Young Adult Ministry, A Pastor's Take

YOUNG ADULT MINISTRY
A PASTOR’S TAKE

DANIEL DANIELSON

Editor’s note: The Fifth Cardinal Bernardin Conference, in March 9-11, 2001, chose to address young adults in the church because the issue is so vital, even though the problem is not really polarization, the usual focus of the Initiative.

Young Adult Ministry has been an area of concern to me for the past few years, though I confess that I had given it little conscious attention before reading some recent Generation X materials. And so, when I was invited to take part in the Catholic Common Ground Initiative’s Conference in Mundelein, Illinois, I was excited and hopeful.

As a pastor of a large suburban parish of 4700 households on the West Coast, it troubles me that so many of my faithful, church-going, involved parishioners speak painfully of their children who no longer go to church, “though they are good people.” Parents ask themselves “what did we do wrong?” And as a pastor, I ask myself, “what did we do wrong?” and “what can we do about this?”

For many years, I have been keenly focused on moving from a “maintenance” church institution to an evangelizing one. But I realize that in the parish, we haven’t really paid much attention to young adults until they come to prepare for marriage or the baptism of their first child.

A NEW SITUATION

Now studies show that fifty percent of young adult Catholics are marrying someone from a different faith or no faith. Forty-two percent of them are not marrying according to the rites of the Catholic Church at all. But in my experience of the rest, many are attractive and reasonably open young people who are willing to approach the church and even listen to its teaching in their preparation for marriage and family life. What courage it must take for the typical young couple to come to the parish office to meet with the priest when they haven’t been to church since last Christmas, have been living together for two years, are not registered in the parish, are using artificial birth-control, and don’t know the aged priest from the county supervisor! Yet, I have found it a joy to work with these young couples. I have found them open to looking deeper, willing to change some old habits, at least on an experimental basis, and quite open to a relationship, even with an old priest.

As a sidelight, I’ve found that some of our young adults who choose to marry outside the church have never been told the significance of being married according to the rites of the Catholic Church. Being married “in the church” is often interpreted as nothing more than “in the church building.” It is not surprising that with this minimalist understanding, some opt for a rose garden instead.

My readings on Generation X (those in their twenties and thirties) helped to clarify my experience. In general, they are high on relationships and low on institutions. They, along with many other people in the United States, don’t identify much with the church as an institution. Rather, they find meaning in this particular parish, this particular sub-group within the parish, this particular ministry group, this group of friends who worship at the same church, often at the same Mass.

They fairly easily drop out of a parish that doesn’t satisfy their needs. “Business as usual” parishes do not attract them. They move quite easily from one denomination to another if the new denomination’s church has programs—childcare, outreach, welcome.

A STRUGGLE TO UNDERSTAND

For me personally, such a casual relationship to the Catholic Church is beyond imagination. I could no more move from denomination to denomination than I could move from family to family. I am aware of the faults of my family, but I am committed to them and they are committed to me. I feel the same way about the church. I am aware of its faults, among them racism, authoritarianism, sexism. But I love this church, am committed to it, would never leave it, because through it, in spite of it all, I have come to know the Lord of all history, the God who loves me into being through the Lord Jesus Christ.

So I struggle to understand those who do not experience the mystery of God in the midst of this human, weak, sinful institution. Some at the conference expressed this as struggling to find the diamond buried in a pile of manure. They asked, “Just how much manure must a person be willing to shovel in order to find the diamond?”

So, as the pastor of a large parish, I struggle with how to put a greater emphasis on relationships and dialogue than on institution and programs. In general, young adults need and deserve small group experiences in which they can look together at how their lives and their faith interact. How can I create a place where they can ask questions and discuss issues?

In a postmodern world, in which the knowability of Truth is everywhere challenged, young adults who will not receive Truth if it is proclaimed unilaterally and heavy-handedly, can at least partially attain to it in conversation with other people.

“BRIE AND BIBLE”

One answer I’ve found is in an adult confirmation preparation program that we offer every year. Each summer we announce in the bulletin and send every registered parishioner who is out of high school, Catholic and not yet confirmed, as sorted out from our computerized census, an invitaton to complete their Sacraments of Initiation. Usually about fifteen to twenty respond, most of them young adults. The group meets once a week and is led through a process that addresses their personal experience and faith issues in the light of the tradition of the church. They have a retreat together and they are confirmed at the Easter Vigil. Frequently they form a more permanent small Christian community to continue their faith-sharing after confirmation.

The small groups might well be titled “Brie and Bible” as those are the elements that characterize their coming together. One of our associate pastors runs this group with a team of young adults. It is a model that has worked for many years.

But how to stimulate this dialogue on a broader level troubles me. There are not enough priests or staff members to be personally available to enter into relationships with the young adult members of the community. Somehow it has to be young adults themselves who do this. This is an extraordinarily labor-intensive ministry and I don’t have those readily available ministers at my fingertips—at least not yet.

INTERGENERATIONAL DIALOGUE

How can I stimulate other forms of intergenerational dialogue, where we listen, share, and don’t judge each other? Some of our permanent small Christian communities have a cross-section of age groups, but most groups do better with like-to-like faith-sharing groups and go there instinctively.

This generation is so caught up in their careers, working long hours and, at least up until recently, reaping the financial rewards of a flourishing economy, where do they get time to reflect on the deeper questions of life? With our young marriages, both people work. They try to get household responsibilities met on Saturdays and weekends and have little time left over for prayer groups or adult education sessions.

BEGIN WITH THEIR DESIRES

And yet many of them desire to explore the connection between their work, their lives and their spirituality. They want a “safe place” to consider the ethical dilemmas in their workplaces. While some are caught up in the consumer culture of American society, accumulating more and more toys, others are dedicated to justice in our world, reaching out to those in need if the opportunity is presented to them. Individually many young adults are connected to the outreach efforts of our parish, but the challenge is to facilitate their identity as a group and then offer them the opportunities that are available for hands-on outreach.

How do I provide hands-on experience of social justice, not just second collections for good causes? I invite parishioners on field trips to St. Mary’s Interfaith Dining Room in Stockton (a neighboring diocese). The director there is my friend of forty years and the program is the major outreach in the Central Valley of California.

Although our parish has supported it in all kinds of ways for several years, the creativity of the parishioners only comes alive when people actually get a chance to visit the dental and medical clinic, the food pantry, the dining room itself, the clothes exchange area, and the school for the children of migrant laborers.

The ways our parishioners have begun to interact with the various parts of that program hold great promise for the future. Exposure, participating, hands-on—that’s where it’s at, I’m convinced. Many of our young people journey to Tijuana each year to build a house or a community meeting place for people in the hill country there. They are changed by the experience.

FEELING JUDGED BY US

Many young adults at the conference felt implicitly judged by the older generations in the church. They tended to see us as concerned about preserving the church as we know it, passing on the faith as we have received it, keeping the church as an institution alive and well. We don’t look enough, they say, at the quality of their lives, their dedication to social justice, their openness to spirituality, their search for anchors and heroic witnesses who can show them what it is like to follow Christ and to have a personal relationship with Him. So I ask myself—what about providing retreats and other rich prayer experiences to these parishioners? We do that now on two weekends each year and seasonally in the parish itself.

How do I make the heroic witness of so many of our Catholics, present and past, alive and real in our parish life? Films and videos have helped here and we have a lending library of these resources, but more needs to be done by having people come and share their witness.

DISCIPLESHIP AND KNOWLEDGE

At the conference, many young adults also said that they don’t know what we believe as church. This was something of a shock to me. I did not realize that the results of our religious formation were so poor. Others say, “so what, whether I know dogmas as long as I live a good Christian life of service?” But the search for Truth is critical. On what basis do I live a Christian life if I don’t know what the church believes about Christ, about baptism, about the Eucharist?

I realize that my generation of Vatican II Catholics has probably gone overboard in our teaching of religion as faith formation as we have moved away from accountability for clear teaching and knowledge in favor of catching a spirit of what it means to be a follower of Jesus. I guess I’d have to say now, “we’d better do both.”

One of the things that this has led me to do is to review every year of our Faith Formation Program (1556 students pre-school through high school, with six full-time staff people and two full-time secretaries). We have instituted a core curriculum so we can be sure that the foundational teachings of Catholic faith have been studied before a person leaves our program.

We have clarified what knowledge the student is expected to have at the conclusion of each year, and we examine them and their teachers on that content. I have left it up to the teachers together with our salaried staff coordinator for each area to determine the method for this examination. In some cases it is a written report. In others, a personal interview with each student. We keep our classes small, about 12, so this can be done. They cannot get through just on collage 101!

Those who have been through the Adult Confirmation process invite their friends to experience the same thing. Those who have enjoyed the music and participation, the open spirit of the 6:30 p.m. Sunday evening liturgy, invite their friends to come with them one evening.

HOSPITALITY IS ONE KEY

I have seen this as the most effective form of evangelizing young adults. We have to have something for them to come to, but someone of their own group has to do the inviting and come with them. Helping our young adults who are active in the parish to grow in this awareness is a key part of my role, I feel.

Hospitality involves the quality of our worship and our liturgy as well. Is the community alive? The hunger for community is very real in their lives. Is the preaching relevant, bringing the Word of God to reflect on the real situations of people’s lives, including young adult lives? I can’t do this unless I have some young adults who share their lives with me, let me into their issues, their questionings. My younger associate pastors help to tune me into this area as well.

Is the music alive? Are the instruments contemporary? Are the ministries open or are those positions occupied exclusively by members of the Holy Name Society?

OUTREACH ONLINE

Outreach also involves having a parish that is on-line, where people who are more comfortable with electronic media than former generations can look up something on the parish web page, ask questions and get honest responses. It means having someone to keep the page up-to-date. It means that I have to regularly check the comments and question section and respond in a timely manner to the concerns and questions raised. I didn’t realize that I would be getting questions from all over the world!

I now realize that this is one of the ways in which we express our desire to reach out to the communiy and to respect their way of communicating. The young adults in the parish have patiently taught me this and helped me set it all up, though I was all but computer illiterate and somewhat resistant at first.

Young adult ministers are very rare. We have hired a part time person for our three-parish deanery to work at coordinating young adult ministry. How do I judge the success of this effort? How do I know how far to expand it? What about the parish level? Where would I find the right person for this position? How do they need to be trained? There are very few young adult ministers even at the level of the diocese. Young adult ministry, I realize, is much more diverse and complicated than is youth ministry. We cannot do ministry “for” them or “to” them; we need rather to facilitate ministry “with” them. Young adults are not in any one place. They are away at college except during the summer; they are at community colleges; they are beginning careers; they are newly married and/or newly divorced.

They are single and perhaps will be single all their lives. They are white collar and blue collar, gay and straight, multi-ethnic. Many are well-educated with a good critical intelligence. I wrestle with what kind of person to look for to help facilitate these different young adults’ getting together in various kinds of subgroups, to help us as a community learn how to be more welcoming and hospitable.

Some people see young adults today as tending toward conservatism in church and in politics. I have come to realize that young adults are not, by and large, conservative on everything, nor do they want to return to a pre-Vatican II church. More often they are looking for anchors in their fluid, chaotic world. Things that are “old,” that have stood the test of time, tend to appear as anchors. Some pre-Vatican II devotions such as Stations of the Cross, Eucharistic Adoration, Benediction, have an appeal to some young adults, but they seem to carry different meanings for this generation. We need to explore these meanings before judging them.

REACHING ACROSS CULTURE

I know from my reading that young adults seek and express much of their spiritual quest through modern culture—music, films, television programs. Tom Beaudoin has helped me see that reality in his excellent book Virtual Faith. But, personally, I struggle with this. Some of that culture is simply unintelligible to me.

So I ask, is it realistic to expect myself to change, to grow to the point where I appreciate pop culture? Probably not. But I can find people who do, and I can encourage them, validate their efforts, and provide them a forum for such discussions.

As a priest, I have dedicated my life to helping the post-Vatican II church flourish. I have seen the initial excitement of such an undertaking give way to the so-called “restorationist” reactions. I have seen priestly vocations wane and the number of ordained workers in the vineyard decrease; but I have also seen lay ministry flourish and parishioners assume their rightful place in the life of the local church. I have sometimes mistaken means for ends. I have probably gone too far in some directions, but through it all, the constant is the brilliant diamond of God’s love in Christ at the heart of it all.

To be in relationship with Christ is what it’s all about. And I want to share the experience of that “Good News” with everyone. I want our young adults, so talented, gifted and full of promise, to discover that diamond, appreciate its multi-faceted diversity, and experience the presence and power of that eternal love.

Rev. Daniel Danielson is the pastor of St. Augustine Church and St. Elizabeth Seton Mission in Pleasanton, California.

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