The Genealogy of Ministry

Early last year, as I tried to decipher how I'd start creating a high school campus ministry from the ground up, I had it in my head that I wanted to create an immersion trip.

I used to work at a high school in Southern California that made several immersions a year to East Los Angeles. Centered on the home base of Dolores Mission in Boyle Heights, the trips involved a lot of experiential learning. Students were given first-hand exposure to rough neighborhoods, the realities of life on the margins, and the people that navigated these realities.

My experience on this immersion gave me some basic genetics to work with that I knew I wanted to keep: visiting a Catholic university for a tour and exposure to collegiate ministry, touring a vulnerable area through the eyes of the marginalized, learning about gang intervention (for East LA, we did so at Homebody Industries), serving and eating with marginalized people, and staying in simple lodging near our immersion sites and not our school.

Thanks to my friends and colleagues at this school, I was able to rundown some of these things with them and get their input on what to watch for as I constructed our trip. They encouraged me to not overpack the schedule with appointments. Leave time for kids to invent their own fun between more structured activities. Intersect faith with action. Activity to the point of exhaustion and reflection at day's end to process it all. Add in more insight from my brother and a Brother, and I was off.

With their wisdom in hand, I set out to navigate the waters of ministry. Those in the business, commercial, and industrial worlds rely heavily on networking: conversations, meetings, and business card exchanges that help companies connect, do business, and mutually support each other. I work in the Church. And we call this ministry.

Our Church is universal. Everyone scattered all throughout our messy network of faith is centered on their pastor, who's centered on his bishop, who's centered on the pope, who's centered on Christ. And when it comes to firing up ministry, you bet I tap this network.

I started with some new friends. Before I was Campus Minister at my current school, I was also offered a job by St. Xavier University. After copious deliberation, I chose to come to the high school, but my almost-boss and I agreed that it would be disappointing if we never found a way to work together anyway. So here was our chance: I wanted my students to visit a Catholic university, do a tour, and converse with college students who were doing something to live their faith and be active in Campus Ministry. My almost-boss and some of his ministry staff worked with me to setup a pizza lunch-and-conversation and sign us up for a campus tour. Boom. We're off.

I next decided to go off my hit list a little to try a home connection. My alma mater high school's annual Lenten Campaign once led us to raise thousands for the Mercy Home for Boys and Girls. As the Student Ministry Team co-chair, I got to deliver the check with several team members and tour the facility. My brother reminded me that the president was an alumnus of our high school, so I walked down this path. After a few emails, a conference call with him and some of his administrators, I matched up with a woman who directs the post-grad volunteers and mentoring program for their at-risk youth. She agreed to host my students for lunch, do an info session/Q&A, and walk them around the facility.

Now, whereas the California kids toured Skid Row with a social worker, I had to be creative as Chicago (thank God) does not have such a profoundly concentrated area of homeless (well, nowhere does). My brother had suggested I look into The Night Ministry, an organization with tons of outreaches to the marginalized of Chicago. I was fascinated by their "Night Walk," an urban immersion exercise in which participants learn about and discuss the realities and facts of homelessness, simulate homelessness themselves, and then share their experience. Despite tight schedules and last-minute issues, a long-time administrator dusted off his Night Walk skills and went out on a limb to lead us in our first Night Walk, though he hadn't been out to do one in over a decade. And now I've learned how to lead students on this activity in which they have 45-60 minutes to explore a neighborhood and discern how and/or where they'll eat/make money, sleep, warmup, and go to the bathroom.

Unfortunately, not everything works out, nor should it. I had the hope of having my students interact not just with homeless/marginalized adults, but also children. I tried to make contact with Catholic junior high and high school administrators, but I struck out. A junior high principal declined my request respectfully, opting not to have my students pass through for the day or afternoon. Mercy Home also opted to decline contact with their youth. Concerns over a one-time visit are paramount with kids such as these who have trust and loyalty issues. Thus, we wouldn't get to spend time with at-risk youth.

Before I got too far, I knew we needed somewhere we could stay. Leaning again on old friends, I reached out to a Viatorian brother, one who used to work at my high school and had been in formation for religious life and now eventually for priesthood. Having connected with him at graduate school, it was an easy pitch. He secured permission from the pastor of St. Viator Parish, on the northwest side of the city, for us to sleep in meeting rooms above their parish/school gymnasium. As would become my tagline to the kids for the trip, it would be safe but not comfortable.

At this point, I needed to go off my beaten paths to create new relationships. Our itinerary still lacked a food bank and a soup kitchen, and I wanted one or both added so the kids would have a significant encounter in direct service with the marginalized.

I Googled my way to a Catholic Charities supper site that served dinner at the right time and on the right day for our schedule. After a few labored conversations with an elderly woman in the office, she secured us volunteer slots at the supper, and a group who would cook the dinner we'd serve (we couldn't cook since we'd be on the road). And as faith would have it, when we arrived, we discovered that the dinner was held in the same building that housed a Polish school run by the same order of sisters who operate a retirement home next door to our school and assisted with the supper.

The biggest leap of faith came with the parish food bank I found. I had spoken over the phone with a woman about our coming to help at this site that she coordinated. When I made my confirmation calls and emails in the preceding weeks, I got derailed here. When I got through to the woman, she told me, through some stifled emotion, that she had been let go and no longer worked at the parish. She referred me to a parish phone number and the pastor, neither of which proved fruitful for confirming out visit.

The day of the trip came, and I made a decision: it's a Catholic Church; it has a food bank; and they could probably always use some help; so we're just gonna show up. We drove down into the Manor Park neighborhood and rolled into the gravelly, grassy parking lot of the adjacent school, walked around the corner to the courtyard, and saw tables and boxes being arrayed. I walked up to some men who seemed to be in charge and introduced myself. With a big smile, a fellow named Preston greeted us and immediately gave us jobs to get working on. He and his volunteers were wonderfully gracious, welcoming, and genial. They didn't want us to leave at the end of a busy morning, and as Preston and I traded phone numbers and man-hugs, I knew we'd be back. We've now made five different visits, including once in the summer outside of any school-sacntioned trip, to assist the food bank distribution at St. Columbanus.

Unfortunately, the same couldn't be said for the soup kitchen. When we initially signed up, I had asked if the kids could eat with the families that came after they served them their dinner, or at least sit with them to talk. The site coordinator shot down this idea as intrusive, so we simply served and cleaned, leaving me a bit unsatisfied at the minimal interaction, and the implicit demarcation between the needy and those who came to serve. Our two visits there proved to be a bit rough and tumble, as we were mostly hired hands forced into particular duties and bossed around a bit. The focus was on cleaning and serving and not on encounter and relationship.

Before the third rendition of this immersion, I was frantic. This site already had volunteers for the day we'd be in town, and I needed a new place. After trying a handful of different places, ready to give up, a Franciscan Outreach center replied and said they'd take us, even though it'd be more help than they needed. We arrived late, stuck in rush hour traffic, and I worried that this would sour a not-yet-started relationship.

But we walked in to a grateful reception from young volunteers - the center was run by a community of post-grad volunteers, who took turns with the various tasks in organizing their nightly supper for the needy. The other adults who had signed up as volunteers for the meal were grateful to have an easier shift along side all of us and even got to happily leave early when we took on the brunt of the end-of-shift cleaning work. It was a great night of interacting not just with the hungry clients but also the Franciscan volunteers. They had a system that was easy to follow and enabled the servers to plug in with ease and focus on interacting with everyone. A new relationship was forged that endures still.

Another addition that came on after the inaugural outing came from our school chaplain. The trip was still without any contact with gang populations, or at-risk teenagers. He plugged me into members from his religious community who ran a center in one of the roughest Chicago neighborhoods where they gathered local youth to dialogue, express themselves, and hang out in a safe environment, off the streets. We made our first visit to the Precious Blood Ministry of Reconciliation, and found a new favorite site at which we could hear from people who overflowed with gratitude for their safe haven off the streets.

Not to be outdone, others continued to heap on more and more help. On our most recent service-learning immersion - The Margins #4 (we're up to 4 already!) - we got a bonus site. My contact at Mercy Home, when I confirmed the date for our trip with her, told me that the one and only Fr. Greg Boyle, SJ, of Homeboy Industries would be speaking at Dominican University of the west side of Chicago. Not only was this clutch in terms of timing and content (witness to gang intervention ministry and the epitome of solidarity), I knew the director of university ministry from grad school. I traded emails with him, and he helped secure us tickets to what proved to be a sold-out lecture. Because of the enterprise of a dear contact and the generosity of a new/old one, we got this beautiful bonus event thrown into the middle of our trip.

Sprinkle in visits to the University of Illinois-Chicago St. John Paul II Newman Center, Mass at Holy Name Cathedral, and other bits and pieces as schedules fluctuate from trip to trip. Add in the Catholic Social Teaching seminar I open the trip with to kickstart students' reflection on solidarity and serving with, not just for, and seeking relationship. And we have a heckuva service-immersion!

Yes, I am terribly guilty of humble-bragging. I am very proud of what we've (me and these first 29 students) built in these first four trips. It's quite a harbinger at a school that was seriously lacking in retreats and service in previous years, not for lack of faithful faculty/staff but for lack of someone dedicated to these things.

However, the main point of this isn't to celebrate my awesomeness. It's to celebrate the relative ease with which such a ridiculous endeavor can come together with a significant level of coherence and seamlessness.

Ironically, this most recent group of students loved to joke at me when things were missed. I carry a string bag full of their journals to pass them out when I'd like to stop and reflect, and one time, I was missing one (she had left hers in the car); another time, I couldn't find the second box of granola bars I had bought for our breakfast (I had never bought it), and I left the fruit snack boxes at school. In each of these cases, my students liked to groan, sarcastically, "Geez, Mr. Masterton, you only had ONE job! That was your ONLY job." They appreciated the organization and coherence of the trip, that they were just along for the ride and guided down such a path.

The beauty of the trip is that I was just the temporary pilot of a triple-7 jet, the humble captain of a cruise-ship. I just had to guide a familiar vessel down a path I could see ahead. All of these site contacts who made each piece fall into place were my air traffic controllers, my navigators. I radioed in my coordinates to them, and they guided me in. Like lighthouses and those goofy dudes on the tarmac with the neon sticks - they helped me steer my precious cargo (students' faith lives) in for a landing.

The end result of these trips is beautiful pictures of service in action, of friendships and community being discovered and strengthened, and of life-altering service-learning experience. But the genealogy, the pedigree of it all are the people who facilitated our visits. And all of them are united in Christ, by the reality that they live and work to serve Christ by serving others. All it took to tap into their service outreach was to share in their mission. Our desire to share their ministry was the only key needed to get in with them.

We got to join in with many amazing ministries already happening in Christ's name, so that we could alter our DNA a bit more to live Eucharistically. We sought to become more profoundly what and who we receive - Christ. By the help of these servants, we got to bring Christ to others, and we got to receive Christ from them.

To see more from these trips, visit the Bishop Noll Campus Ministry social media:
Facebook - Twitter or search #TheMargins - Instagram

Also, a map of our most recent trip's visits can be found here.