www.catholicYMblog.com
WELCOME TO THE CATHOLIC YOUTH MINISTRY BLOG
This web-site has been affirmed as
the 411 of Catholic Youth Ministry.
 Your intrepid blogger, podcast studio host, and slideshare trainer is D. Scott Miller.

Great Moments

What we Have learned

Pope

 o Friday, February 29, 2008
BONUS DAY
  Make it count! It is an extraordinary day - -  don't live ordinarily today. Take a Leap of Faith (or Hope or Love) today!
GREAT MOMENTS IN CATHOLIC YOUTH MINISTRY
  We continue with NCCYM YouTube mother load (see Lessons Learn in Youth Ministry yesterday) Do begin your planning to join us all at the 2008 NCCYM in Cleveland in December! It is a place to learn, network, pray and laugh!
  Come back tomorrow for more! And pass the word to friends: www.catholicYMblog.com has got the hook-up on these great YouTubes!
TOP TEN YOUTH MINISTRY COMMITMENTS
  We continue Meanwhile, it absolutly is the middle of winter - - always a difficult time to keep our priorities straight! Here is list worth consider from Doug Fields' book Your First Two Years in Youth Ministry
 > I will move slowly 
 > I will regularly check my motives and evaluate my heart
 > I will steer clear of the numbers game
 > I will not criticize my past
 > I will avoid the comparison trap
 > I will focus on priorities
 > I will pace my self
 > I will serve
 > I will be a learner
 > I will pursue contentment.
There is some commentary on these commitments here

 o Thursday, February 28, 2008
CATHOLIC YOUTH MINISTRY YOU-TUBE MOTHER LOAD 
  What make it easier to blog on a daily basis is to set up a "tickler file" of postings ready to go . . . Yet, most of the postings this week responded to the news of the day: Pope, Pew . . . and now in my inbox from a good friend comes the mother-load! Over the next three days, we'll be sharing pieces from the 2006 National Conference on Catholic Youth Ministry comedy club.  There is some great, funny, sad but all-too-true stuff to be found in these.  Please enjoy!  And do begin your planning to join us all at the 2008 NCCYM in Cleveland in December!
  Come back tomorrow for more! And pass to word to friends: www.catholicYMblog.com has got the hook-up on these great YouTubes!
WHAT DEFINES A GENERATION?
   This quote is from an insightful article in The Santa Barbara Independent about how growing up with school shootings has become a defining generational characteristic:  ". . .what is fairly new and somewhat specific to our generation is the extent to which pop culture builds bonds across national and even international boundaries. Since we were seven or eight years old, we've been watching the worldwide web grow into a globe-spanning network of collective cultural consciousness and shared social space.
    When someone blogs about the Backstreet Boys in Boise, the twentysomething reading it in Britain gets it immediately. When someone mentions slap bracelets or creates a Facebook group devoted to the bygone computer game Oregon Trail, every Generation Y-er with internet access gets to reminiscing right away. When The Spice Girls come on in the car, you can guarantee that any girl within earshot will start singing along.
    And, when someone talks about leaving his iPod behind as he fled a lecture hall under siege in yet another school shooting, it resonates. It is a sad truth that the phenomenon of school shootings is something else our generation shares with one another.

 o Wednesday, February 27, 2008
DR. EDWARD HAHNENBERG IS
INSIDE THE YOUTH LAY MINISTERS' STUDIO
     (Enter the studio here.) We used to be able to get along by a sense of command.  The Community was able to compel with a "you don’t do something, you’re in trouble" sensibility; it was beliefs holding believers. Now, it seems to be more a sense of choice, reliant upon the individual. It’s our responsibility to construct our own synthesis; it is believers holding beliefs. As we can see from yesterday, choice might not be working for us. In today's podcast, Dr. Edward Hahnenberg suggests that there is a middle ground between command and choice to be found in the language of call - a recognition that my life fits into something bigger.  This is important stuff, folks!  Does our ministry work focus on command, choice, or call? Give it a listen.

 o Tuesday, February 26, 2008
THE RELIGIOUS LANDSCAPE
  The news is all over the place:
 > Boston Globe: A sweeping new study of religious affiliation in the United States finds a country in which Protestants are becoming a minority, Catholicism is becoming heavily Hispanic, and the number of people who say they are not affiliated with any religion is growing.
 > CNN: The U.S. religious marketplace is extremely volatile, with nearly half of American adults leaving the faith tradition of their upbringing to either switch allegiances or abandon religious affiliation altogether, a new survey finds.
 >  TIME: A major new survey presents perhaps the most detailed picture we've yet had of which religious groups Americans belong to. And its big message is: blink and they'll change. For the first time, a large-scale study has quantified what many experts suspect: there is a constant membership turnover among most American faiths.
 > USA Today: A new map of faith in the USA shows a nation constantly shifting amid religious choices, unaware or unconcerned with doctrinal distinctions. Unbelief is on the rise. And immigration is introducing new faces in the pews, new cultural concerns, new forces in the public square.
 > New York Times: More than a quarter of adult Americans have left the faith of their childhood to join another religion or no religion, according to a new survey of religious affiliation by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.
 > US News and World Report: The first American colonists were Protestant, and for roughly four centuries their descendents, along with successive waves of Protestant immigrants, have been the country's dominant religious group. But now Protestants are on the verge of becoming a statistical minority in the U.S., according a study released today.
 > Los Angeles Times: America remains an overwhelmingly Christian country, but the nation's religious life also shows great fluidity, with many adults switching religious affiliations or abandoning ties to organized denominations altogether, according to a new survey released today.
   BUT. . . Catholic News Agency reports that "Though converts have offset some of the numbers of Catholics who have left the Church, the disproportionately high number of Catholics among immigrants is most responsible for keeping the Catholic population stable.  Latinos now account for 45 percent of American Catholics aged 18-29."  The U.S. Religious Landscape Survey from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life can be found here.  Meanwhile, here's a link to 241 more related articles.

 o Monday, February 25, 2008
UNATTRACTIVE
  There was a middle school "lock-in" for the local parishes scheduled over this weekend.  It just may have not happen due to the weather cancellations.  Nonetheless, I still hold the memories of this annual event deep in my heart (actually the memories are located somewhere deep in my lower intestine.)  Anyway, I'm sending out this little piece of YouTubed love to my peeps in Howard County.
ATTRACTIVE
  Life Teen has released their 2008 Calendar of Events.  From the cover, pictured here, throughout the whole book, they have put together a professional, attractive multi-page booklet.  Time, effort, intention, and money was all invested in it... and why not, our kids are worth it1!!  (Note: This is not meant to be attactional to kids, but attractive to you and I)
ATTRACTIONAL
  There has been an on-going discussion in youth ministry regarding if attractional is the way to go. A report on the attractional efforts of libraries can be found here.  Key snip: Libraries in southeastern Michigan are turning the page on peace and quiet. "Getting teens to come to the library is right up there with getting them to go to church: It's not exactly the first place they want to go," Christine Lind Hage, library director, told the Detroit Free Press for a story Sunday.

 o Sunday, February 24, 2008
CHOOSE GOD
  The following interaction is from a question-and-answer dialogue that the Pope recently held on February 7th with his diocesan priest in Rome. This question comes from a young priest and deals with concerns of youth ministry.
     Fr Graziano Bonfitto: Holy Father, I come from San Marco in Lamis, a village in the Province of Foggia. I am a Religious of Don Orione and have been a priest for a year and a half. I am currently parochial vicar in Ognisanti.... My priestly apostolate takes place among young people in particular. It is precisely on their behalf that I wish to thank you today. My holy Founder, St Luigi Orione, said that young people are the sunshine or the storm of the future. I believe that at this moment in history young people are as much the sunshine as the storm, and not of tomorrow but of today, of this moment. Today, we young people feel a more pressing need than ever for certainties. We long for sincerity, freedom, justice and peace. We want beside us people who walk with us, who listen to us, just like Jesus with the disciples of Emmaus. Youth long for people who can point out the way to freedom, responsibility, love and truth. In other words, today's young people have an unquenchable thirst for Christ. It is the thirst of joyful witnesses who have encountered Jesus and have staked their whole life on him. Young people want a Church that is ever alert, ever closer to their needs. They want her to be present in the decisions of life, even if they feel a lingering sense of detachment from the Church herself.... Holy Father, - may I call you "father"? - how difficult it is to live in God, with God and for God. Young people feel threatened on many sides.... So what should be done? How should one act? Is it effectively worthwhile continuing to stake one's life on Christ? Are life, the family, love, joy, justice, respect for the opinions of others, freedom, prayer and charity still values we should defend? Is the blessed life based on the Beatitudes a life suited to human beings, to the young person of the third millennium?... Thank you.
    Pope Benedict XVI: Thank you for this beautiful witness of a young priest who works with young people, who accompanies them, as you said, and helps them walk with Christ, with Jesus.
    What can be said? We all know how difficult it is for a young person today to live as a Christian. The cultural and media context offers very different paths than the one that leads to Christ. It even seems to make it impossible to see Christ as the centre of life and to live life as Jesus showed us. However, it also seems to me that many are becoming more and more aware of the inadequacy of all that is offered, of this way of life that in the end leaves one empty.
    In this regard I think that the readings of today's liturgy, that of Deuteronomy (30: 15-20) and the Gospel passage from Luke (9: 22-25), correspond substantially with what we must say to young people and over and over again to ourselves. As you said, sincerity is fundamental. Young people must feel that we are not saying words we ourselves have not lived, but that we speak because we have found and seek to find anew every day the truth, as a truth for my own life. Only if we have set out in this direction, if we ourselves seek to interiorize this life and to make our lives resemble that of the Lord can our words be credible and have a visible and convincing logic. I repeat: today this is the great fundamental rule, not only for Lent but for the whole of Christian life: choose life. You have before you death and life: choose life. And I think that the answer is natural. There are only a few who in their innermost selves harbour a desire for destruction, for death, for desiring to no longer live because everything has gone wrong for them. Unfortunately, however, this phenomenon is growing. With all the contradictions and false promises, life in the end appears contradictory, no longer as a gift but a condemnation, so there are some who choose death rather than life. But usually, the human being responds: Yes, I choose life.
     Yet the question as to how to find life, what to choose, how to choose life remains. And we know what is usually offered: to visit a discothèque, to take as much as possible, to see freedom as doing everything one likes, everything that springs to mind at any given moment. We know instead - and can prove it - that this road is a road of falsehood, for in the end it does not lead to finding life but indeed to the abyss of nothingness. Choose life. The same reading says: God is your life, you have chosen life and have made your choice: God. This seems to me to be fundamental. Only in this way is our horizon sufficiently broad and only in this way are we at the source of life, which is stronger than death, stronger than all death threats. Thus, the fundamental choice is the one pointed out here: choose God. It is essential to understand that those who travel on the road without God find themselves ultimately in darkness, even if there can be moments where they seem to have found life.
     Then, a further step is how to find God, how to choose God. Here we come to the Gospel: God is not an unknown Person, a hypothesis perhaps of the very beginning of the cosmos. God is flesh and blood. He is one of us. We know him by his Face, by his Name. He is Jesus Christ who speaks to us in the Gospel. He is both man and God. And being God, he chose man to enable us to choose God. Thus, we must enter into the knowledge of Jesus and then friendship with him in order to walk with him.
      I think that this is the fundamental point of our pastoral care for young people, for everyone but especially for the young: to draw attention to the choice of God who is life, to the fact that God exists - and he exists very concretely - and also to teach friendship with Jesus Christ.
      There is also a third step. This friendship with Jesus is not a friendship with an unreal person, with someone who belongs to the past or who is distant from human beings, seated at God's right hand. Jesus is present in his Body, which is still a body of flesh and blood: he is the Church, the communion of the Church. We must build and make more accessible communities that reflect, that are the mirror of the great community of the vital Church. She is a whole complex of things: the vital experience of the community with all its human weaknesses but nonetheless real, with a clear path and a solid sacramental life where we can touch even what may seem so remote to us: the Lord's presence. In this way we can also learn the commandments - to return to Deuteronomy, my starting point. For the reading says: choosing God means choosing according to his words, living according to the Word. For a moment this appears almost positivistic: they are imperatives. But the first thing is the gift, it is his friendship. Then we can understand that the road signs are explanations of the reality of our friendship.
     This, we can say, is a general vision in which contact with Sacred Scripture and the Church's daily life originates. It is then translated step by step into real encounters with young people: to guide them to dialogue with Jesus in prayer, in reading Sacred Scripture - especially in groups but also on their own - and in sacramental life. All these steps serve to make these experiences present in professional life, even if the context is often marked by the total absence of God and the apparent impossibility of seeing him present. However, it is precisely then, through our lives and our experience of God, that we must also seek to make Christ's presence enter this world far-removed from God.
     There is a thirst for God. A short time ago I received the ad limina visit from some Bishops from a country where more than 50 percent of the people declare themselves to be atheists or agnostics. But they said to me: in fact, all are thirsting for God. This hidden thirst exists. Therefore, let us begin first with the young people available. Let us form communities in which the Church is reflected, let us learn friendship with Jesus. In this way, full of this joy and this experience, we can still make God present today in this world of ours.

 o Friday, February 22, 2008
WHAT YOUNG PEOPLE WANT
   The Diocese of Cheyenne and Bishop Ricken just conducted a Wyoming Catholic Youth Catechesis Symposium.  As a prelude to the National Symposium, the national office players in the Partnership on Adolescent Catechesis traveled to Casper to discern  How do we evangelize and catechize young people in Wyoming so that they develop a lifelong relationship with Christ and the Church?  Part of their work was to examine the following statement- the Wyoming Catholic Youth Charter, which claim:
   We want:
  > To learn our Catholic faith;
 > To live among emotionally mature, spiritually healthy adults;
 > The Church and our families to talk about what is important;
 > Parents who live their Catholic faith and teach it to us;
 > To see adults who commit to working through difficult issues and problems;
 > To claim our Catholic identity and we need faithful adults to help us feel brave enough to wear it every day;
FOR ONCE IN MY LIFE
   I have actually once in my life had the privilege of seeing Mr. Tony Bennett at Baltimore's Meyerhoff Symphony Hall. Truly, he is one of the reasons God created singing. In one month's time, it will happen all over again. "For once, I can go, unafraid, where life leads me and somehow I know I'll be strong.  For once I can touch what my heart used to dream of long before I knew." On the YouTube, Bennett, Carrie Underwood, Josh Groban, and Michael Buble.

 o Thursday, February 21, 2008
WE MUST SING
       What does singing have to do with our lives? Everything! Rev. J. Glenn Murray preaches for a bit here.  Like Ansel yesterday, he talks of home.  "We are going home and until we get home, we must sing."
EMPOWERED BY THE SPIRIT
       The Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio is offering a Bi-lingual Youth Ministry Symposium in April. As I examined the flyer.  I marveled as to how much the slate of presenters represented a seismic shift in the landscape of American Catholic youth ministry. It  truly must be Empowered by the Spirit.
LENTEN SACRIFICE
    Instead of going without meat or sweets for Lent, some young Christians are suppressing their appetite for the Internet, forgoing social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace and instant-messaging programs for 40 days and 40 nights. Read more here.  (Please note that I AM NOT encouraging you to drop visiting at least one site on the web.  We can both make justifications based on professional reasons, right? Right? Anyone still out there????)

 o Wednesday, February 20, 2008
ANSEL AUGUSTINE  IS INSIDE THE YOUTH MINISTERS' STUDIO
     (Enter the studio here.) There was a moment at NCYC in Columbus this past fall.  Young people and youth ministers from the Gulf Coast joined Father Tony Richard in blessing those young people who had gathered.  Those who had been prayed for, supported, and blessed by the post-Katrina solidarity of the youngchurch were now boldly, proudly blessing the very same youngchurch.  Hear, now, the story of youth ministry "after the storm".  Hear, now, what has been learned and discovered. Here, now, is a  podcast which should demand your attention.

 o Tuesday, February 19, 2008
STUFF THAT MATTERS
    David Fitch weighs in on the goal of youth ministry here He is "convinced the challenge of youth ministry to keep ‘making disciples’ as the main game. Its easy to get into event mode & ‘pumped’ mode, but the stuff that lasts is the stuff that matters. Its not to say there is no place for fun stuff - not at all - we need to have fun - but sometimes the priorities in youth ministry get misplaced." An then, he throws in, for good measure, Mike Yaconelli's opinion that we might need to examine The Failure of Youth Ministry.    Meanwhile, Joe Troyer is also frustrated with the state of youth ministry: Yet, he asks: So what is keeping me from change? Two things: Fear and Uncertainty. What I fear are the repercussions of change in my congregation. Now what? It's time for change, but what? It isn't working. Let's deal with it. It isn't a fad or a season. It is reality. We are doing youth ministry just like the 1970's. Same old stuff in new shoes. It is time to be honest and embrace change. But where to start? Read the whole rant here
THE LUCIFER EFFECT
    Phillip Zimbardo, author of the Lucifer Effect, goes up against Catholic catechist Stephen Colbert on the nature of evil, the power of social situations, disobeying authority, and rejecting the concept of God being wrong.  Beyond the swearing, wouldn't it be great if more catechists could proudly claim, like Colbert,  "I teach Sunday School!"
MAKE READY THE WAY
    We are two months out . . .Popes don't visit Washington every day, which is why the Washington Times is hosting a Papal Visit blog to keep tabs on every detail about Pope Benedict XVI's April 15-20.  Check the blog here

 o Saturday, February 16, 2008
AN AFFLUENZA EPIDEMIC
  A report from the suburbs has some surprising news about children growing up in the culture of affluence. It's a longitudinal study and the interesting finding is that the kids have a multitude of adjustment problems. The surprise is that they often have more problems than age-matched kids growing up in the inner city—and their problems persist despite the mental health services presumably available to them. Read more here
WILL POWERPOINT FOR FOOD  
   If you are just joining us today, we have listed five potential workshops for you to host in your own area. Please review the previous days. As you begin your planning for next year, consider booking any of these workshops.