5 Principles for Effective Catholic Youth Ministry
If you want to invest in the right projects, start here.
Want to know the one silver lining of the COVID pandemic in our Diocese? It caused a ‘hard reset’ of the way we were doing youth ministry.
It gave us the opportunity to step back from “doing what we’ve always done” and ask the question, “what does effective Catholic youth ministry look like?”
In the subsequent two years, we’ve reflected on a decade-worth of diocesan youth ministry initiatives, we’ve studied other youth ministries extensively, and we’ve begun to pilot new models.
It’s too early to say if we’ve found answers. But what we have found are 5 principles; 5 common threads from case studies of Catholic youth ministry that works.
That’s not to say that there aren’t successful Catholic youth ministries that don’t follow these principles. There are. But as a diocesan team with limited time and money, we want to invest our resources in the projects that are most likely to be effective.
Here are the 5 principles that guide us:
1. Focus, Focus, Focus
There’s no shortage of things you could be doing. There’s no shortage of things that other people think you should be doing. On top of the business-as-usual of diocesan youth ministry, there’s an endless list of workshops, synod sessions, and possible projects that you could be running.
The problem is that if you chase these possibilities, you’ll be left with a ministry that is a mile wide, but only an inch deep. You’ll look busy. You’ll feel busy. But you won’t be doing something that is going to matter in the long term.
If long term, meaningful impact in your goal, you’ve got to focus.
In this, I’ve been inspired by the example of the Archdiocese of Brisbane. Several years ago, the Brisbane team felt spread thin supporting youth ministry across their 103 parishes. They decided to pilot a new model, focused on establishing 5 thriving youth ministries in 5 parishes over 5 years. Four years into the project, they’ve successful launched three thriving weekly youth ministries.
2. You’ve Got to Involve the Secondary Schools
Imagine how much easier it would be to engage young people if you had access to literally thousands of them, 30 hours a week, Monday – Friday. The Catholic Church does. They’re in our secondary schools.
If our youth ministry efforts focus solely on a parish, we’re going to engage with the 10-20 young people who are actually at mass on Sunday. But if we expand our ministry to include the local Catholic secondary school, suddenly we’ve got access to 500+ young people.
When I tell my friends who are Evangelical youth pastors about this, they can’t believe the advantage we have.
With this in mind, if a parish has a paid youth minister, that youth minister should be spending some of his or her week at the local Catholic secondary school. If your schools need help running student retreats, it’s worth supporting that. And when you’re running a diocesan youth event, it’s worth taking the time to get buy-in from secondary school staff.
3. Accompaniment is Essential
“[W]e need a church capable of walking at people's side… a church that accompanies them on their journey.” This was Pope Francis’s exhortation to the bishop of Brazil at World Youth Day 2013.
This “walking at people’s side” has a name, it’s called accompaniment. It’s not about a particular program or resource. It’s about relationship. Just as Jesus formed deep relationships walking alongside his disciples, we are called to do the same.
But it’s easy to lose sight of this in youth ministry, and ‘high performing’ youth ministries are often the worst culprits.
We create these youth events filled with high-energy games, engaging talks, and powerful prayer experiences. But to fit everything else in, small groups can only go for 10 minutes. Catching up with people is limited to the start and end of the event, but your team probably busy setting up or packing down.
Jesus never ran a high-octane youth event (I’m sure the Gospel of John would have recorded it). But he did show us that forming relationships was at the heart of effective ministry. If we want to do ministry that works, we have to make time for accompaniment.
4. Youth Ministers Need to be Paid
For a youth ministry to work, it needs to be sustainable. Sustainable in the sense that (1) it will continue over a long period of time, even if the coordinator changes, and sustainable in the sense that (2) it doesn’t burn out the person running it.
The best foundation for this sustainability is a paid role.
Paying youth ministers accomplishes several things:
1) it recognises and appropriately values their hard work,
2) it means they don’t have to work another job (or at least work as many hours at their other job) to meet their living expenses, and
3) it provides greater stability, by retaining the youth minister for a longer period of time and making it easier to find a replacement when they do move on.
A paid youth ministry role is no small commitment for most parishes. It often requires fundraising, financial planning, and new organisational structures. Not to mention a culture shift around the perceived value of youth ministry.
At a diocesan level, you can support the creation of paid youth ministry roles in a couple of ways. One is to provide resources that help parishes with hiring a youth ministry, such as this excellent resource from the Archdiocese of Melbourne.
Another is to explore creative funding arrangements, such as a diocesan subsidy and/or a cost-sharing arrangement between a parish and a local secondary school.
5. Local Community Buy-In Will Make or Break Your Ministry
You might have the best ministry strategy in the world, but if you don’t have local buy-in, you’re going to be rolling a boulder uphill.
If you’re planning something at a parish, ask yourself: Is the parish priest onboard? Are parents supportive? Can they help you cast the vision to the wider parish?
If you’re doing something at a school: Do you have the principal’s support? What about the head of campus ministry? Do the wider school staff understand what you’re doing?
If the answer is “no,” then stop. Do not pass go. Do not collect a series of disappointing ministry failures.
Achieving community buy-in requires slowing down. You need to take time to listen, share your vision, listen again, make adjustments based the feedback you get (yes, even if you’re sure the original plan is flawless), listen again and ask for people’s support.
It’s messy. But your ministry won’t succeed without it.
Effective Ministry Starts Here
What effective ministry looks like will be different in different dioceses. It will change based on the unique opportunities and challenges of your context. But what will stay the same are the principles.
These are the 5 that have emerged from more than a decade of our own successes and failures. They’ve been identified in case studies of successes from around the world. They’ve been tested in promising new ministry pilots.
If you want to do Catholic youth ministry that works, start here.