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!
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!
No comments:
Post a Comment