Get Young Adults to Join Your Parish in Two Easy Steps, Guaranteed.<\/a>\u201d \u00a0The premise of the post: \u00a0\u201cthe answer is exceedingly simple: \u00a01. Be serious about following Jesus. \u00a02. Get out of the way.\u201d<\/p>\n#1 means: \u00a0music, liturgy, homily should be about worshipping God, and equipping people to serve God. \u00a0\u201cIf your liturgy is All About Us and How Wonderful a Community We Are, there\u2019s no compelling reason for a young adult to show up.\u201d \u00a0And in the homily, \u201cpeople who are showing up for Jesus don\u2019t want to hear about how special they are. They want to understand the Bible, learn how to pray, and learn how to live. \u00a0They want instruction. \u00a0They want reminders.\u201d \u00a0And being serious about following Jesus means putting this into practice for more than just one hour a week, seeking out people in your neighborhood, not just waiting for them to show up at church on their own initiative.<\/p>\n
#2 means simply giving young adults the opportunity to do<\/i>, rather than being told \u201cyou\u2019re too young,\u201d or \u201cwe need bureacratic approval.\u201d<\/p>\n
Separately, I\u2019m reading a book called \u201cGot Religion?\u201d (it uses the \u201cgot milk?\u201d typeface), by Naomi Schaefer Riley, about young adults and religion. \u00a0The bulk of it is profiling churches\/organizations which take a new and seemingly successful approach to getting\/keeping young adults in the church, or continuing religious observance more generally speaking. \u00a0Haven\u2019t finished it yet but here are my three key take-aways:<\/p>\n
1) A statistic: \u00a0in discussing efforts by Catholic universities to offer post-college service opportunities (primarily Catholic school teaching \u2014 with, by the way, more pre-classroom instruction and training that the Teach for America program) and post-service-opportunity \u201cretention efforts\u201d, the book cites a pretty unsettling figure:<\/p>\n
One in 10 Americans today has been raised Catholic and is now no longer Catholic. \u00a0<\/b>
<\/b>This is not 1 in 10 of those raised Catholic, or one in 10 of the religiously unaffiliated. \u00a0This is 1 in 10 Americans. \u00a0This is a big issue, and one that the Catholic leadership should be addressing (and certainly should be spending more time on than amnesty or other political causes). \u00a0And one imagines that this number will decline over time, not because we\u2019ll get better at holding on to people, but that the number of those \u201craised Catholic\u201d in the first place will decline.<\/p>\n
2) It\u2019s all about the peer group. <\/p>\n
Some of the chapters discuss religions and religious approaches that aren\u2019t particularly applicable to Catholicism \u2014 e.g., sections on Islam and Judaism where \u201creligious practice\u201d is about saying the daily prayers or observing the Sabbath, respectively, and efforts center around encouraging these sorts of individual observances rather than attendance in a religious community weekly. \u00a0For Catholicism, and Christianity more generally, it is about, as a starting point, weekly church attendance, and building from there to individual prayer and group activities outside of Sunday mornings.<\/p>\n
But a key theme in multiple chapters is a certain, \u201cI\u2019d go, if I knew my friends were going\u201d or even \u201cif I knew other people my age would be there.\u201d \u00a0Which means that campus ministry programs are successful because young people know that their peer group will, indeed, be there, but after leaving college, kids flounder. \u00a0And it\u2019s not that church is inherently undesirable to them, but that peer group is important.<\/p>\n
3) It\u2019s all about the invitation.<\/p>\n
The first church Riley profiles is a New Orleans church which, while it has a strong young adult membership, does not specifically cater to young adults; rather, it focuses on what it calls \u201ctheology of place,\u201d reaching out to those in their specific neighborhood, with the intent that you\u2019ll see your fellow parishoners in the neighborhood, at the grocery store, and so on, and that this will build the church and community institutions much better than a church that focuses on a narrow demographic but draws from a wide geographic area. \u00a0If you\u2019re driving 45 minutes to church, chances are, you\u2019re not going to be willing to come back midweek for a committee meeting or a church group of some kind.<\/p>\n
That also means that the people you see in everyday life are good \u201ccandidates\u201d for an invitation to church, and this chapter profiles a woman who was, in fact, invited. <\/p>\n
(Sure, the book also discusses such issues as: \u00a0do you create young adult-focused or -only churches or communities, or try to draw them in to the wider church? \u00a0How much do you cater to them, e.g., via free Sabbath dinners, vs. challenge them? \u00a0and so on. \u00a0And in my suburb, it poses the question of whether our parish should make special efforts to reach out to the apartment-dwellers to the north and south of us. \u00a0But these are my<\/i> take-aways.)<\/p>\n
And when you think about it, young people, for whom peer group is so important, are the perfect candidates for reconnecting with church by invitation from others. \u00a0True, probably not the 8:15 AM, but a late Sunday mass, or a Saturday night pre-bar-hop service, or even last-chance-mass on Sunday night.<\/p>\n
And that\u2019s where the \u201cuse words if necessary\u201d platitude is such a cop out. \u00a0If those young people who do stick with church have been told, basically, that it\u2019s bad to talk about their faith to others, because it would be inappropriately lacking in tolerance and nonjudgementalism, then we\u2019re all pretty much dead in the water.<\/p>\n
And, of course, I say that from my computer, knowing that my young adulthood was spent in grad school with a close group of churchgoing friends, and now pretty much everyone I know is through church and the parochial school, so, sure, \u201ceasy for me to say.\u201d \u00a0But when I was in college, I was the one who was too insecure to go to church by myself but happily joined in when a group of kids did so.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
If you\u2019re Catholic, and maybe even if you aren\u2019t, you\u2019ve probably been told that St. Francis said, \u201cPreach the gospel at all times. \u00a0Use words if necessary.\u201d \u00a0Now, turns out, this St. Francis said nothing of the sort, but people love, love, love this quote: \u00a0it tells them that they need not feel obliged to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[6,108],"class_list":["post-154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-christianity","tag-evangelism"],"yoast_head":"\n
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