Rubberneckin'

The Chicago Blackhawks have become the hottest ticket in town. The Bulls still are a big draw, and the Bears only host eight regular season games a year (and not playoff games coming anytime soon) making them a perennial draw. Meanwhile, the Cubs are surging, and Sox fans continue to be passionate about their team but not as much about putting their butts in the seats.

When the ice is exposed at the Madhouse on Madison, every seat is filled, and extra fans are ringed around top of the arena, angling for a half-decent sight line from their standing room only pens. Tickets easily resell for 1.5-2x their original value (or more) for most regular season games, let alone the markups on playoff games for a team with three cups in six years. Chicago wants to be in that crazy crowded loud building to go crazy together.

I'm not sure if it's just human, or a majorly American thing, but we are attracted to a crowd. If two bars are on the same street when we're going out, most of us probably pick the more crowded one. If we walk past some commotion on the road or drive past a big group of people, we slow down and crane our necks to get a glimpse of what's going on.

These kinds of social realities are bearing down on the Church. As parishes engage with varying levels of Church attendance and parish involvement, it's hard for the Church to be able to play on this social tendency. It's hard to make a church appear to be like a hoppin' bar or a trendy restaurant or an eye-catching street performance, which is fine since I'm not sure that's what we should be trying to do anyway.

The pope's visit was helpful for this, because he drew such massive crowds and pervasive attention. However, as the honeymoon glow wears off, we're back to combating reductive headlines about intolerance of civilly remarried Catholics and grappling with tight budgets and parish/school closings. And trying as always to engage Catholics in Sunday Mass, regular Sacraments, and the chewy, sweet center of all the goodies in between.

These realities hit home for me in my job, where I work in a unique PreK-12 school. Our parish is pretty dynamic, and our early childhood and elementary schools are sturdy. However, our high school classes have just 30-40 kids each, and recruitment is a steeply uphill battle. As families compete for spots in Chicago's selective enrollment public high schools and strive for acceptance into the city's elite Catholic schools, we are left to sift through a dog-eat-dog landscape to find families that match well with us.

We can pitch our strengths - a small student body with excellent student-to-teacher ratio and great individual attention including small-group advisories, pervasive opportunity to be involved in clubs, sports, and extracurriculars with less students competing to climb over each other, a protege program to jump-start students' professional development, and ties into a parish that creates unique spiritual and resource opportunities. Couple this with the Campus Ministry I'm trying to jump-start, and we can offer some seriously intriguing things.

But we can't boast the curriculum portfolio of our competition, the college acceptance catalogues, the massive, constantly renovated campuses, the ginormous staffs, and more. Where these schools can draw a crowd and entice the masses, we are scratching and clawing to catch a glimpse from passersby.

It's tough to have a school-wide staff invest so much preparation in time, energy, and resources into recruitment at such a challenging rate and to see mixed results, but it challenges me to consider my motivations, especially with the students who are already here.

As I tried to create a new service and ministry team, I had one student come to the first meeting and four come to the second. I had to face up to facts: at my previous schools, getting 25 kids to something equalled 5% of the student body whereas here that's 20%. I have to recommit to quality over quantity, to relationship establishing and building. I have to zoom in from the big, exciting, flashy work to build a small core that can start to ripple out through the pond of our community.

I can't worry so much about numbers and percentage impact. I have to take the student or students who show up, who express interest, who make an initial effort, and find ways to utilize their interest and passion to give them something that engages their spirituality.

In my first months at my previous job, I struggled with the tension between trying to learn lots of names and get myself out there on a wide scale with the different approach of focusing on a core few. After a few months, I knew that it had to start somewhere and that I didn't have to feel guilty about connecting more strongly with the first few students who were starting to warm up to ministry.

Quicker than I realized, that core grew and grew until both goals were really being realized at once. From that handful of students who dove in first, the momentum snowballed and catalyzed the growth I hoped for as interest grew and grew.

As always, the grace comes in surrender. Goals and motivations are important, but they can't blur the focus on the end result. Fun and gratifying (and effective) as it is to build big groups of students, to do frequent service trips, to ramp up student leadership and formation involvement, it all is ultimately about establishing relationships that foster trust and develop gifts and passions. I have to focus on connecting with teens such that my involving them more in Christ helps them become more positively disposed to their faith and its potential to positively impact their lives.

It's so tempting to calculate my batting average on stuff, to percentage out success rates, to count the successes. I'd love to have a great minister's baseball card full of gaudy stats that would put me in the Hall of Fame on the first ballot.

Time to eat the humble pie, put the thoughts in perspective, and worry less about having the sold out arena, the crowded bar, or the flashy performance. I gotta just keep getting to know people whenever I have the chance, which is ultimately gonna be harder. Time to complain a little bit, think and pray through it, and try again.