Teenagers from around the Archdiocese of Chicago spend time every summer getting away from home, not for rest and relaxation, but to help people in need and to focus on their relationship with Christ at the same time.
Youth ministers who have led such trips say they see the transformation in the young people they bring over just a few days, both as leaders on their service projects and in their faith.
“That is one of my favorite parts, looking at them from Monday morning to Friday afternoon,” said Elizabeth Kos, youth minister at St. Paul VI Parish in Riverside. “I have kids that maybe I’ve been warned about, and maybe that mischievous kid becomes a leader by the end. Maybe this is a place that they can shine.”
“As a youth minister, it’s really nice to see how their hearts change,” said Madeline James, youth minister at Our Lady of the Wayside Parish in Arlington Heights.
Her group, with a chaperone and a couple of teens from nearby St. Mary Parish in Buffalo Grove, went to Montague, Michigan, in the Diocese of Grand Rapids for a week in June.
One of the members of Our Lady of the Wayside’s Peer Ministry, LeAnn Carlson, 17, was on her fourth mission trip, she said. It’s something she looks forward to every summer.
“I love my mission trip,” Carlson said. “It’s different from the other kinds of camps you can go to. It combines my two favorite things, service and worship. It’s opened my mind and my heart to so many opportunities and experiences I’ve never had before.”
Carlson went on her first mission trip the summer after she finished eighth grade, she said.
“I wouldn’t say I was scared,” she said. “I was a little nervous about just the unknowns, of going to a new place and not knowing what to expect. But I wanted to keep growing in my faith and keep my faith in me.”
Since then, she’s invited several friends to come on the trip, she said.
“The ones I’ve asked have come multiple times now,” she said.
Parishes usually work with an organization that handles the logistics of the trip, including finding places where the teens can serve, a place for them to sleep and meals. Some also offer faith-based programming for the evenings.
Our Lady of the Wayside worked with Catholic HEART Workcamp, which sets up youth mission trips around the country, many of them in the Midwest. The group from Our Lady of the Wayside participated with groups from all over, sleeping on air mattresses at a local high school and then splitting up into teams at several service sites.
The teams then came together in the evenings for faith-based activities, including worship and devotion, but also games and fun.
“They’re doing daily Mass, adoration, confession,” James said. “Everyone is there to serve the Lord. The service gets them deeper in their faith. It helps them think about their own faith and why they are doing this.”
Carlson said that she often ends up tasked with painting during the workday, either for a homeowner who is unable to do it for themselves or for an organization that needs help, but teams of teens are assigned to different kinds of work.
Catholic HEART Workcamp allows participants to say what kind of work they are comfortable doing before they leave, explained Deacon John Sobol. Sobol works with GodSEND youth ministry, a combined effort of St. Elizabeth Seton Parish in Orland Hills and St. George Parish and St. Stephen, Deacon and Martyr parishes, Tinley Park.
Sobol was speaking from a water park where his group of 24 teenagers and six chaperones spent a free day at the end of their week of service in Waterloo, Iowa. Some of the teams in Waterloo did home repairs and maintenance, some did things like help in a St. Vincent de Paul thrift store and some moved furniture around for an organization that provides shelter to young pregnant women who have no place to stay.
Because each team includes teens from all of the groups participating during the week, Sobol’s youth group members got to meet peers from other places. By the end of the first day, they were working together and joking around like old friends.
Among Sobol’s favorite evening activities is on the last service day, when people who were helped come to talk to all the participants about how important their work is.
“It’s really how we are called to help one another regardless of anyone’s socioeconomic status. It’s how we are planting seeds of faith that will be harvested after we leave,” Sobol said. “We’re serving a ministry in our faith — faith in action is what I call it with the kids. We are not just preachers, we are doers. We are doers of Christ.”
Kos, from St. Paul VI Parish in Riverside, said her members also are attracted to service, and they especially enjoy the opportunity to learn new skills.
For the past four years, the group has worked with Appalachian Service Project, a Christian organization that welcomes youth groups from churches of many Christian denominations to its centers throughout Appalachia.
Projects there generally are repair and maintenance related, helping families who can no longer keep their homes up, often because they have encountered one crisis too many.
This year, 22 teens and 12 chaperones worked in Leslie County, Kentucky. The various teams replaced a metal roof, installed flooring and windows and hung and taped drywall.
“The idea of helping somebody by using your hands, changing somebody’s life by making sure the roof doesn’t leak or the windows aren’t drafty anymore — the kids realize that there are people living completely differently than how they live,” she said. “They go there and they expect to feel sorry for these families. They expect to feel, ‘Oh, poor you.’ But all of these families are so proud of their homes. A lot of them have built their homes themselves.”
It helps, she said, that the teens spend a week with the families, eating lunch with them and working alongside them, sometimes playing with the children.
Sometimes, Kos said, in a rural area with a Catholic population of 1% to 3%, people are curious about their faith, or what it’s like to live in an urban area.
“We’ve had people say, ‘I’ve never met anyone Catholic, and I’ve never been in a city bigger than Lexington,’” Kos said.
Because the service organization is ecumenical, sometimes members of the youth group talk about their faith with teens from other Christian churches as well, Kos said. This year, Father Tim Berryhill, associate pastor at St. Paul VI, traveled with the group and celebrated daily Mass, and some of the teens from other groups attended to see what Mass was like.
“It’s good for the kids to hear about how different people live, to learn about different faiths, and to share their experiences,” Kos said. “I encourage the kids to have and share their elevator speech of why they are Catholic so that they can have those little experiences.”
Because their service project is so construction focused, the youth group starts preparing for it in the fall, said Paul Sadowski, a parent chaperone who has gone on mission trips with St. Paul VI and with other parishes for several years.
This year, he went with his son, Thomas Sadowski, 15.
St. Paul VI puts parent volunteers and their children on different teams, he said, so they only see each other before and after the workday.
Another chaperone is a general contractor, and he works with the teens who are going in the months leading up to the trip on everything from how to measure properly to how to use a circular saw safely, Paul Sadowski said.
Thomas Sadowski said he enjoyed the drywall and painting the most, but the best part is seeing the reactions of the people they are helping.
Doing so felt right, he said.
“I know God would like to see us helping out others,” he said. “I do think it changed me, because it gives me a different perspective in how other people live.”
“I think it’s given him a sense of confidence in just doing things,” his father said.
Keira Gardner, 16, said the trip was “eye opening,” especially seeing how other people live.
“It made me feel closer to God,” she said.
Her father, chaperone Mike Gardner, was pleased when Keira wanted to go, he said, because he went on a similar trip when he was a student at St. Ignatius College Prep, and it was important to him.
“It was an important life experience as a whole, to have a different perspective,” Gardner said. “And it kind of comes full circle, to see it with my own kid and her peers. You could see it in the kids’ faces and their talk. Their mood changed after day one. You see the growth in them. They went from being kids to being young adults real quick.”