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By Steve Weatherbe
A RARE BIRD is Bradley Cameron, the new youth minister at St. Joseph the Worker
parish in Greater Victoria.
Though they are common in the Maritimes where Cameron is from, and in Vancouver,
which is flush with immigrant Catholic youth, there are no other paid staff in
Vancouver Island’s Catholic parishes specializing in youth.
“This is the way to go,” said St. Joe’s pastor Father William Hann, a former high school teacher and fellow Maritimer.
“We need youth,” he said, and noted that youth need the church to guide them in a culture that
offers them “so many gods: money, power, sex.”
Hann credits two young parishioners, Del Myers and Robin Daniels, with providing
the push for a youth minister. Both had full-time experience in the field,
having done stints with National Evangelization Team (NET) Ministries.
NET trains teams of young college-age Catholics, and sends them out for a year
of evangelizing teens in a series of high schools or a single parish.
Daniels said NET reaches out to parish teens in four ways: with solid Catholic
teaching; building fellowship; addressing big and relevant issues like sex
before marriage, abortion, war, and drugs; and service. Teens, he emphasized, “need to see faith in action.” Daniels said a typical month of activities would feature one weekend night
devoted to issues, another to fun and socializing, and two to teaching the
faith.
NET, he stressed, will only do a year-long mission in a parish that is committed
to taking youth ministry seriously over the long run – which, as far as he’s concerned, means hiring a full time person.
“Otherwise you get volunteer burnout,” he said. Enthusiastic volunteers can do it for awhile, but not forever. Hence,
most Catholic parishes don’t have this form of ministry.
Daniels pointed out, in his pitch to Hann and the parish council, something
noted by University of Lethbridge sociologist Reg Bibby: that while Catholic teen
involvement in church had diminished in recent years, evangelical Protestant
teens had maintained their participation.
“Protestants throw a lot of money at this, more money than most Catholic parishes
would dream of spending on youth ministry,” said Daniels.
The parish went for NET – and so did other Victoria parishes, who happily directed their youth to the
weekly ‘Ignight’ events. Starting with 50 young people, the event was attracting several hundred
by the end of its stint. Hann figures 60 percent of those are from St. Joe’s, and the rest from other parishes.
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Now, with NET gone, the parish has followed through and hired one of the team to
return on a full-time basis.
Cameron, 19, got involved with NET by following in his older brother’s footsteps. He applied, without full commitment – but, told BCCN, “ultimately the Holy Spirit decided.”
He said he sees teenagers as generally “pretty apathetic towards God. When they are in trouble, they may pray; but when
things are going well, they aren’t much interested. God is far off in the distance and they are not sure who he
is. They are not aware of God’s love nor of their own self worth.”
Cameron was surprised to get the call from Hann. “I’d gotten the sense I was being called to do another year of ministry – but I thought it would be with NET.”
Both Cameron and Daniels stressed the social aspect of youth ministry. “The big way to increase the numbers is to get those who come to bring their
friends,” said Cameron. “It’s like the chicken and the egg,” added Daniels. “In order to get teens to come, you have to get their friends to come.”
The point, said Daniels, is to lead the teenagers to a close relationship with
Christ, and into the life of the church.
Hann believes an important part of the way to do that is through the Catholic
church’s social teachings – which means “responding to the downtrodden and the broken.”
Teens already have a passion for justice, he said, but often don’t know that the church does as well. Hann, who taught social justice for 15
years at St. Andrew’s Catholic High School, concluded: “Kids need to know Jesus not just in their heads. They need to know they can do
great things for others.”
September 2009
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