Mission field youth
We hear the complaint often: our young people are not interested in the Church any longer.
Of course, it is true that young Catholics leave the Church as the message of a secularising society finds ever greater traction, and the entertainment value of evangelical and pentecostal churches offers what they believe to be an alternative to our liturgy.
When such Catholics leave the Church, there may well have been failings in their Catholic formation—in the home and in the parish. It is not easy, however, to pinpoint a general cause for the formation deficit. Indeed, the reasons may vary vastly, with some methods of formation working for some, but not for others.
We must also acknowledge that many young people simply have no interest in being formed as Catholics, but go through the motions for reasons of culture or parental expectation.
Some good work is being done to identify the religious character of the generation labelled the Millennials (those born between 1980 and 2000). Those tasked with that age group’s formation would do well to study these insights, and shape their catechetical and evangelical pursuits accordingly, with the necessary flexibility and cultural awareness
For example, our report this week on the experience of Youth Alpha in the parish of Paarl suggests that teenagers respond better to one type of catechetical programme than they do to others.
This does not mean that Youth Alpha will invariably work in every parish, but it shows that parishes must have access to alternative catechetical programmes which can be introduced according to the needs of the youth, and the means to implement them.
At a time when the message of religious faith and salvation competes with the constant din of other messages, the youth is becoming a critical area of the Church’s missionary activities. Catechists who have experienced uninterested teens texting on cellphones while in catechism class will know the value of an engaging catechetical programme.
They will also know the difference between young Catholics who have been raised to regard themselves as members of the Church, and those whom one might call accidental Catholics.
In a world of unlimited choice, noise and distraction (and, indeed, detraction), both groups, and those who fall in between them, require on-going formation.
The social media—Facebook, Twitter and so on—are a fertile mission field. For many pastors cellphones and the Internet are key in performing their pastoral work, among all age-groups, but in particular those who have been conditioned to have shorter attention spans than preceding generations. Because the social network is so immense, it is also a good way of reaching those who have left the Church.
Pastoral activity on the Internet must not, however, replace human interaction. Like the traditional missionaries, who went out to far-off places to evangelise the unchurched, so must the Church go out to meet those whom it seeks to form, on their territory. The time when the Church watched people leave and, like a haughty matriarch, expected them to return of their own accord, are gone. The Church must be in the world, without being consumed by it.
Parishes must offer young Catholics the means to live their faith. For some young people, it means access to active participation in the liturgy, for others the opportunity to strengthen their meditative life (for example by silent adoration or by group prayer), or being given leadership roles in the parish. Perhaps those best placed to serve as missionaries to young people—and others—are young people themselves.
They can do so in particular by means of performing altruistic acts, especially social justice projects that appeal to youthful idealism, by which they can show that serving others is a meaningful way of living out Christ’s mandate to love.
We are aware that many young people feel disconnected from the Church. The next step is to find ways to attract their attention, to persuade them of the Catholic faith, and to fully integrate their diverse spiritual and pastoral needs into the life of the Church.
In this way, the youth is very much a mission field.
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