Our Youth Are Leaving the Church

EVERETT FRITZ
Fritz learned that other parishes reported similar staggering losses, pointing to a grim
truth: today’s Youth Ministries simply do not form young people into lifelong disciples of Jesus
Christ.

Several years ago, I was sitting in a diocesan youth-ministry meeting. These

monthly meetings were supposed to be for professional development. I can’t say I
got a whole lot out of them, but the free lunch was always delicious, so I would
usually go if I didn’t have anything more important to do.

At this meeting, the diocesan director told all the youth-ministry professionals
that there would be an anniversary celebration for the diocese in the next year
and that, as part of the celebration, we would have an event for the youth. I was
excited about the prospect until I heard what we were doing: “We’re going to have
a walk-a-thon, with all of the teens walking down the main avenue of our city and
raising money for a Catholic Charities after-school program.”

This didn’t sound like a good idea to me. Not only would the teens have to raise
money for the diocese, but it was for a cause to which they had no strong
commitment. I wondered how I was going to get teens excited to participate in
this event.

How Did They Convince Them?

A year later, when the event took place, I found the answer to my question. How
did the diocese get the youth to attend? They mandated that every Catholic-
school student participate — ensuring that well over a thousand students were
there. Parish youth ministries enticed teenagers to attend by promising them
service hours as part of their preparation for Confirmation. There were thousands
of young people at the event, and they raised more than ten thousand dollars for
Catholic Charities.

But it wasn’t an event for youth. It was a public-relations stunt. The diocese got
great publicity because of the event, and one of their ministries received much-
needed funding from it.
There were thousands of Catholic teens in one place, celebrating being Catholic —
except that they had no choice but to show up. They were at the event not because
they were disciples of Jesus Christ who wanted to share their Faith with others
but because they were required to be there.

This event typifies Catholic youth ministry in America: we are good at getting
young people to participate. Our programs, events, and ministries do a good job
— perhaps better than any other denomination in the world — at getting teens in
the door. Thousands of young Catholics attend World Youth Day every three
years. Hundreds of thousands of teenagers in the United States attend Catholic
youth conferences, mission trips, work camps, and Catholic camps. Hundreds of
thousands are enrolled in Catholic youth programs in parishes every year (mostly
for sacramental preparation).

To be fair, many of these events are excellent, with much better intentions than
the diocesan walk-a-thon that I mentioned. But is participation alone a good
indicator of success? Do we really have many, many young people who are being
formed in Catholicism, ensuring the passing on of our Faith for generations to
come?

Unfortunately, if we look just a little past the surface, the news is not good. In
fact, Catholic youth ministry is a catastrophe.

Catholic Youth Ministry Is Not Working

Nearly half of the “cradle Catholics” who become unaffiliated are gone by age
eighteen. Seventy-nine percent are gone by age twenty-three. When a soul walks
away from the Church, that soul usually leaves when it is young.

Dynamic Catholic states that 85 percent of Catholic young adults stop practicing
their Faith in college (most of them within their first year of leaving home). Curtis
Martin, the founder of the Fellowship of Catholic University Students (FOCUS)
thinks that 85 percent is conservative, and that the Catholic Church is losing
more than 90 percent of Catholic young people by the end of their college years.

This data isn’t new. One can look at Dr. Christian Smith’s Soul Searching study
from 2005 and see the same negative trends. In the 1990s, Mark DeVries of
Ministry Architects tried to sound the alarm in evangelical churches that
Christian youth were leaving those churches, too. The data has demonstrated the
hemorrhaging for quite some time.
Recently I attended the expo of a large youth-ministry training conference. There
were booths selling all kinds of resources and services for youth ministry: video
resources, textbooks, parish programs, and youth-ministry books. There were
recruiters for certification programs for youth ministry and for undergraduate
and graduate degrees from major universities. There were booths with
information about youth camps, conferences, mission trips, work camps, retreat
centers, and events of every kind offered all over the country. There were
speakers, musicians, and entertainers. There was Catholic music played
everywhere, T-shirts for sale, and apps for iPhones. If you could think of it, it was
there.

As I walked around the expo, one thought occurred to me: if we are losing our
young people in the Church today, it isn’t due to lack of effort. Nor is it due to a
lack of good resources and programs. In fact, I really liked a lot of the products
and services I saw offered at the expo. Lack of effort is not the problem.
Between the millions of dollars that the Church has invested in Catholic
secondary education, and the time, talent, and treasure invested in youth
ministry, young people get more attention from the Catholic Church than does
any other ministry or demographic. Why is there so little return on that
investment? More importantly, why is the Church failing to make young
disciples?

Understanding Discipleship
One year, while I was a youth minister working in a parish, the parish hosted a
mission intended to help Catholics dive deeper into Scripture. At the Sunday
Masses, the speaker encouraged all the parishioners to come to his presentation
on Monday night and to bring their Bibles. I took a handful of the teens in my
youth ministry to the presentation. They all brought their Bibles, and we sat in
the front row.

The speaker started the presentation by asking everyone to open their Bibles to a
certain verse in the book of Leviticus. Virtually every adult sitting around us
struggled simply to find the book in his Bible. I looked at my row of teens. Not
only did they all have their Bibles open to the correct verse, but I noticed that
every single one of the teens’ Bibles was littered with handwritten notes,
highlights, underlined verses, and sticky notes. All of their Bibles were worn and
weathered because the teens had been reading and studying their Bibles.

In fact, their Bibles looked a lot like mine.

This is a simple example that demonstrates discipleship: the disciple imitates the
rabbi.
I believe discipleship is marked by three characteristics: it is a process, it is an
apprenticeship, and it involves practicing discipline.

Discipleship is a process
Much within our faith life operates as a process. We don’t receive all the
sacraments at once: they are conferred on us over the course of our lives. In the
Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA), a person goes through the stages of
pre-evangelization, evangelization, conversion, catechesis, initiation, and
mystagogia as he is initiated into the Catholic Faith.

In her book Forming Intentional Disciples, Sherry Weddell says that we need to

return to our understanding of disciple making. She speaks of the five thresholds
a person passes as he grows into intentional discipleship of Jesus Christ. The five
thresholds are:
 Initial trust: A person is not practicing Catholicism, but has a positive
association with Jesus Christ, His Church, the Blessed Virgin Mary, a person
in the Church, or something else related to the Catholic Faith.
 Spiritual curiosity: A person is intrigued by Jesus Christ and desires to
know more about Him and His Church but is not yet at a level of openness to
life change.
 Spiritual openness: A person acknowledges to himself and to God that he
is open to the possibility of personal and spiritual change (also known as
conversion), but there is no commitment yet.
 Spiritual seeking: A person actively seeks to know the God who is calling
him. He seeks to know and understand Christ and His Church.
 Intentional disciple: A person makes the decision to drop everything and
follow Jesus.
Discipleship doesn’t happen in an instant: it’s an ongoing process in life.

Discipleship is an apprenticeship
In the days of Jesus, the word discipleship was used to describe the relationship
between a student and a rabbi. As a young Jew grew up, he graduated from
school to school. At the end of his classroom education, he moved into the
household of a rabbi, to live with him and learn from his way of life. When the
student was old enough, the rabbi would either extend an invitation to him to
“come after me” or tell him to “go and learn the trade of your father.”
This is why Jesus extends the invitation to Peter, James, Andrew, and John to
come and follow Him. They were plying the trade of their father; their
opportunity to become disciples of another rabbi had come and gone, and they
hadn’t been chosen. Jesus, the greatest rabbi ever, gave each of these apostles a
second chance.
As a disciple lived with a rabbi to learn from his daily example, so the apostles
learned from the words of Jesus — from His words, yes, but even more from His
manner of praying, the way He handled difficult situations, His daily routines,
and His example. They knew Him intimately, and after He ascended into Heaven,
they imitated His practices as the Church was born.

Discipleship is not discipleship without mentoring. A disciple must first be

inspired to follow the rabbi and then be impacted by his living example. In
discipleship, the Faith is not taught; it is caught. It is experiential in nature: the
disciple learns by following the example of the rabbi.

Disciples practice disciplines

The words disciple and discipline come from the Latin word discere, “to learn.” A
disciple learns to be a disciplined person in everyday life. This means that
disciples practice habits, and those habits lead to deeper conversion.
Most importantly, these practiced disciplines lead to a personal relationship with
Christ — a relationship in which the disciple makes Jesus Christ the Lord and
Savior of his life.

If a young person becomes a lifelong follower of Christ, the following habits will
likely be visible in his life: regular visits to the Blessed Sacrament; weekly or even
daily Mass attendance; daily prayer, including the Rosary; reading and studying
Scripture; intentional growth in virtue and service; and tithing. This is what we
want — to form our young people into lifelong followers of Jesus Christ and His
Church through the process of discipleship.

Sounds simple, right?

The Crux of the Problem

Most people agree that there’s a problem with youth ministry in the Church
today, but there’s very little consensus about what that problem is. Ask a person
associated with the Church why youth ministry is struggling, and you will likely
hear responses I have heard many times:

 A pastor will say that he lacks the funds necessary to hire a capable youth
minister.
 A pastor will say that he can’t find or keep a qualified youth minister.
 A youth minister will say that her pastor is not supportive.
 A parent will say that her teen doesn’t like the youth group and doesn’t
connect with the youth minister.
 A youth minister will complain that parents are disengaged and aren’t
supportive of their teenagers’ faith.
 A parent will complain that the Catholic school isn’t doing a good job
teaching the core doctrines of the Faith.
 A Catholic-school teacher will complain that parents are not modeling the
Faith for their children at home.
 A parent will complain that the church youth group or religious-education
program is little more than stale pizza, lame entertainment, and a boring
curriculum.
 A parent will state that he is waiting for the pastor to fire the middle-aged
DRE who is underqualified for working with young people and out-of-touch
with modern methods of ministry.
 A diocesan director will observe that parish leadership lacks vision, so that
teens end up planning their own ministry, or pastors and youth leaders end
up pinning their hope of success on the latest program and resources.
 A bishop will observe that youth-ministry events in his diocese are all hype,
flash, and entertainment, and no substance.
 A teenager will complain that the Church doesn’t understand teens and
that their questions about God and faith aren’t being answered.
Any one of these statements may be true, but not a single one of them correctly
identifies the problem in the Church today.

These are symptoms of a greater problem: we don’t understand young people and
how to meet their most basic needs. If we don’t understand the problem, we can
never hope to solve it.

The best summary of youth ministry in our Church today comes from Pope
Francis in his first apostolic exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium. He says:
Youth ministry, as traditionally organized, has also suffered the impact of social
changes. Young people often fail to find responses to their concerns, needs,
problems, and hurts in the usual structures. As adults, we find it hard to listen
patiently to them, to appreciate their concerns, demands, and to speak to them in
a language they can understand. For the same reason, our efforts in the field of
education do not produce the results expected.
The structures our Church uses to minister to young people are not meeting their
basic needs, and because of this, our young people are failing to become disciples.
It’s not enough to have the best resources money can buy — a youth minister, a
Catholic school — or to be catechizing a large number of teens. The landscape of
youth culture is changing, but the Church has not adapted to these changes. In
fact, in some cases, parishes are implementing approaches to youth formation
that haven’t been updated in more than four hundred years.
Our Church is facing a crisis — we are hemorrhaging young people. For decades,
the Church has been talking of a New Evangelization — a kind of new birth or
revolution of the gospel in the Church. But no major revolution in the world has
ever thrived without a youth movement. The Church cannot reinvigorate her
members so long as her young people are uninspired.