In case you hadn’t noticed, let me fill you in on something: St. Jude’s youth group is booming.
It’s hardly a surprise, though. A similar thing happened last year, though on a smaller scale. Steubenville on the Bayou (and all the Steubenville Youth Conferences) has a way of acting as a springboard for youth ministry. Out of the eleven youth who attended last year, seven became very active and are now leaven for the entire group, building community, notifying each other of upcoming events, putting on a little positive peer pressure.
We had one youth who came back with faith in God after being agnostic. Another who was lukewarm in her faith asked for (and received) a copy of the Catechism and started reading it regularly, coming to a greater understanding of our Catholic faith, and even evangelized here peers in band class. Another of those youth designed our highly popular (and almost sold-out) “Catholic Kung-Fu” t-shirts. Yet another used her bubbly personality to cross the lines of many of the cliques to unite the group very effectively. For one young man, the conference last year meant taking youth events more seriously, and he has become increasingly active since then.
That was last year.
On June 27, 2008, we set out once again for Steubenville on the Bayou, this time with 18 youth on the bus. Let me do the math for you: that’s a 64% increase in youth attendance from our parish at that conference. Since we returned, we have experienced phenomenal growth.
Please allow me give you a few statistics. Last Fall, the first CHAT session we had on a Wednesday evening drew 10 attendees. It was miserable. I spoke with some of our youth and was told that I was outdone by a concert that same evening at a local Baptist church. As the year went on, our group grew to an average somewhere around 17 youth (23 was our high). Right now, in the middle of the slow summer months, we’re drawing in between 10-15 each Wednesday (keep in mind that last summer, we had 0 youth attendance on Wednesday evenings because there were no activities during the summer on Wednesdays).
It gets better. Last Fall, our Sunday evening activities averaged between 4-6 youth. Right now, our community nights have been spreading like wildfire, with the most recent one drawing in over 30 youth. Again, this is all in the middle of the summer.
Sound good? Sure, it sounds good, but how many youth are going to give up a Friday evening? How many, you ask? Our first Duc in Altum saw 10 youth, our second saw nearly 20 (and we received compliments from the waiter on our behavior). Soon, we’ll be getting Duc in Altum t-shirts so that we become more recognizable within the community.
Sure, you say, but are they giving back to the community? Well, 10 of them went just after Steubenville to Princeton, LA, to weed and plant new flowers in the garden of one of the elderly residents. Just last week, 12 of them did it again for another four elderly women in Haughton.
That’s not all, either. Some of our youth are beginning to attend Eucharistic Adoration, which (hopefully) indicates immense growth in their spiritual lives.
So what can we make of these numbers? We can come to only one conclusion: St. Jude’s Youth Group is growing and the Holy Spirit is at work.
What can we do to encourage this growth? I’m glad you asked. We want to use the big events, e.g. Steubenville Youth Conferences, to attract more youth into regular attendance. How do we do that? Well, we could always just tell them that they can’t go unless they attend meetings regularly, but that would keep us from being able to reach out to those who aren’t involved and use the big trips as an opportunity to draw them in. Instead, we need an incentive that will encourage youth and their parents to participate in our regular meetings without insisting absolutely on attendance for those wanting to go on trips. The best way to do this is to subsidize. We can offer a lower price to those who attend meetings regularly; most of the trips are inexpensive enough, though, that this is only a major incentive if we pay for the whole trip.
So we run into a problem, and so does the growth of St. Jude’s youth program. We have the possibility of expanding greatly, but only if we can afford to send our youth on trips.
Then came the idea to ask for sponsors. A marathon came to mind. In a marathon, a sponsor donates a certain amount of money to charity for each mile the contestant runs. We proposed: what if we got sponsors to donate a certain amount of money to the St. Jude Youth Group for every meeting their sponsored youth attends. That would give us plenty of money to sponsor all sorts of trips. In the meantime, it would follow the same basic principle: the extra incentive to attend the meetings is tied into the number of meetings attended. The youth will be earning the ability to go on their trips by participating in the youth group.
This raises a very interesting question: does this mean that the youth will be attending the meetings just to go on trips? First, let me point out that the trips are all Church trips, meant to build community and foster friendships within the youth group, making the work of catechesis more effective. Second, because these are “Church” trips, they probably won’t attract the type of kids who have no desire to attend Church, that is, the kids who will come to the meetings but get nothing out of it because all they care about is the trip. The idea, instead, is to attract the kids in the middle ground, to encourage them to participate here instead of another non-Catholic youth group. There are a ton of St. Jude teens who attend Baptist and Methodist youth groups. Third, we expect a greater response from parents (who would be saving money) pushing their children to attend meetings regularly.
We have a New Pentecost on our hands. What will we do with it?
His Servant and Yours,
Micah