Bigger than Ourselves Ch. 3: Embracing an Accompaniment Paradigm

by Dan Masterton

Ministry – and really, faith itself – is largely about giving love as gift. The planning and preparation and administration and leadership a minister brings to the work has to be done with unconditional love, offered to individual people and to a community as a complete gift.

Yet, numbers and head counts cannot be totally ignored. Especially when humanpower and financial resources are often scarce, there has to be some intentionality about how time and money are spent. It’s ok to give new ideas a pilot runway and try them out over a trial period of time, even if quantity or quality of engagement starts off quite low. But eventually, tough decisions have to be made, which sometimes includes opting to end a project, to pivot to different ideas or priorities, or to try a different strategy or approach.

So ministry is often about juggling the pure charity of love with the cruel realities of pragmatism.

When it comes to ministry with youth and young adults, I think many segments of the Church need to confront a difficult truth: the reservoir of loyal, committed families who simply show up to everything is drying up, and in some cases is already emptied. In parishes, the core families who regularly come to Mass, who consistently re-register their kids for religious ed, and whose parents volunteer as catechists and support staff are often not as numerous as they may have formerly been. In schools, the amount of students from families who have perennially practiced their faith in stable parish belonging and raised their kids with steady faith formation is dwindling, and often the pool of kids interested in ministry, service, and Christian leadership is then also smaller. We are now rarely operating from a pre-existing high baseline of engagement.

But we shouldn’t confuse this with the death of faith or of the Church. Even if belonging, engagement, and other metrics of faith life are down, a human desire to be spiritually engaged and fed, and to be a part of something bigger than one’s self, surely remains. Instead of being fatalistic, we have to acknowledge the need for a greater paradigm shift. We have to stop expecting turnout for ready-made, copy-paste events and shift our planning-and-preparation energy to what I’ll call “retail ministry.”

Pardon the cheap phrasing, but it comes from a parallel that I see to political campaigns. Consider candidates for office: imagine them in small-towns going table to table at coffee shops and diners, at senior living facilities and VFW halls, “buying” votes through one-on-one and small-group conversations, fifteen minutes at a time, day-in and day-out over the course of a long campaign. Catholic ministers need to embrace this grassroots, relationship-building mindset and bust out of office-based, calendar-driven, programmatic, bulletin-ad-running, announcement-at-Mass ministries. These things can still continue in a reduced, complementary role, but people who are paid to shepherd Catholic ministries professionally need to structure their time to allocate a greater proportion to retail ministry.

This will mean more home visits, calling parents or young adults and asking if you can pop by with an appetizer to share or resources to drop off and explain in person. This will mean more coffee chats, meeting out at a cafe or setting up a coffee bar in a room at the rectory or school where you can host parents and young adults (or even teens!) for friendly conversations. This will mean checking in with young adults at college campuses within day-trip range, maybe loading up a car with a priest, a DRE, and a youth leader to go see your young people in their element for a day (and maybe share a meal or Mass with them there!).

And from there, it will mean slowly developing programming such as faith formation, shared prayer, or social fellowship around the ideas, the gifts, the passions, the interests, and the explicit ideas of these people. It means building relationships where your conversations with them reveal the ways in which they want to be fed, the ways they want to serve or lead, the ways they want to belong and be formed. Surely, you may have to redirect or adjust an idea to make it more substantial or relevant, but the efficacy could be totally different when it starts with them.

The longer we hang on to dated mindsets – planning things on our own and doggedly pursuing low-yield advertising strategies that struggle to engage people passively – the longer we’ll struggle without progress in engaging more youth, young adults, and families.

In Chapter 3, Hope pulls herself back from the cusp of burnout by deciding to take a rest, study the society in which she seeks to minister, and rebuild an approach that can renew her, renew her ministry, and better serve the young people she feels vocationally meant to serve.

In these regards, I struggle with the part-time work I do around being a mostly stay-at-home parent. My job was intentionally structured to saddle me with as much office-based support work as possible to free up our full-time active professed religious to do more quality and quantity of pastoral ministry for youth, young adults, and discerners of religious life. I’m hoping that my future full-time roles in Catholic ministry will be opportunities for me to call my own bluff and attempt this sort of focus in my own work. In the meantime, I hope it can be an invitation to reevaluation for those of you in the vineyard full-time now!

Bigger than Ourselves Ch. 2: Working with Kids, Especially the Ones up for Grabs

by Dan Masterton

Working with young people is rarely dry or dull.

They are in such a time of growth and self-discovery that they are frequently changing, sometimes drastically, but more often in small, incremental ways. You have to do your best to judge their character and invite them to grow, to be good and do good. And you have to try to discern where each of them are at, all along a wide range from immaturity and to wisdom – a practice that will often humble you by showing you things you missed or misunderstood in them.

Even as they let you down and/or confirm your best hopes, you have to above all give them opportunities. You have to identify gifts and passions – in both the immature and the wise – and bring them to opportunities to share their best traits and serve others. Often, ministers find ourselves leaning on the “good ones,” perhaps taking advantage of their reliability, their responsiveness, their desire to make adults proud of them; often, ministers find ourselves bemoaning, chasing, and scolding the “tough ones,” perhaps playing into tragic scripts they’re trying to write. And even as ministers have to check themselves on both ends of this spectrum, there exists also a sizable middle group.

These kids in the middle may have neither discipline problems nor model behavior, may not have academic struggles nor intellectual excellence, and may not have poor judgment nor blossoming faith. Often, they’re just quiet, understated, largely average kiddos just doing their thing. And these can frequently be the kids who get overlooked, underutilized, and even forgotten. Often, all while being susceptible to negative influences if they get there before positive ones do.

One of the most complex yet fruitful processes I was ever a part of in my pastoral ministries was assembling a Kairos retreat leadership team. Whereas one-day retreats are often just a group of plucky volunteer students with a morsel of training, most schools (mine included) use the multi-night Kairos as a chance to do intensive faith formation and student leadership training with young people.

On the one hand, you need some kids with preexisting competencies that you can really hone and shape; on the other hand, you want to take a chance on some kids who maybe have an emerging gift or passion and use the intensive process to give them a lot of close attention that can help them grow in awesome ways.

You get and read written applications. You interview the kids individually. You talk to teachers, support staff, and admins about them. You get in greater depth with counselors about the bits they can share about the students. You try to build a hearty portrait of each one.

And then you attempt to build a balanced team with diversity in many different respects. And you hope you’ve hit upon a vocational moment that the Holy Spirit will nourish as each kid is formed to lead by serving.

All of this is to say: there are tons of layers to young people, especially when it comes to engaging their faith. Teens have so much to navigate, both in their social surroundings and within themselves. It can be a bit of a crap shoot for ministers to be effective companions, and we’re simply called to fidelity – to a good-faith best effort that prioritizes the young person and their growth. This means striving to offer consistent invitation to service and faith formation, encouragement to be in strong community settings (like retreat teams, service groups, liturgical ministries, and more), and trying to facilitate healthy, faith-forward relationships with both adult faith figures and with peers.

In Chapter 2, Madison is a kid up for grabs. Cristina is a kid seeking deeper faith and trying to bring others with her. Katy and Eileen and turning away and trying to bring others with them. And Ms. Hope is calmly watching to see what she might be able to do.

In my ministry, I hope to help young people reach a few milestones: (1) engage with matters of faith authentically, (2) develop a desire to be a part of something communal and bigger than themselves and contribute to charity and justice in our world, and (3) to thoughtfully ask and explore challenging theological, social, and spiritual questions. Hopefully, this would lead them to belief and belonging, hopefully rooted in the Church, but often, that’s not something teens are quite ready for. These three earlier targets were the stepping stones we tried to trod.