A Call to Action

We want to achieve Youth Ministry greatness. Not in a comparative way, or even so much in a quantitative way. Rather, we want to envision and embody the youth ministry which the Church needs, and which will bring souls to Christ and cement them there as life-long disciples. This is certainly a unique charism, one which bears more in common with the first missionaries to China and America than it does to recent pastoral practice. We are waging war against the rotting culture of this world, evangelizing souls who have never heard the gospel meaningfully preached, setting out into the deep to redeem the practices of the contemporary western world in order to bring souls out of darkness and show them the piercing and powerful light.

We must be willing and able to risk our very selves. Paraphrasing Augustine, our shared Christianity brings salvation, but our role as ministers brings danger. Whether it is from false accusations of the most insidious kind, angry parents who wish leisure and vague happiness for their children even to the despising of Truth, churches or pastors or co-ministers who do not understand and value youth ministry or ministry at all, or even the attacks of the enemy of human kind; we are vulnerable to fearing failure and being discouraged in our mission. Yet it is ours. God has called and claimed us to serve Him in his teenagers and adolescents. He has called us to engage Him in smelly locker rooms, among pimples and gossip, amidst so much fear of failure, fear of being different, fear of being unloved and outcast. These are our poorest of the poor.

And yet, there is so much we have to offer this generation. God, who is the Fountain of Mercy and Ocean of Love has so much to give and Be for these teens! We must show them, unleash the full power of God’s message and the full power of the Rites of the Church for them! We must show them how to drink freely and without reservation from that great reserve of Love that God is for us. What a wonderful task we were created for! Much more than chaperones, we are witnesses, windows, other Christs which must shine forth His light into the darkest, most personal, closed-off corners of the lives of young people. We must become less and less our flawed selves so that the beauty, goodness, holiness, and truth of Christ’s love can shine forth through us and transform the very lives and being of those whom we are pleased to serve!

Imagine what tasks we have in store for us. How do we show a teenage boy with an absent father what God’s love looks like? How do we show a teenage girl who regrets her flawed relationships and the loss of her virginity that Christ makes all things new? How do we make a Freshman feel as if they belong on their very first day, and a senior know that they always have a home in the Church? How do we show the confused teenager that her path to the convent is so clear if she has the strength to choose it; or the young man who struggles to accept God’s will because his capacity for sacrifice seems so incapable? How do we build up young men and women for others, rooted in the true Man for Others Christ Jesus? These are our daily tasks. How do we minister to those whom are placed before us? How do we serve God in these brothers and sisters?

And what’s more, these tasks place a question back onto us: how are we to be worthy to be as Christ to these young people? How do we polish the glass through which they access the Lord? How do we pray sincerely to be less and less and Christ more and more? “Fools! Leave those worldly things which shackle the heart—and very often degrade it—leave all that and come with us in search of Love!” - St. Josemaria Escriva. Lay down your sword at the altar. Offer up your very heart, soul, mind, and strength to the Lord. He will provide. He will lift you up, strengthen you, create you, breathe into you, animate you, speak through you, intercede for you, love through you. Make yourself an instrument in the hands of the surgeon, a tool in the hand of the carpenter, a paintbrush in the hand or the artist and creator of Heaven and Earth! He will do nothing but make greatness and great art with you. But you must obey. You must submit.

God will write straight lines on the hearts of the youth we serve, write straight lines even with our crooked selves, if we let Him have us. But we must let Him work. And when we let His will move us, we will create a revolution unlike any have ever seen. We will plant seeds that produce fruit far beyond our years and comprehension. We will pile wood and tinder and start fires which blaze so long beyond our lives and beyond our wildest dreams and imaginations. We will love into existence with a love that resounds until the end of the age. We will do great things, if we let God do them through us. Will we say yes to the Lord?