only to young people, but to all those who are different from us, whether it be age, race, gender, ethnicity, skin color, country, economic status, political or religious beliefs.

When I speak with others about youth and young adult ministry, most express a fear of being able to connect with a generation so different from their own. A priest in my parish shared his reluctance to gear homilies toward the youth because he doesn’t really understand them and can’t relate to them. I’ve spoken with grandparents who desperately want to see their grandchildren have a strong faith and grow to be faithful Catholics, fearing that they will fail when trying to guide, teach, direct, and correct them.   I confess that I shared some of those same fears when I started in Youth Ministry.

One’s initial reaction might be to say that we must return to the core of what has worked in the past, that our curriculum and activities must deal with providing our young people with a strong foundation on the details, facts, and doctrines of our Catholic faith. And that from that strong foundation, they would naturally come to experience and love God. But this doesn’t work. It takes much more than this.

It doesn’t work because we start with some wrong assumptions.

• First, we assume that our young people should automatically trust and respect us because of our role, position, and experience.

• Second, we assume that what worked to teach us the faith when we were young will always work and certainly would still work today. 

Instead, what I ‘ve come to learn is that neither of these things is true. Not only is trust and respect not a given, but what worked in the past does not necessarily work in today’s world.  With the advancements in technology, and the changes we have seen in communication, socialization, global connection, and the availability of information, young people today are growing up in a world that is totally different from the world we grew up in. 

Again, our initial reaction might be to say:

• “Yah, that’s what’s wrong with today’s generation of parents, young adults, and youth… they have no respect for authority.” 

• “If only it were like it used to be”

• “What can I possibly have to offer them, that they would even want to listen to?”

• “I wouldn’t even know where to start, or how to connect with them…”

It’s easy to think that the exodus of youth, young adults and young families from our churches means that something’s wrong with what we’re doing, that the changes we’ve made over the years are ineffective, and that we need to go back to telling them facts, focusing on doctrine, and correcting their errors, to get them back on track.

The truth is, we are losing young people and families. But the answer is not found in going back to old ways. It’s found in developing a deeper understanding of today’s generation of young people, and then meeting them where they are.  Just as Jesus did. 

A recent study [1] showed that over the past few generations the level of trust and respect that young people have for the institutional church, it’s leaders, priests, catechists, and youth ministers are at all-time lows.  At first glance this is alarming. But upon deeper review, we find that this trend does not only apply to the church, it applies to ALL institutions, our schools, the government, law enforcement, politicians, etc.

What at first seems like a serious issue, “Young people just don’t have the kind of trust and respect for authority that they should have,” is in fact a result of young people being open to asking deeper and more serious questions than we might have asked in our day.  We oftentimes blindly offered our trust and respect by virtue of someone’s position, only to find out later that our trust was misplaced.  Today’s young folks have access to greater amounts of information, have witnessed the insincerity and brokenness of those in positions of power, and therefore are unwilling to just trust someone because they are told to. They will question, research, and discern, before choosing who to trust.  And this… is healthy.

The most important thing we can do to earn their trust is to authentically be ourselves, to enter into relationship with them, and to accompany them on their journey.  Authenticity, Accompaniment and Relationship.

In the end, the studies found that the adults that today’s generation of young folks choose to trust the most are all people who are willing to join them in the nuts and bolts of their lives and enter into the messiness that is their life’s journey, namely their parents, their coaches, and their youth ministers.  If we are going to be successful in impacting their lives, helping them to experience the presence of God in their hearts, leading them to an encounter with God’s love and his mercy, we need to be willing to enter into an authentic relationship of accompaniment with them.

Two Lost Children of God

Oftentimes we don’t even see the impact we are having and may even feel we are making little if any progress.  But I’ve come to learn that God is always at work, and we simply need to love, and be faithful. 

In the early days of my involvement in Youth Ministry, there were two students who were especially troublesome, disruptive, and disrespectful.  We had frequent conversations to discuss how best to handle them, and settled on staying faithful to patient love, and building relationship.

As these students left our program and moved on to what turned out to be some very troubled and broken times in their lives, it appeared that our efforts had had very little impact. 

However, in recent years, I have had the opportunity to talk to them both.  Each of them has made significant progress in turning their lives around. Both apologized for being so unruly and disruptive in our classes and thanked us for the unwavering love and support we showed them even when they were being so difficult. 

One of them commented that their early years of faith formation focused on the doctrines and teachings of the church, the rules, the dos-and-don’ts, sin and punishment, and as a result, created extreme feelings of guilt, shame, anxiety, hopelessness, and despair in their life.

But when they entered high school, we explained to them that the rules are not of primary importance, but rather our relationships of love with God and others.  And then we exhibited it over and over again with our patience, understanding, and perseverance.  That through our words, our actions, and our willingness to accept them, even in their brokenness and their messiness, they began to see God in a different light.

Although we could not see it at the time, our willingness to enter into an authentic relationship of accompaniment with them had a deep impact on them and their lives.

One Child Finds a Home

Another youth in our program, who was adopted as a child from China, spent much of her life feeling as though she didn’t quite fit in anywhere.  She came to one of our Youth Group gatherings with a friend and felt comfortable enough to participate regularly, joining us for nearly every event and participating each year in our summer mission trip.   

She shared with me that when she started applying to colleges, she was required to write an essay, and chose to write her essay about the impact our parish and our youth ministry program had on her life. In her essay, she explained that while we were traveling in the van to her first mission trip she knew she had found a place of welcome… a home. 

It was there that she watched as I drove the van with my daughter in the front seat beside me, and together we sang along to the christian music we were listening to on the van’s radio, freely and joyfully singing about our faith, unconcerned with what others may think or say.  She witnessed in us a faith and confidence in God that was infectious.

As a result of our ministry of accompaniment, the freedom she found, the authenticity of faith she witnessed and experienced, the life-long relationships she established, along with the love, the support, the kindness, and the authentic example of those who joyfully accompanied her on her journey, she learned what the love of Christ looks like in action, which had a major impact not only on her life and her faith journey, but those of her parents as well.

This is what young people and families desire.  It is the means through which we can touch them with the love of God.  If our goal is to correct, to convert, or to recruit, we are starting from the wrong place.  Our goal as Christians is to help others encounter the living God and enter into a deep and abiding relationship with him. We do this by entering into a relationship with them.  This is not easy. In fact, it asks a lot of us. It requires a serious commitment to foster life-long relationships with our youth and young adults.  Not something that lasts for a season, a year, or even a few years, but a relationship that lasts for a lifetime.

Authenticity, Accompaniment and Relationship, these are the key words.  These are the key words not only for our young people and their families, but these are also the key words for approaching all those who are different from us, all those who make us uncomfortable, all those we are afraid of because we don’t understand them.  We don’t have to be afraid, and we don’t have to feel uncomfortable.

We just must be willing and open. Willing to engage in relationships with them, knowing we don’t need to have all the answers, that our goal, first and foremost, is not to change them, but rather to just love them. And we must be open to authentically being ourselves, willing to share our own hurts, pains, joys, and sorrows, our own messiness, with them, letting them know that they are not alone in this journey we call life.

Once you have entered into a relationship with them, you become a part of their experience of encountering God, part of their journey. It is here that trust, respect, openness, and dialogue flourishes, and they become open to hearing more about the details of our faith, the doctrines of the church, and most importantly the intimate relationship of love you and God share with each other. We impact their lives by our example and our love.  And we become instruments in the hands of God, as the Holy Spirit works in their hearts, minds and souls.

I know there is still this deep desire to want to jump in and help “fix” them, to help them learn what we have learned, to help them be like us, to join the church.  But that was never Jesus’ goal. Jesus’ goal was for each and every one of us to fall in love with God, and for each of us to love our neighbor so that they too can experience the deep and abiding love for God.  Jesus did this by being authentically himself, and then meeting others where they are, loving them as they are, and encouraging them to achieve their fullest potential in God. 

He encourages us to do the same.

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[1] Springtide Research Institute, The State of Religion & Young People 2020: Relational Authority, 2020  www.springtideresearch.org