Chicagoland

Year of Teens and Young Adults already bearing fruit

By Joyce Duriga | Editor
Sunday, January 15, 2012

It’s been six months since the Archdiocese of Chicago launched its Year of Teens and Young Adults as part of its strategic pastoral plan. Good things are happening, organizers say, but it’s not time to rest.

“Now is the time to set goals. We keep saying this is a launch year. We are not done in June,” said Nancy Polacek, the coordinator for the Strategic Pastoral Plan. Polacek is urging the parishes that have been slow to start to set goals for the second half of the year.

The year is meant to be a time to help parishes jumpstart or revitalize their outreach to young people from the ages of 13 to 24. The committee that put together the overall plan identified that when young people have direct, deep experiences of faith between these ages, those experiences leave an impression upon them and can carry their faith through to their later years.

The overall Strategic Pastoral Plan’s purpose is to engage baptized Catholics more deeply in the life of the church. One indicator of success will be increased Mass attendance by 2016, but the overall theme is to bring baptized Catholics closer to Christ.

The implementation of the strategic plan includes four themed years. After the Year of Teens and Young Adults, the archdiocese will celebrate the Year of Sunday Mass, Year of Parent Formation and Year of the Sacraments.

Polacek says there has been a good response to the Year of Teens and Young Adults.

“The majority of parishes are glad for this focus because everyone knows there is a need. It’s just some parishes have been more proactive in getting started than others,” she said.

Interaction with the schools “is another game changer all because of the Strategic Pastoral Plan,” Polacek said. Organizers are doing weekly updates for schools exposing them to the year. “We are also providing resources to the religion teachers to help them realize there is more happening out in the parishes for their teens,” Polacek said.

Collaboration between the agencies, parishes, schools and groups has increased on all levels because of the strategic pastoral plan just in the first year.

“If this isn’t of the Holy Spirit I don’t know what is,” Polacek said.

Organizers have learned that it is easier to connect with teens than young adults.

“They [young adults] like to float from parish to parish wherever there are interesting things going on. It’s hard to hold on to them,” Polacek said, adding that the key to reaching this group is to be flexible and to evolve in our thinking. In some cases, parishes in a geographical area could, and do, work together to minister to this group.

The year has helped many parishes take an honest look at their congregation and pay attention to who is missing, said Timone Davis, young adult coordinator for the Strategic Pastoral Plan. “It has also helped us look at how are we interacting with each other that is life-giving and is not routine.”

For some parishes, where there may not be teens or young adults in their community awareness has been raised to the journey of young people.

“I think people have been pleasantly surprised by the faith of young people in a way that shattered paradigms that made them think that young people were not interested in growing closer to Christ,” Davis said.

“There’s a hunger for Christ in young people and I believe the archdiocese is waking up to the fact that we can feed it. But we have to cook the food,” she said.

By food, Davis says she means taking our cues from the liturgy and being welcoming and open to the young adults. For example, have young adults serve as ushers, lectors or extraordinary ministers of Holy Communion.

It’s also about relating the preaching to everyday life instead of abstract ideas. But it can also be as simple as taking a few minutes during Mass to explain why the liturgical colors change for different seasons.

In the end we need to build relationships with the young adults. “Talk to them face to face. Get beyond pulpit announcement and bulletin insert,” she said. “There needs to be genuine interest in young people.”

The Strategic Pastoral Plan steering committee has begun work on the Year of Sunday Mass, which launches in July.

Some of the many fruits

The Office for Catechesis and Youth ministry is identifying parishes in each vicariate without youth ministry programs and helping them start programs.

On an archdiocesan level:

  • The website connection2faith. org was launched to offer young adults in the archdiocese one place to go to share events and resources.
  • Organizers have used text messaging to connect to the group and gather responses on questions of faith to share with ministers. Teens at last year’s March for Life trip in January texted answers to the question “While you’re there where is God speaking to you?” This method was used with two Catholic high schools around other themes. Responses were gathered and sent to high school religion teachers for their information.

On a parish level:

  • Pastors and youth leaders of Our Lady of Victory, St. Robert Bellarmine, St. Pascal and St. Bartholomew agreed to begin a Sunday night youth-friendly Mass (open to the community). It is still in the planning stages.
  • St. Jerome Parish took 40 young people to World Youth Day Chicago and followed up with an overnight retreat in the fall. They recruited youth from this group to serve as lectors, extraordinary ministers of Holy Communion, ushers and music ministers.
  • Our Lady of the Woods Parish set up a table with a sign, “Year of Teens and Young Adults” where this group is welcome to share stories, resources, pictures, everything in their honor.
  • Incarnation Parish’s stewardship bulletin this year featured all young adults. Parishioners photographed and interviewed young adults on “What does the Catholic Church offer young people today?”
  • Old St. Patrick Parish started a liturgy initiative designed to give the teens in its youth group ownership of the Mass. The liturgical coordinator and youth minister meet with eight juniors and seniors to plan, implement and host the 9:30 a.m. Mass. This committee meets monthly to reflect on the readings, write the Prayers of the Faithful, choose the songs for the teen choir and invite teens to lector, usher and bring up the gifts.

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